Bringing a Gun to a Fist Fight

A fully certified Agile coach recently bought a move-in ready holiday home. He only needed to fix the complete home interior. And so, as many of us do, his wife and him turned to IKEA. Confident and supported by his agile background, he explained to his wife: “I got this, I will approach this in an Agile way. No worries.” A visit to the nearest IKEA and a short period of trial and error later he was subsequently released from his duty.

What happened? His wife has suggested that they have a look at the website first and figure out what they needed before actually going shopping. However, he answered that this is not the correct approach. So they drove to the nearest IKEA store, went in, bought a piece of wood from a closet, a red cushion and one coffee cup. Afterwards, they drove back home where he said: “Give me a couple of minutes, I’ll do some development in the living area.” After about 10 minutes he called his wife back in and asked: “What do you think and do not hold back on the feedback?” She didn’t, took the catalogue and finished the interior design job properly.

Don’t get us wrong. We absolutely believe in agile or adaptive approaches, but there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to every situation.

For simple, straightforward projects and tasks, there is no point trying to bring an agile approach to the table. Such a project is typically defined by two criteria: first of all, the task is clear and secondly, it has alread;y been done a lot of times. The right approach for such tasks simply is: If x happens, then do y.

Simple problems …

However, most real life business scenarios are not that self-evident. The solution exists, but the way to the solution is not trivial. As an example, think of a logistics optimization challenge. A truck needs to be loaded with product in such a way that you do not waste space and you take into account the truck has three customers to visit in a specific order. So you cannot put the products in the truck in a random way. Your gut immediately tells you that there is a logical approach to the problem statement, but it will not be easy to find. It is probably unlikely to come up at once with the optimal algorithm. You will need to do this in steps, which you call iterations from an agile point of view. Unlike the above, these are complex or complicated scenarios.

… vs. complex scenarios

No matter how hard you think about these problems, you will not find the right solution or approach to it. Think of starting a company. If you would know upfront what you learned after the first two years, you would do certain things very differently. Most AI solutions today fall in this category for instance. The technology is still in full evolution and what can be accomplished with it is even more unclear. In complex scenarios there is an absolute need to learn during the process. Learning while doing is not a nice to have; it is the only way to solve the problem.

The example of technology in this situation is an unknown or unstable parameter in your growth process. However, when the number of unknowns becomes too large, you are no longer in a complex problem. You are in chaos. Whereas in a complex scenario you can look back to the process and take learnings out of it. You can clearly pinpoint what happened and why something happened. Finally, you are able to define patterns that will help you navigate through the complexity. In contrast to chaos, you will look backwards and find nothing.

The IKEA story

The IKEA story is an example of a complex scenario that is best approached in a waterfall way. If you think about it: IKEA made sure that they simplified the whole process of building a beautiful interior with easy to use and access tools. Therefore the product range needs to be as straightforward as possible. The paradox of the whole story is that IKEA maintains a “it has to be simple” design approach for their customers, but simultaneously create a complex production process for themselves, which requires several iterations and learnings before anything even makes it to the catalogue. So yes, for the design process, an agile approach is the best one, but the production process needs a different perspective In summary: the internal business processes of IKEA need to be so adaptive so they can provide their customers a waterfall experience.

Choose your character

The best way to approach a certain task or activity can even depend on the context of the task. Let us look at another example: booking a trip. Is that a simple task or rather a complex activity which you will need to approach in iterations? It depends on the context. If you need to book a business trip just for yourself, it will probably take 15 minutes. It is simple and straightforward. However, it becomes more complicated if it is not just a business trip for yourself, but a city trip with your partner. That will probably take a bit longer to set up. And now imagine you expand the trip to organising a holiday getaway with five families.

Translate all of this to your IT projects and programs. By all means, stay away from the chaos scenario. That in itself is a separate story. For complex projects, an adaptive approach will give the best results, because the learning is a key enabler to get to the solution. For simple tasks, you do not need iterations, agility or being adaptive. Simple tasks might need a plan. So make the plan and get them done. The waterfall approach works absolutely fine for that. For projects in between simple and complex tasks (call them complicated scenarios), both options can work. We suggest asking yourself the question: do we need to have learnings in between the steps of the execution to get to the right solution? If not, use a waterfall approach. If yes, use an adaptive approach.

Service management processes

Let us take the IT implications one step further and have a look into service management processes. These live very closely to the IKEA paradox. To start with, the designing and updating of the processes themselves are like the product design in IKEA: they are best approached in an adaptive way. Especially in complex hybrid enterprise environments, some of these process designs can be very complex. Not in the least because it involves people from different divisions, groups or even companies. And in the case of a managed services scenario, they all have to take a part of the accountability. The outcome, in IKEA the products themselves, in an IT division the service management processes, need to be as simple as possible. If executing one of them requires a plan, it is best to have a waterfall plan. Take backup and an example. Once the process is designed and architected, it needs to be executed time after time, without failure, in exactly the same way. There is no room or need for learning in between the steps of the backup process.

In summary, an Agile coach’s attempt to decorate a holiday home with an Agile approach becomes a humorous analogy for task management in business and IT projects. The IKEA story, however, illustrates the paradox of simplicity for customers versus the complexity of internal product creation processes.

It advises tailoring the approach based on the task’s complexity—opting for a waterfall approach for simplicity, an adaptive approach for complexity, and either for scenarios in between. This advice extends to service management processes, where designing and updating processes align with the IKEA paradox. Ultimately, the key is to avoid chaos scenarios and choose an approach that balances the need for learning with task execution.

Note 1: this column is made in collaboration with iLean. iLean is a company focused on implementing Agile effectively and guiding you towards measurable results with big impact.

Note 2: this column takes inspiration from the work of Ralph Stacey around complexity in leadership. His model provides a framework for organisations about the type of actions they could take based on the amount of uncertainty and agreement.

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