Reciprocal commitment: The Forgotten Key to agile
A long long time ago while I attended my CSPO training, there were two key trainers on Product Ownership: Mike Cohn and Roman Pichler. With my service design and product management background, I chose Roman Pichler.
This was only the beginning of my agile journey. Just after the training, I have been asked to develop a training on Product Ownership and deliver it in South London.
The content is barely known by everybody but one single point mentioned by Pichler referring to Cohn was rapidly discussed. That point was reciprocal commitment.
Reciprocal commitment means that the team commits to deliver value and the customer commits to deliver feedback.
This point sounded obvious at the beginning of Agile and I am wondering if this is still accurate nearly fifteen years later.
Nowadays, there is no reciprocal commitment any longer. A customer orders work, and teams execute work. Even if everybody is using some of the agile methodologies, you have a weird feeling in your gut telling you that something wrong is happening. We lost reciprocal commitment.
Ten years ago when I started researching new ways of working and agile organizations, I came across a research publication on Leading in Complexity by Peter Kruse.
Kruse’s concept explained and demonstrated that leading and communicating in a complex system is based on negotiation. Here a complex system relates to the system’s behavior, not its context. A complex system allows co-creation and rapid problem-solving, and curiously it only works without management in a self-organized manner. That dynamic also sounds to be one distilling innovation.
Kruse’s approach was to find an answer for the role of leaders in such a dynamic. In fact, I demonstrated in a previous publication on Agile System Dynamics (browse my stories in Medium) how an agile systems behavior works but one piece was still missing: what is the decision-making process in such a dynamic?
In an agile working model, all conversations are negotiations. An objective is a negotiation allowing a win for business and customer, a win for development, and a win for management. If the deal isn’t well balanced and one part loses, you won’t get what you expected.
That’s for the deal.
The nature of that deal is based on commitment to deliver work, commitment to deliver feedback, and commitment to create the context to create value. This is the reciprocal commitment of all parts.
So, check out your Agile and take a look at your reciprocal commitments. Check out your reciprocal commitment with your third parties and service providers, they are part of your system too.
It is essential to remember that reciprocal commitment should be approached as a mutual agreement rather than a mere transactional experience. Rather than treating it as a shopping endeavor, reciprocal commitment involves making a sincere deal that entails a deeper level of trust and loyalty. It goes beyond a simple exchange of goods or services and instead focuses on fostering a meaningful and dedicated relationship between parties involved.
