2019 will be the year of Big Agile, where large adopters like General Motors, the Department of Defense, the State of Michigan, Lockheed Martin, and others, who have combined IT budgets exceeding 100 Billion dollars, have all announced their desire to “go agile” at a scale not yet seen in our community. Are technology leaders who cut their teeth in a low-trust, command-and-control, high-documentation environment prepared to make a successful transformation? What will Big Agile look like, and how will it affect the rest of the community?

Jeff Dalton thinks this is will be our industry’s biggest challenge, and he’s been studying it for years. As the large adopters in the federal government and corporate sector begin to adopt agile, they’ll bring their habits, culture, and bureaucracies with them, and in dozens of podcasts, articles, books, and keynote speeches Jeff has been talking about getting in front of the wave. His latest book, “Great Big Agile: An OS for Agile Leaders” is available on Amazon, and he has written for CIO Magazine, CIO Online, Better Software Magazine, and the Cutter IT Business Journal on agile leadership in a large-scale environment.

Agile is all about learning. But do Agile leaders know how and what to teach?

It is undisputable that Agile adoption has grown exponentially, but too much of this growth has been horizontal, not vertical, and this phenomenon has been an impediment to the expansion of Agile values and frameworks beyond the project team. Organizations are not learning to be Agile! In this presentation, “Agility for Leaders – Learning to Teach in a World that Is Rejecting Hierarchy,” Jeff Dalton shows why the lack of teaching skills leaves Agile Leaders open to the most insidious of all agile anti-patterns – an organizational type mismatch where teams are embracing agility but multiple levels of management lack basic knowledge of Agile values, ceremonies, and techniques, creating an impediment to enterprise Agile transformation.

Of all the reasons for technology leaders to embrace agility, the power of continuous learning should be at the top of the list.

It is indisputable that Agile adoption has grown exponentially, but too much of this growth has been horizontal, not vertical, and this phenomenon has been an impediment to the expansion of Agile values and frameworks beyond the project team. Organizations are not learning to be Agile! In this presentation, “Agility for Leaders – Learning to Teach in a World that Is Rejecting Hierarchy,” Jeff Dalton shows why the lack of teaching skills leaves Agile Leaders open to the most insidious of all agile anti-patterns – an organizational type mismatch where teams are embracing agility but multiple levels of leadership are not.

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As more companies seek the benefits of Agile within and beyond IT, Agile Leaders need to build and sustain capability while scaling agility – no easy task – and they need to succeed without introducing unnecessary process and overhead.

The Agile Performance Holarchy is an empirical model for Agile leaders that provides guidance for scaling and sustaining agility and capability throughout a modern technology organization.  The APH is drawn from lessons learned while observing and assessing hundreds of agile companies and teams.  It is not a process or a hierarchy, but a “Holarchy,” centered around a series of Performance Circles with embedded “holons” that reflect the behaviors of high performing Agile organizations.  The Agile Performance Holarchy provides implementation guidance in the areas of Leadership, Values, Teaming, Visioning, Governing, Building, Supporting, and Engaging within an all-Agile organization.