When the Tail doesn't Wag the Dog - Chasing Outcomes rather than Agile
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Talk delivered by Antoinette Coetzee at the Business Agility Conference (NYC) 2020 Abstract: In 2019 a pharma giant decided to “pilot Agile” in their clinical research division. Eight teams of between 80 and 100 people started, assisted by a group of highly experienced agile coaches. One by one the pilots were cancelled by the leaders. Only two survived and concluded successfully. Did it mean the teams were Agile in the conventional sense? Not by a long shot. Did it mean they were more successful? Absolutely! Rework that was costing the company hundreds of thousands of euros were just one of the many things that changed. In this session we will explore the tale of the successful pilot, focusing on the role, attitude and learnings of the leaders, how they engaged with the pilot, their teams, and the coach and what they did that lead to the successful outcome.
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When the Tail doesn't Wag the Dog - Chasing Outcomes rather than Agile
- 1. When the Tail doesn't Wag the Dog Coaching for Agility BY ANTOINETTE COETZEE Business Agility Conference NYC 2020
- 2. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t It started off so well… March 2019
- 3. You cannot coach someone who is not in the room @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 4. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G Total contact time? 3 days @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 5. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 6. Main Focus Areas Rework Virtual Collaboration Work Overload @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 7. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t 12 Experiments Agile practices Collaboration Ways of working
- 8. Agile is as Agile does: model the behavior you are looking to cultivate @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 9. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t I see a bad moon arisin’… May 2019
- 10. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G Lugano @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t June 2019
- 11. @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 12. How do I add the most value to this wonderful team? I SIMPLY ASKED: @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 13. There is no textbook definition of what agility looks like for a team, for an organisation, or an industry. NOBODY knows, and even if somebody did, by tomorrow it will look different. @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 14. Let go of Agile as a goal and use it as a TOOL @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 15. So what did we do that worked? @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 16. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t So long, Marianne. September 2019
- 17. The impact? Dramatically reduced rework @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t Reduced turn-around time Focus on the right things Psychological safety Continuous improvement Collaboration
- 18. Major Impediments Geographical spread Matrix org Agility in strategy and execs Too many initiatives @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 19. If your desire is to be told how to become Agile, you are not ready for it. @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 20. As a leader, how can you get the biggest ROI on coaching? • Be involved • Make sure there is chemistry and relationship • Create an appetite for coaching • Be clear on what you want out of the coaching effort @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t • Be brave and willing to change yourself first • Be open to giving and receiving feedback • It is your money; you choose how to spend it
- 21. “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” ― Lilla Watson @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
Editor's Notes
- I have always been very fortunate in my life by being on the right place at the right time. This is how my introduction to Agile happened many years, meeting people on training course often brought me luck, so when I was suggested as the coach for a pharma giant in Switzerland I also thought that was very lucky. I mean, c’mon, I live at the Southern tip of Africa – who would NOT want to work in beautiful Switzerland, as part of a group of deeply experienced agile coaches, THREE of whom were actually my friends! Little did I know….
- Now let me first give you some background. The organisation is a giant. They bought an American giant pharma a few years ago, so they are well represented in both Europe and the US. They have a purpose I could certainly identify with – they only develop meds for terminal illnesses. Literally a case of life or death. We were launching 8 pilots in the clinical research division. Now I didn’t know this, but it takes on average 10 years to launch a new medicine. And it takes a LOT of money – these people talk in millions. Also, the patent on a new molecule only lasts for 10 years. After that the generic market can produce drugs as well. So not only is it critical to get the drug into the market from a health perspective, it is also critical commercially The teams were between 80-120 people big and they were already crossfunctional due to an initiative the previous year. I chose to work with the leadership team, consisting of 4 people. I also had the team’s so-called performance coach, a professional coach that were available to my team and 6 or 7 others, to support me. I met my leadership team, actually whilst at this very BA conference in NYC last year, and I gave them a short overview of how I normally start, which is a brief review of their situation, some feedback from me on what I found, a kickoff session that would include some training, alignment around where they wanted Agile to take them, and then some experiment. So in the words of one of my musical heros – it started off SO well! For about 30 mins we made a perfect pair. And then the problem that really hamstrung us first raised its head: the team was spread out over 3 main locations : Basel, Welwyn in the UK, and San Francisco. It was mirrored in the quad : 2 were based in Basel, 1 in Welwyn and 1 in San Francisco.
