The Agile Manager

Book excerpt: The world is in a permanent state of change. We must work in new ways. To change the work we must change how we manage; how we think about management. What got you here won't get you there. There are new ways of managing which are changing business, government, and not-for-profit organisations, big and small. This isn't about leaders, it's about managers. It's not about mystical mind methods, it's about principles to work by. It's about agility, the agile Manager. This book starts your journey. The book has four sections: 1. A set of principles which you as an agile manager must get your head around in order to function in the new world. 2. A set of management practices which follow from those principles. 3. A set of agile work practices that you need to understand and support. 4. Guidance on the journey to new ways of working. . . . Agile is a way of thinking about work. Agile is a thing now, it has become a noun as well as an adjective. Agile thinking is impacting Information Technology, enterprises, government, and society. It may have started in IT but now it is transforming work everywhere, and even how we think. Its impact is far-reaching enough to talk of it as a renaissance in thinking, a refresh or step change that comes only once or twice a century. This is not an exaggeration. . . . It is not just Agile, there is a suite of new ideas transforming work. They all aim for "better value sooner, safer, happier". We simply call them the New Ways of Working, NWoW. This book is about the impact of these new ways on management in the modern enterprise. . . . The new thinking empowers people to be knowledge workers, to design the work and make the decisions. It treats them like they are over 18 and on the same side. Conventional management too often treats people like clerical workers, like plug-compatible wetware, like Human Resources, who can't be trusted, who are evaluated numerically, who are an overhead to be minimised, who need to be told what to do and how to do it. Which is not conducive to satisfaction and mental health. . . . The Agile way is iterative, incremental, experimenting, exploring complex systems. These are displacing the ideas of conventional enterprises: big-bang projects; zero risk; certainty and accuracy; plan once execute perfectly; failure is not an option. Along the way Agile is resurfacing (and standing on the shoulders of) the ideas of Lean, which ironically go back pre-second-world-war; and Agile is drawing on the principles of complex systems and the modern understanding of human behaviour and social constructs. . . . At least as important, though, is New Ways of Managing. Too often, management views the transformation to New Ways as something done to improve the practitioner workforce, not management. This can't be. For an organisation to change, the management must change. This is one of the biggest issues facing organisations moving to agile ways of working. Managers must understand and focus on empowerment, collaboration, agility, and flow. Why focus on management in agile transformation? Because we see it often neglected, and because it is the key. This book is about how to manage in an agile way, not what agile work looks like. Plenty has been written about that. . . . It is our personal offering. We hope you like it and derive value from it. Join our community and tell us how you felt about it.