Blaming a method or tool, rather than the people who use it, is the ultimate sin of social failures in organizations.
Agile, sprint, OKR, design thinking, lean or whatever shibboleth that happens to be in fashion, is almost always failed by incompatible culture, poor leadership and misplaced incentives, facilitated by leaders who don’t want to be held accountable for failures. Almost always, not always.
But is blaming those factors instead of blaming methods and tools any better? It’s not. That’s why oversight is critical to proper adoption. Good oversight not only puts every factor in check, but also motivates people to correct course when things go wrong. There are literally bad methods and bad tools out there, as much as there are toxic cultures and poor leadership. Oversight is used to create a dynamic balance of power that encourages people to identify root causes and then come together to address them.
Oversight not only needs to be effective, but also needs to be efficient. Oversight is the only organizational mechanism that injects balance between the extremes mentioned above.
The saddest thing is that oversight is often weak: ineffective and/or inefficient.
You see, using methods and tools are not just about using methods and tools. Listening to people is as much about hearing what is being said as about hearing what isn’t being said.
The context of using methods and tools is as critical as the methods and tools themselves.
That context is rarely anything technical. Instead, it’s often cultural, and political.
In your organization, what/whom do employees, managers and executives blame when adopting methods and tools goes wrong? Why?
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Noah Fang 