- Still, full of enthusiasm, I started out contracting with each of the leadership team, building trust and creating relationship. Some of the things they thought Agile would bring were not in scope for me, some of it was. There were a lot of requests for giving them TOOLS to go faster. Ever heard that? So far so good. Then I tried to get the group together virtually so we could do a bit of alignment of what the problems were, and whether they could be solved by Agile. Weeeeeellllll, that went nowhere very slowly. Here’s the problem – its not that they were unwilling. They were busy. Extremely busy. Not uncommon, you say. Well, in addition this group had had 2 golden hours in every day – the time SF, Basel and Welwyn were awake together – and it was already booked. Every day. The leaders wanted to help, but did not really know how to, since people are also travelling all the time, to attend conferences, FDA meetings, etc, etc. It was like herding cats! Now, as coaches we know how to avoid this situation – contract it! But what if you cannot even get people together in the first place to contract about it!
- In 2 months I had an hour here, an hour there – what normally takes me a week or so in elapsed time had taken 2 months. That wasn’t all …. The leadership team included a crackerjack PM, who managed to miraculously make stuff happen. Welllll….. that was until she fell down a flight of stairs, broke her leg and was booked off indefinitely. At the same time the PA who had access to everyone’s diaries and set up sessions for me hurt her back so badly she had to get an operation. And was booked off indefinitely. What else could go wrong??? The leaders and I had a 30 min meeting every week to talk about impediments and focus for the next week. I was going out of my mind, not to mention running out of money. We were NOWHERE! I had done individual interviews with various team members, but no collective sessions. My very cooperative leadership team felt the pain and then decided to limit the focus on the product development function, since most of the function was based in Welwyn. Now please note that the head of product was NOT in this meeting, but if we waited for all 4 members to be present, we would delay the start with another month! And our pilots were due to end at the beginning of June! So for the time being I chose to forget that local optimisation always creates problems in the long run and got going. I all else fails, lower your standards! So off to Welwyn I went, spent a day with the team to do a Value Stream mapping, which as per usual they found shocking, as well as a retro.
- I took a day or two to prepare a summary. On the plus side they were a healthy engaged team with good leadership, a good product. Remember that most of the people had PhD’s and a large number of them even had DOUBLE PhDs. So they were brilliant researchers and dedicated. And that was one of the biggest problems – they were working harder and harder and harder to get stuff done. Healthy team relations Focus on delivery – Can Do attitude Cross-functional LCT LCT leadership respected and trusted Regular communication sessions Deep technical expertise Shared awareness of issues Awareness of need and value for decision making at lower levels Good product Quarterly goal setting Focus areas Unnecessary rework: Abbvie interaction Clarity on strategic direction Shifting priorities Geographic spread Finding time to collaborate Some Us vs Them, compounded by functional silo’s Finding their feet after recent changes: Staying informed in ReImagineD world Establishing relationships after leadership changes Tools not working well Virtual tools Information sharing in general People are working too hard: A lot of work in progress No time for reflection Some people are bottlenecks Working on multiple projects and teams – context switching
- Ultimately there were 5 areas I suggested we focus on – reducing the amount of rework that had various causes, not least the relationship with their external partner, who also held the purse strings, but also because the strategic direction was not always clear. Improving the quality of virtual conversations. In a lot of cases the 2 hour virtual meetings consoisted of somebody walking through an immaculate slide to explain the latest developments of a particular study, maybe one or two of the 40 people on the call would ask a question, but everybody else’s videos and mics were off. We all know that when you are on Zoom or Skype and your video and mic is off you are so easily tempted to do something else – well, this was no exception! 80% of those precious 2 golden hours taken up by one way communication download to a bunch of people who are completely disengaged! Ouch! The organisational reshuffle had an impact on new members to the team from the US. The team needed to form properly, agree on the way they wanted to work together, their norms, values, etc in order to become a real team again. There were several tools in use by different team members – it was causing a real problem and again a lot of rework. Everyone knew that information sharing via powerpoint decks were time-consuming and inefficient. The biggest problem in terms of impact was the capacity of people. Here we wanted to pay attention to continuous context switching as a result of working on multiple initiatives, too much work in progress and on people who were bottlenecks. The approach we were going to take was Action Learning, which is basically coming up with a hypotheses about what can improve a problem with the ones experiencing the problem, defining an experiment, an action, and then learning by performing the experiment.
