Scaled Intent Leadership

The essential idea of the agile movement is a focus on the human factor. A human-centric working approach is serving the purpose of delivering the highest value to the users. 

When it comes to people collaborating, the effectiveness of collaboration depends on the level of shared sense of purpose and meaning. Consequently, leadership needs to scale across the organization. What makes up an agile leader is to inspire others to lead themselves, rather than to follow. Scaling leadership by intent is an approach to provide the foundation for applying agile frameworks, practices, processes, and tools effectively.

Doing Agile vs. Being Agile

Today, we have a large repertoire of practices and tools at hand that support organizations as they implement agile on the practical and operational level. That’s the doing side of the agile coin. 

In contrast, the being side of the agile coin is all about the shared sense of meaning and purpose across the organization, i.e. independently from roles and titles. The nature of meaning in the context of an enterprise is transparency between the operational culture of an organization and the impact that products and services create for clients and customers. Consequently, the being dimension of agile builds the bridge between internal enterprise dynamics and external value creation. Consequently, it’s the foundation for creating business agility.

An Over Emphasis on Doing Agile

When it comes to the reality of scaling agile, we observe the tendency of corporations to attempt to increase the level of agility by increasing the number of teams working with agile practices. They call agile coaches to advise them on agile “best practices” to be taught and implemented. This ignores the ground-breaking Harvard Business Review article “The New New Product Development Game” which was published back in 1986. Here the evidence was provided that business agility requires applying the principles of a learning organization. 

In such organizations, people who do the work come first and managers become leaders who focus on enabling and encouraging responsibility for owning the way of working. Effectively, workers become leaders themselves. 

The Misconception of “Work-Life Balance”

Overall, after 20 years of rolling out agile transformations, we observe a worldwide trend in large corporations to roll back leadership principles into the stage of the second industrial revolution. Ultimately, when it comes to the logics of decision making, we observe a tendency to implement agile transformations in a way that confirms the legacy status quo. 

While today’s world is distinguished by higher advanced technology and especially by digitalization and instant global communication, executive leadership is clinging to a mindset that emphasizes technology, standardization, and mass production. 

Noticeably, from a socio-political perspective, in a command-and-control based culture, employees find their sense of comfort in applying the concept of work-life balance. From this place, personal values are unfolded in the private sphere, while the work activity is about serving another one's purpose. Hence, there is a substantial gap between the private and professional sphere when it comes to the sense of meaning. That is exactly not a basis for showing up authentically at the workplace.

Resolving the Ambiguity of Leadership

When it comes to the dynamics of the enterprise as a social system and an economic entity, enterprise agility corresponds to the enterprise intent. An agile culture supports the transformation of individual meaning to be represented as enterprise intent. Enterprise intent is another name for the concept of leadership as organizational “dark matter” as outlined by leadership prophet Mary Parker Follett back in the 1920s. When enterprise intent is decoupled from individual positions, decision-making happens on a situational basis. 

In 1960, Douglas McGregor introduced “Theory Y” and proposed a human-centric culture that believes in the intrinsic motivation of employees. In contrast, “Theory X” is based on the idea that humans are naturally lazy and without a sense of meaning, so a purpose needs to be imposed from the outside (command) and results need to be supervised (control). 

Since then, the debate on leadership concepts oscillates between those two concepts. Our socio-political contract calls executive management to cling to classical concepts of management, even if they would like to steer more into distributed leadership.

Consequently, the question is, what exactly needs to happen to reconcile the case of executive management with the principles of human-centric leadership? Bear with me.

Intent as Mirror of Individual Meaning

Intent is distinguished from intention by a deeper level of ownership. While intention serves you by leveraging your mind to roll out a plan properly, intent happens on an intuitive level whenever the clarity of personal values is expressed as concrete actions. Intent is the result of self-awareness about the very personal values as much as about the usefulness of personal behavioral patterns. As an effect, an increased level of self-awareness closes the gap between self perception and how you are perceived by others.

Scaling Intent: Leaders Create Leaders

As a leader, you are scaling intent when you act with a sense of determination that inspires others to follow. Noticeably, to follow such a leader doesn’t exactly mean to follow his or her opinion about a subject matter. On the contrary, to follow such a leader means to follow the concept of leading from the inside out. Following the intentional leader means to start my own personal quest to search inside myself, and ultimately to show up as a full human being with my very own sense of determination. That is how the inner stance of leadership intent unfolds in a fractal structure. 

Scaling Intent in the Enterprise Context

In the enterprise context, intent is the result of a shared sense of meaning. Rather than alignment of meaning, enterprise intent relates to the impact that the product or service is creating for its users or consumers

Regarding the internal operational culture of the enterprise, meaning scales from the individual emotional sphere to the factual space of empirical evidence. The factual space is the result of consequently applying the principles of the learning organization. In fact, the value of transparency in Scrum corresponds to an evidence-based culture. Rather than arguing with opinions in a political battle, you put data on the table and make informed decisions based on it. Individuals can relate to decisions that are evidence-based as a result of aligning perspectives in a conversation as meaningful.

A Call to Leverage Coaching for Deep Inner Work

Today, the stage is open for everybody to acknowledge that Theory Y represents the deeper reality of human nature and, most importantly, that determination for a deep inner work is required in order to move from state X to state Y. It’s a call to any individual to get started, independent of title, position and educational level.

If leading by intent is the key to drive adaptability and purpose in enterprises, how do we get that sense of intent and inner determination?

In another article, I discussed in depth, how adopting personal intent requires exploring a higher sense of wholeness as a human being, and why this challenge is like swimming against the tide. Elevating your sense of wholeness requires to Search inside yourself, as Chade-Meng Tan coined it in his best-selling book.

The good news is that you are not alone with this endeavor. Coaching according to ICF standards, in particular the Co-Active coaching model, is a practical and potentially very powerful tool that can support anybody to step into their purpose. 

In the context of the enterprise, acknowledging their “orange” reality according to Frederic Laloux’s famous book Reinventing Organizations, managers who work consistently with a professional coach have the opportunity to explore a new narrative, connect to their true personal values and thus truly transform the world of work.

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