Ready for a multi-million-dollar waste?

Ready for a multi-million-dollar waste? Run an organizational transformation without touching HR.
A real story of an excellent Agile framework adoption that had no chance to succeed.

MONTH 1 (since the structural and process changes)
The product teams are on fire. Everyone’s aligned. Energy. Creativity. Real conversations drive continuous improvement.
Adaptivity and speed of learning? Already impressive and continuing to grow.
Management? Proud. Finally, it feels like the way to success has been found.

MONTH 6
The spark? Gone.
Team members? Everyone is busy producing their own stuff—specs, code, testing.
Teams? Quick in delivering their own components. Attempts to raise hard discussions meet no support. Everyone seems to be OK with everything.
Adaptivity and speed of learning? Stuck at some point and gradually degrading.
Management? Nervous: business goals are in danger.

MONTH 12
Goals? Missed. Again.
Morale? Low.
Management? Pulls the emergency brake: back to what seemed to be working at least somehow before.

THE POST-MORTEM
✅ Optimization goals? Adaptiveness and speed of learning were thoughtfully selected as essential for overcoming key challenges to strategic business goals.
✅ Framework? Chosen consistently with the optimization goals and implemented adequately, with solid training and staffing, including brilliant continuous coaching support.
⚠️ HR and line management practices? Unchanged - out of scope.

CONCLUSIONS
You can’t expect people to act like a team while rewarding individual achievements and visibility to management.
You can’t demand adaptability while career promotions demand narrow specialization.
You can’t spark a passion for rapid, value-driven learning if recognition is tied to value-agnostic output.
You can’t change people’s behaviors while keeping HR and line-management practices unchanged.

RECOMMENDATIONS
🧠 Stop treating HR and line management as a separate world when it has a crucial impact on your people’s behaviors.
Redesign the organization by aligning HR and line management practices in synergy with other key organizational elements toward your optimization goals.