- There were 12 experiments that I could suggest, of which only 4 really had an agile flavour per se It was already clear to me that they needed a lot more than Agile tools
- Those were my suggestions, but of course I just see a small part of the picture, especially after having only spent 3 days with them in total – mostly virtual. So we had a kickoff to discuss and build out and prioritise. I flew to the UK for a few days, full of hope and enthusiasm, since NOW we are going to really get going! And a full FIVE people showed up!!!!! The LCT leader was there, supportive and open, as always, the marketing lead could only attend late afternoon, since he was in SF, the product lead was travelling somewhere. And the 5 people there suggested some tweaks and prioritised the experiments, based on value to them. And we ended up selecting the top 3 only. The interaction with their external partner, visualising work and retrospectives on a bigger scale. So now we were really going to cook with gas! Well, the next day everybody had so much to do they had to work from home… So I contacted them all and they managed to make 3 hours free on the day after. Now I have NEVER had this problem , since the first thing I always do with people when I start coaching is to make an alliance with them – how we will work together, etc, etc Problem was that I could NEVER get enough of them together to create this alliance. But wait, there was light at the end of the tunnel – they were planning their quarterly offsite and they would give me a day of the agenda so we could do an alliance, I could do some education and we could make a big dent in our experiments. In the meantime we would continue with the retrospectives, since people reported real changes in their thinking, their process and their attitude. Hypotheses : Visualising work will - aid communication by localising conversations around the work - limit "in person" conversations by recording progress and issues in context of a work item - aid prioritisation - more clearly ID bottlenecks and delays Proof : people use the board and less requests for information come to the team members Disprove : people don't use the board and/or no reduction in comms Experiment length : 4 weeks Hypotheses : Weekly/biweekly retrospectives work will - start improving the way of work little by little - create the space to stop and reflect - increase shared awareness of impediments - establish the habit of small incremental improvements - keep focus on the pilot Proof : people report positive on improvements that happen as a result of the retro, people attend the retro's regularly Disprove : None of the retro improvements are followed by the team Experiment length : 6 weeks This is what we stuck with mostly, except the first one was disproved so quickly we chose another that was an extension of it – that consciously “contracting” with one another whenever we work together
- Things back at home with the rest of the agile coaches were really tough – we could not figure out how to move things along. Nobody really had figured out what agility looks like in Clinical Research, since nobody had ever done it. We were trying to port some agile practices and it was hard. I was struggling myself, obsessing over whether there was something that I was missing? I must admit, we were not always in agreement. There were some of us with a very strong coaching approach – we were not keen to make things fit, not keen on embedded coaching. We did not want the tail to wag the dog, so to speak! And we were butting our heads against the internal coaches, who kept on asking over and over and over again what the difference was between a professional coach and an agile coach. Since a couple of us could play either role, we tried to explain. Somehow it did not land. I was still really enjoying working with my team and we were making progress, but in the meantime it was really hard for me to make a living frankly. At the beginning of June only 3 of the pilots were still going – all the others had been cancelled prematurely. But there was going to be Lugano!!!!
