Post by Jens Coldewey

Recently I stumbled across the work of Marijn Janssen and Haiko Van Der Voort from Delft University of Technology on Adaptive Organisations. Marjin and Haiko research adaptivity and agility in governmental and public organizations. In a worthwhile paper about the reaction of the Dutch government to the COVID pandemic (https://lnkd.in/dw-Y8GGa) they make an interesting distinction between “adaptive” and “agile”. In my own probably too short words they differentiate: 👉 “Agile Governance” is mainly reactive (“Sensing events and responding quickly”) to “satisfy a client” within a stable organisation. 👉 “Adaptive Governance" aims at “learning and maintaining fit”. Though I’m not sure I agree with their view on Agile, I have seen enough organisations neglecting the “learning and maintaining fit” part, leading to disempowered product owners and mediocre results. These two different dimensions fit nicely to models we're using all the time (though their definition of adaptiveness aims further into the full organization): They fit to the two dimensions of the Stacey Matrix of “What?” and “How?” and they fit to the “Internal vs. External” dimension of the Competing Values Framework. From this perspective it’s also pretty clear that doing the wrong stuff won’t be too helpful, even if done in a very agile way. The ultimate goal is to be able to adapt to changing circumstances. Methods you use - be it Scrum, XP, SAFe or whatever - are just helpful tools to get there. If you don’t use them to build the stuff that is needed, you will fail. The paper cites the failed development of the Dutch COVID contact tracing app as a striking example of a failed agile endeavour. Build the right thing and building it right are two different dimensions. In a dynamic world, this also needs organizations that adapt. Marijn’s and Haiko’s distinction is helpful to make that clear.