The Agile Paradox: Necessary evil or evil necessity of having managers?

 

“Ninety-five per cent of changes made by management today make no improvement.”

Dr. Edward Deming - “The New Economics” 1994

It is no secret that Deming often chided upper managers as being the cause of bottlenecks, revenue loss, and ill-conceived decisions based on short term thinking that is the result of the lack of utilizing sound data driven processes and decisions.  The Agile movement is just as notorious for blaming management as well as the bureaucratic organizational structures which in turn create the need to compartmentalize people and feed the desire to have them all follow a prescribed waterfall-ish process.

So it was serendipitous that I ran into this blog post from a “Lean and Kanban” advocate from Germany named Arne Roock, who states to “stop bashing managers”.  As he states:

First of all we should not offend all the people with management titles out there.  Furthermore I’ve argued that we need people who are not part of our autonomous teams. They need a good standing in the organization and must have a good understanding of our systems. They are responsible for managing the team’s interactions, re-designing the system and observing and acting upon local optimization. And sometimes they need to change the setup of a team. For me, that’s exactly what a good manager does. So let’s stop bashing managers and start working on establishing another understanding of management!

This pie chart from the post does a good job of mirroring management based organizations in the world:

Interestingly, one could say about 95% of the companies out there are run by a hierarchical management structure.  And the ones who claim not to have a management structure is probably because they are small solo or run by a few partners type businesses, that at some point will start hiring management when they grow.  So the realities are that it is virtually impossible to work in any company of some comparable size and scale that would not have some type of management in place.

Even ones who are adopting so called “management-less” structures such as Zappos’ agenda to follow a “holarchy” style structure will inevitably have some management structure in place.  In fact, one could argue that the CEO Hsieh’s very agenda to have a management-less structure was made because his is in fact the head manager!

The famous father of modern sociology, Max Weber, advocated that capitalism, ironically, could not run without bureaucracies and managers because to do so would run contrary to the egalitarian and democratic foundations of a country like America for as he famously stated:

In order that a manner of life well adapted to the peculiarities of the capitalism… could come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to the whole groups of man.

In other words, if it were not for bureaucratic management in place both in government and companies, there would be no check points for decisions to be made such that equal voice and equal votes could be vetted for all involved.

What it boils down to is an Agile paradox: What are the necessary evils of management that need to be in place, so that they do not become just evil necessities that hamper our ability to deliver projects with high velocity?

What’s your answer?

P.S. – I wrote a post on my site about project managers being perceived as necessary evils as well.  Let me know what you think!