- Nirvana…. Now let me tell you about Lugano. Im a pleb – I have never gone skiing or scuba diving or anything glamorous. I love travelling, and I love cities and I love nature. Lugano was something else! I stayed in the fanciest hotel ever, it was breathtakingly beautiful and I remember taking a photo of the price of a glass of wine and sending it home, where we be able to buy a CASE of wine for the same price! Anyway, I was SO prepared for this f2f session that I was overprepared. We were going to do a game first, and then the Alliance. I had 6 hours. We started 1.5 hours late. Hmmm…. I had to cut something. I really, really , really wanted to illustrate the impact of WIP to them, and I have a really great game – Klaus Leopold’s boat building game. So that’s what we did. BIG mistake! Never will I ever play paper folding games with busy PhD’s again… halfway through it felt like the air had left the room. The insights were really good though, and a good discussion followed. Seeing that we started so late I could not continue with an alliance, and they in any case had decisions to make, so I facilitated that for them. The purpose of the day was not fulfilled. I went out to dinner with them, but the Dom Perignon , yes really!, tasted bitter in my mouth. I felt utterly defeated. A few days afterwards I had a call with my performance coach, who had joined the Lugano meeting virtually. It was a tough conversation, but something she said in passing struck me…
- She asked me why agile coaches always have to be in the spotlight, why they have to run the show, etc. And whilst I knew some of the answers to that, what she said next really struck me: Why can’t you just be of service to the team? And I realised that even as a professionally trained coach I had missed the point: I was trying to land a whole bunch of things with the team because I considered my job to be increasing their agility And maybe, just maybe, that was not my real job
- So I let go. And the team really surprised me : the same week they had their first self-facilitated retrospective and they came up with a really impactful improvement. Wow! This shit really DOES work!
- In the process I realised something: I was being blinded by all the things that as a CONSULTANT I could see the team could change and do. I had a vision for where they could go. When I fact no guidelines for agility in clinical research even exists. And even if it did, who cares? How arrogant to think that I know better than they do what the most pressing matters for them are? So I stopped fighting behind the scenes, agonising with myself, relaxed and simply kept on asking, what is the next most important thing for us to solve?
- Now as a matter of fact, this was not news to me – I have been an agile coach for about 15 years and I have done it ALL the ways, but somehow in the midst of frustration I reverted, or at least I was tempted to revert to the same behaviour Sandy spoke about yesterday – getting in there. I didn’t. but it was taking HUGE self management not to! When I relaxed I became free to bring ALL the tools I have in my toolbox to assist them. Agile is a really great tool to solve complex problems, but it is JUST a tool.
- We certainly tried a few Agile practices as experiments – some of them worked, some of them didn’t. Some subteams utilised boards really well, others did not like it at all. The practice that was the most useful to me personally was the weekly alignment session with the leadership team – they really were resourceful about resolving impediments. The practice they found the most useful was retrospectives. Week after week they faithfully held their retro’s, reflected and came up with small improvements. They still so, BTW
- I eventually left them at the end of September. At that point we had been recording an education session on a topic of their choice every week. And even though some of the more agile xperiments did not work they were still keen to learn about things like Flow and Limiting WIP, so even those were covered. I also ended up developing quite a few How To guides for them. Was there more to do? Absolutely. They knew that. We had only scratched the surface. But they did what they had appetite for and as a result they kept on doing it.
- The biggest short-term impact was the cooperation with their outside partner. The level of collaboration improved from the moment the question around improving the relationship was asked. The 40% reported rework not only went away for the most part – there was actual collaboration. This was really major for them. The combination of retro’s and visualising work helped to improve focus, and as a result of creating psychological safety as well creating relationship intelligence the leadership not only create an even tighter team, they also started managing more effective upwards. The change was noted in the rest of the organisation as well – at one FDA meeting the team took 2 hours to update their documentation, vs the week the other team took.
- Was there more work? There was tons. But first some things in the organisation would have to change. It is interesting to note that another pharma company for instance implemented a policy of everyone-under-the-same roof when they decided to go to Lean – this would be unthinkable for the org at this point.
- I would like to end with looking at what made my pilot succeed. As a coaching team we reflected very deeply on this question, because it was a completely confounding engagement. My approach was different to some of the other coaches, but not all of them. So ultimately I believe it was the combination of the approach I took and the true leadership in my leadership team. They were not sitting back and waiting for me to bring “The Agile”.
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