On Monday, I had an emergency tooth extraction. I had been in some pain for a week or so. I had thought (or, in truth, hoped) it was a gum infection. The previous Friday, I had decided to take my chances on having an awful weekend rather than going to the dentist to see if my suspicions of an abscess were correct. I paid the price. I ended up in A&E Sunday evening, begging for pain medication to get me through until Monday morning when I could make it to a dentist.
This is such a typical human behaviour. To believe that the current experience must be pretty innocent, even when our life’s experience has taught us it is unlikely to be so.
As a transformational coach, I often find that by the time a client has engaged with me, they have tried several times to improve their situation. Nothing has had a chance of success as they haven’t been addressing the real problem. Of course, the various levels of management have thought about what could be wrong, and made decisions based on their wishful thinking rather than objective analysis. In many cases, management knows what is at the heart of the problem. Most managers don’t have the skills or the permission to fix the significant issues, so they look to improve some symptom and hope the organisation doesn’t end up in intensive care.
After having left my family at the beach to drive 90 minutes to the hospital - and then many hours of waiting - I left with the drugs I needed to get me through the night. The dentist I saw the next day was incredibly skilful. He had a unique technique. He gave me many local anaesthetic injections and guaranteed I wouldn’t feel any pain. After about a minute of quite intense pressure, he had fully extracted one of my wisdom teeth and whatever evil had lay below it.
I once worked with an exec who thought that if I taught his teams to say the right words and have the right meetings, then we could be deemed a success. He had a few other agile coaches working with him across multiple teams. The other teams ran all the meetings, and my teams were the only ones not. Our agile maturity ratings were poor as we could not tick the boxes saying we held all the Scrum events. My exec didn’t like this and asked me to take the pain away so he could report all was well. I stayed strong and assured him that without achieving the prerequisites for these meetings, there was little point in having them.
A few months later, my teams had completed what I deemed necessary. We were running all the meetings the organisation was expecting of us. These meetings were valuable and insightful because we were doing the work. Meanwhile, other teams were starting to fall apart and experience the problems I had warned the exec of. How could this possibly be? These teams had been mature agile teams for months, while mine had only just reached maturity.
Fixing things rarely looks like how the layperson expected it to. When removing a tooth, you must surely pull. When adopting agility, you must surely have the meetings. Those months were some of the dullest months of my life. Things moved slowly in this gigantic and old organisation. Agility for this kind of organisation is like agility for any old being. Sure, with some work, they can become faster and more flexible, but will they ever win a 100m sprint again? Unlikely.
I didn’t feel the tooth coming out. This is not the same as feeling no pain. At the point the tooth had been extracted, I went into almost instant shock. I was shaking, crying, and unable to gain my composure. The dentist was clearly concerned about this. He made sure someone else was available
to drive me home, led me into the waiting area and told me to sit there as long as it took to recover.
Our dear exec decided there was too much change and disruption for a slight improvement. The exec thanked all of us coaches for our efforts and said we would no longer be required. Teams were rearranged and any hint of agility that had been achieved, any understanding within the organisation of how to do things differently, was spread out too thinly to be seen by anyone from the outside.
I occasionally speak to the team members I worked with at that time. Some have moved on, while many remain. Most speak warmly of the time when they had more impact. A few question why they hadn’t worked in that way before or since.
The organisation took a few weeks to rearrange itself, before it moved on and returned to normal. It was the fastest thing I had ever seen that organisation achieve.