Super important topic. I'm so glad that the NUMMI plant is something that happened. It shows that with the right leadership you can build a high performing culture in any organization, in any country. The collectivist, collaborative culture you need to build for Lean to exist requires you to support the people doing the work and to help them be successful. The key perspective shift is holding the belief that it's the people doing the work who are creating the value (because it is), so if we want to get more work done we have to help the people doing to work to make it easier for them to deliver value.
I appreciate that this conversation “looked over the rim at the vast landscape beyond team coaching” (to paraphrase). Many of the #agileisdead discussions fixate in the team-scape, failing to even acknowledge that the environment around the team as significant effect on the team’s ability to gain agility. One of you mentioned six-sigma and other organizational improvement libraries that were supposed to create great things but also “died.” I’d love for more of us to dive into the causes of those failures and whether or not agile hit on the same reasons for the current difficulties. Is it that the nature of how business is done eventually, successfully rejects changes to how business is done? Or, at best, changes to how business is done is so slow that we cannot see it, and cannot make it happen faster, and is difficult to make it last?
The lack of product management work or role at the beginning of technology products is a great point. That kind of work emerged as needful as the computer-based products became more complex and specialized. This points to the possibility that specialization in the agile coach work is also natural. We, coaches and customers of coaches, are not good at creating shared understanding about specializations.
