Failing to Transform

Change via a growth mindset.

An ad for a software company has been following my web browsing for the last few days and it tries to grab me with “Why Agile Transformations Fail?” which is a pretty catchy title. Since it is an ad I had seen many times before and had actually clicked through to a few months ago. I was curious on what they thought were the reasons and causes.

It is a pretty good white paper and if you go here to Planview Inc.’s site, you can read it. In it they mention that psychology, lack of senior leadership support, budgeting and alignment on objectives are causal. They sure are! I don’t think they relate to just agile transformations but include just about every serious endeavor I can think of. If you read through their white-paper, your experience could vary but the Planview software company aren’t wrong on the topic, in my opinion.

That’s a leading introduction to the rest of this guidance. Agile Transformations are designed to fail. They are designed to create a situation of enabling consulting contracts which can include frameworks or software or hiring consultants or all of these things.

In my experience, and research, failure is the way you learn when trying something new, and, it can’t be avoided. You should embrace failure try to figure out why you can’t reach you goals.

If you have read this far, good for you, and me, too, since I want to share something smart!

If you want to make changes in your approach to your business or work, all you need is an agile mindset, which might be better described as a growth mindset. As Dr. Carol Dweck learns and shares in the linked review article, a growth mindset is all about improvement and growth, which takes both time and a commitment to change. It is a learning mindset too and failure is an excellent teacher. You can’t beat trial and error for either motivation or learning.

I’ve learned from failing and would like to save you a few steps if you are on a journey of self improvement where you work or in your community event planning or budgeting with a group and even family planning etc.

I’ve worked for 25 years with product teams and managed plenty of projects, big and small. I’ve learned that if you are planning to get some project done and it isn’t going the way you want it to, you need to change your approach.

The best thing you can do is bring your friends, family colleagues together and spend 15-30 minutes doing a Retrospective meeting. You’ll need someone to lead and facilitate it, ask the hard questions and keep everyone engaged. You should come up with list of a few things you can change and then pick one to try out to address immediately.

You may well ask, why not do all the things on your change list. Eventually, you will have to do more than one thing to improve. But a couple of things are going to happen when you are on your journey. First, change is harder than you think and even one little change may take time. Second, you, and your teaM, are going to change your mind and in subsequent Retrospectives, you are going to take what you just learned and update your list.

Finally, if you are honest with yourself, your goals tend to shift. You will need to reset them. And that is a good thing and a great agile mindset.

I hope this makes sense for you as 2026 begins. Please hit the like and subscribe buttons below, it doesn’t cost anything! If you want to learn more, join one of our non-fee (free!) Introductions to Product Owner/Managing sessions by signing up at bigdealagility.com.

Happy New Year! Make it a great year!