My blog is called agile for everyone, but is agile really for everyone?

Some workplace cultures aren’t (yet) set up for this way of working. I think more could adapt to agile than you might think, but there are a few pre-requisites. Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore how to spot if there’s more work to do before you are ready for agile.

The most obvious pre-condition for agile is psychological safety – having an environment where people feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks like speaking up with questions and concerns. In psychologically safe settings, people can try new things which might or might not work out, without feeling like they might be punished if it goes wrong. This doesn’t mean you don’t set yourselves high standards, but recognises that some failure is a necessary part of learning.

Extensive research by Google has found that psychological safety is the biggest predictor of team performance. It’s also an essential condition for agile working.

Why do agile teams need psychological safety?

If agile is new to your team, or you are implementing it in a different way, trying it will feel inherently risky. Not only are you doing things differently, but you’re doing it in a way that requires a lot of transparency and openness.

It can feel surprisingly vulnerable to share more of the details of your work – for example, in a stand-up. When we work in silos, it’s easier to cover up when things don’t go to plan, or when you’re not sure what you’re doing. But agile normalises sharing those things regularly as they happen, because if the team knows they are happening they can try and address them together and adapt their approach as necessary.

Agile should also involve more feedback to everyone in the group. Retros are one way to do this in a structured and hopefully non-threatening manner, but even so it’s a shift from most feedback coming from managers to their line reports. You need some psychological safety in order to be able to raise what’s not working in the work you are doing as a team.

I’ve written extensively about how challenging our conventional power norms is core to agile. When you work in an agile way, decisions about what you work on and how you’re going to do it should be made by the group, rather than just coming top-down from the manager. But this relies on the group feeling comfortable speaking up and not just leaving it to the most senior person.

Finally, learning is at the core of agile. We should be experimenting and learning our way forwards. But the nature of experiments means some things will go right and some… won’t. That needs to be ok for agile to work.

How agile helps build psychological safety

Ironically, although a lack of psychological safety is a barrier to agile, agile itself can help grow psychological safety further. All the things we’ve just talked about (transparency, feedback, distributed power and learning) are both essential to agile and strengthened by it.

Think of trying agile as like joining a running club. If you can’t go more than three steps without getting out of breath and giving up, you’re not yet ready to join a group running 5k every week. But if you can just about manage a slow 5k, joining the club will help you get faster.

So, if you’re working somewhere truly toxic, agile probably isn’t for you. But if that’s not the case, you should be fine giving agile a go – just as you would be fine joining that running club even if you can’t run a marathon yet.

In fact, when you look at some of the advice on fostering psychological safety, lots of it might seem familiar to you if you’re aware of some agile mindsets and tools. Many agile practices are just structured ways of making sure everyone has a chance to speak up. At it’s heart, agile should mean teams can experiment, are listened to and have more decision-making power. This is all very helpful for psychological safety!

If you are still a bit nervous about getting started with agile, I strongly recommend starting small. Reduce the risk until it feels comfortable by just picking one tool or one area to try something different. That might mean just trying something like a regular retro, and using that as a way in to creating some space to reflect together. If that works, you can try something else and build your practices over time.

This month, we’ll be exploring more potential barriers to working in an agile way. Subscribe to my email newsletter to get a round-up of posts and more tips on agile working.