TL/DR

Intrinsic Values; extrinsic principles; transient practices.  Practice is too ephemeral to generate long lasting change. Principles can be used as a lever for change because (a) they are malleable - defined by the group (b) they are long-lasting (c) they can be a reference point for inspecting and adapting behaviours; as individuals, as a team and as a larger group. We inspect and adapt around the question “Am I following the agreed principles?” If not, “what needs to change?”  We note that principles must have a direct relationship to values & behaviours to make them effective levers of change. In fact, we find that values and behaviours will have many-to-many relationships to Principles, as illustrated in Sidky’s Agile Funnel.  Since it is a network, to be consistent in our behaviour, we must either adopt all of the values and principles or none.

There’s a story of a newly married couple who are preparing to roast a joint of meat. The young wife duly cut off one third of the joint and placed it on top of the larger piece of meat.  “Why did you do that?” her husband asked quizzically. She explained that it was what her Mum did because it cooked better and enhanced the flavour of the meat.  Not long afterwards, the couple were visiting the wife’s parents and the husband asked his mother-in-law about her technique for preparing and cooking a joint of meat.  She explained that with four children to feed it was the only way to get a large joint of meat in the small oven she used to have; she hasn’t done that since they got a new oven and she didn’t think it made any difference to the flavour!

“If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got" - Henry Ford

What we do is driven by what we believe to be true, which informs our internal values; but what happens if our beliefs are misplaced, out-dated, or out of context?

There is a prevailing school of thought that gives prominence to defining and adhering to practices. It gives this prominence to specific practices but never seeks to justify their selection. It makes practice mandatory without explaining “why?”. When people are led by ‘the process’ they’re effectively stuck with that process and stop looking for smart ways to solve problems associated with the way work is done. 

We’ve heard the story of imposed process before; it’s the ‘because I say so’ story.  It arises from values that focus on process control and the need for consistency, and that leads to a ‘one size fits all’ approach. In some situations the process may be efficient, but in others it will not be. Despite the potential inefficiency, the perceived need to impose a standard process is a management norm that persists in many organisations.

It’s easy for us to remember what we do, but if the reasons why are not made clear, it is much harder to know why we do it.  This is as true for teams and organisations as it is for individuals.  Whether it’s ‘because I say so’ or ‘we’ve always done it this way’ or ‘we tried to change once before’, changing what we do is even more difficult if we don’t understand the reasons why we do it.

Don’t Just Follow The Process

At times, I’ve been told to ‘follow the process, and the process will get results’. The process may be efficient at achieving output but may not be effective at realising the desired business outcomes.  Very often, when we are pursuing a new opportunity or facing a novel problem, we find that the existing process cannot cope and we need to change. In fact, the existence of a process may inhibit our ability to change.

Agility is described as the ability to think and understand quickly or to move quickly and easily.  In today’s fast moving world, every organisation needs to be able to think, understand and move quickly if they want to stay in the game.  The problem is, it’s neither quick nor easy to change an organisation’s underlying behaviour if it only focuses on practice.  However, we have observed that when people really understand why they’re doing something, they are able to adapt what they do more quickly. With a clear purpose or goal, shared values and guiding principles, teams can be creative and adaptive with their practices, finding the most effective ways to achieve their desired outcomes.

We observe that practices, either static or rapidly changing, are unsuitable for driving behavioural change. Explicit principles agreed by the team serve as a target that guides us towards our desired system of values and behaviours.  Since principles are stable and consensual, they make better levers for change than practices. Adhering to agreed principles is a real change in behaviour; failing to adhere to principles provides a focus to inspect and adapt and change behaviour.

Use Your Principles To Inspect Your Behaviours

When we inspect what went wrong and assess our adherence to our principles, we can identify the behaviours that need to change to better express our desired values. When we inspect what went well we can reinforce the behaviours that led to positive outcomes. Teams can use practices such as Team Retrospectives to support deep, behavioural change.

For teams to achieve high-performance, we believe that there will be a strong correlation between their values and their guiding principles - these are the morals and rules for the game, the parameters and boundaries within which to work; everything else is flexible and changeable. In particular, practices are simply ways to implement our values and behaviours. We can change practice and sustain (or even improve) our adherence to principles, values and behaviours. 

An Agile Mind offers a number of Values that, when held in concert, describe the beliefs, ethos and behaviours that underpin how teams realise their objectives.  Values and behaviours are integrated into a person’s self and become characteristic of that person, and, in aggregate, the team; so much so, that others can sense these values in the way the team conducts itself.

Your Behaviour Is A Reflection Of Your Values

This matrix shown, left, begins to illustrate the relationship between the Values & Behaviours and the Principles. You can click the image to view it full size.

For example, Teams can only become and remain high performing if they continually seek out and implement improvements. This capability emerges where the value of Inspect and Adapt meets the principle of High-Performing Teams and those teams are living-out the value of Rigour and Discipline.

We might describe the relationship between the value of Leading not Managing and the principle of High-Performing Teams by saying Leaders consciously avoid interfering in the team in order to enhance team stability as a foundation for high performance.  But we cannot isolate this from the leaders role in upholding the principle that Culture is Key - Leaders create a culture that promotes Team ownership of rigour & discipline and actively seek to avoid management intervention.  Acts of leadership that enable teams to gain increased autonomy are both a driver for and a response to teams demonstrating rigour and discipline and proactively using data and feedback to fuel continuous improvement.

So we begin to see that values and principles cannot be applied in isolation from each other - the power comes from the interconnectedness of principles and values and behaviours. In other words, you cannot refer to an idea as a ‘Value’ or a ‘Principle’ if you consider it optional in some situations.  A team cannot claim to be Customer Led (a value) and conveniently ignore the principle to Always use Data.

When a team has agreed on a set of Principles, they create a basis for inspection and adaptation which can be more powerful than simply looking at their Practices.  This is because our Principles are linked to our Values and Behaviours and when we are willing to inspect our behaviours and adapt in accordance with our Principles we will begin to expose our internal values; this will enable a deeper cultural change than simply adapting our practices and processes.

Finally…

On returning home from her parents, the young couple in our story realised that their joint of meat for two people was smaller than one for a family of six and their oven was more that big enough so they were able to change how they would prepare and roast their meat saving time whilst arguably improving flavour by keeping the joint whole for roasting.