Efficiency or Greed?

Too many leaders tell me they want agile because they want “to do more with less.”

While the power of agile can 100% get teams more productive, my alarm bells go off with the “less” part, because that usually translates into giving people less time to focus on work, less resources for big projects, less crucial agile practices like retrospectives or backlog grooming, and less allocation for strategic thinking.

These areas that leaders want “less” of form the infrastructure of good working teams, and while we would never dream of running a city without the necessary infrastructure in place, we somehow believe that we can run teams and organizations without the support it needs to run seamlessly.

How about this year, we reframe “less” and think of a leader’s role to help team members focus on less, have less distractions, and less stress. That way teams can become laser beam focused on delivering super good work. Instead of “do more with less,” lets get minimalist and do more by doing less.