It’s not that it can’t work, or indeed give you some genuine short term value. The problem is the message that it sends.
Confronted with a rate of change that makes one’s head spin, large corporates are desperately scrambling to get a level of agility that enables them to survive. Deeply entrenched traditional slow ways of working are a major impediment to keeping up with the innovation that is being enabled by cheap (cloud) computer power, and the increasing interconnectedness of all humans. Pretty soon most everybody will be able to innovate and disrupt traditional business from anywhere on the planet.
So the temptation is there. Ring fence the crap, and build a new bit of the business that is capable of innovating and responding to the market rapidly and creating market disrupting value.
So leadership says: “we are going bimodal to respond to the need for innovation and agility”. Here’s what I hear “we are going to let our crappy work practices, our lousy architecture and non existent engineering discipline continue to fester in the traditional part of the business while we put some lipstick on the pig to attempt to keep up with digital disruption”.
I’ve advocated for deep not wide introduction of Agile to large organisations. That’s a pragmatic thing, much better to do it really well in one place and then move it laterally in an organic way, then to do it badly in 100 places and get a company wide backlash. Don’t misinterpret this. I’m an advocate of Agile for the whole organisation. It’s a question of how you roll it out.
So what’s the problem with a creating a second mode of operation to drive an incremental introduction of an agile way of working? At one level, nothing at all, it’s a logical place to start.
The question is, what message are you sending to mode 1? The term ‘bimodal’ is powerful. We work in two different ways. “I’m mode 1, the way I’ve always worked is the way I’m always gunna work”.
Hmmmm, so mode 1 where the vast majority of business functionality and data is locked away continues to operate unchanged (whether that is the intent or not) and only the mode 2 crew need to do anything differently.
A short term fix at best. And I contend that the mode 1 beast will ultimately become a millstone around your neck and drag you to the bottom.
Agility across the whole business is key to survival into the 21st century.
If you are creating an agile part of the business to respond to immediate imperatives it should be seen as a transitionary step to a “Unimodal” delivery model that shares a consistent way of working that allows for rapid course correction, collaboration and innovation and across the entire eco system.
I saw this quote from the CEO of Nokia at the point Microsoft acquired them in a recent article.
“we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”
Failure to transition to a broad, deeply embedded culture of adaption and rapid response will leave you open to the Digital Innovators of the world doing an end run around you, and leave you choking on their dust.