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Interesting article on travel for vocabulary about disability and access 

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Interesting article on travel for vocabulary about disability and access 

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Air travel is particularly daunting for passengers with disabilities. Getting to and from the airport; navigating security checkpoints; moving through large, noisy crowds; and getting on and off an aircraft can all present unique obstacles for those with auditory, visual, cognitive, or other disabilities.

Longtime aviation executive Michael Swiatek wants to help clear the runway for travelers with disabilities-or, really, for any travelers needing assistance. "As societies age, more and more people are becoming less and less abled," he notes. "Eventually, we're all going to need some kind of help."

Swiatek is the chief strategy officer at Abra Group, a holding company for Latin American airlines Avianca and GOL. He is also legally blind. In this interview with McKinsey's Eliza Cooper and Roberta Fusaro, Swiatek outlines the societal, operational, and economic considerations involved with improving air travel for all and conveys his optimism for the "golden age of accessibility" that he believes we're experiencing now.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

McKinsey: Why are the topics of inclusion and accessibility so important to you?

Michael Swiatek: I'm a 60-year-old White male with a bald head and white beard. I have been blind/low vision since birth. The eye disease I have is retinitis pigmentosa, which is severe night blindness and a lack of peripheral vision. And I've slowly been getting closer and closer to total blindness over the past 60 years. And that has given me the opportunity, as a person with disabilities, to learn about this issue firsthand-and to navigate the tricky world of business and airlines.

McKinsey: How have society's and the business world's views on disability inclusion changed since you started your career?

Michael Swiatek: The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990-about halfway through my journey. Since then, the awareness has greatly improved-so much so that I personally believe that we're in a golden age of accessibility. The supports available today are better than they were 30 years ago. A lot of that credit goes to smartphones and advances in their operating systems. The things I can do as a blind/low-vision person with my smartphone today are incredible. I can take a snapshot of a menu in a restaurant, and my phone will read back to me what's on the menu. I can use AI to ask questions such as, "How many dishes on this menu have chicken in it or are vegetarian?" It's getting better every year. But it does take time.

McKinsey: Can you talk a little about how your visual impairment has affected you professionally?

Michael Swiatek: Well, early in my career, when I had a little more eyesight but still not enough to drive a car, my biggest challenge was getting to and from the office. I didn't want to disclose [my visual impairment] to everybody, because 30 years ago, it did feel like there was some bias. As soon as I would mention it in an interview, for instance, the tone would change. People would focus on the wrong things. They would ask, "But how are you going to get to work if you don't have a driver's license?" And I would say, "I'll take care of myself with public transportation, or my wife will drive me."

But one of the advantages that I get from being a blind/low-vision person is it has really enhanced my ability to memorize. It's made me a planner. And I believe it's made me a better listener. Authenticity, empathy-these are buzzwords for leaders today. Well, I can't help but be empathetic because I need other people's help. I've worked for a lot of CEOs in my career, and they have all responded favorably when I've asked for their help and said, "Hey, can I put my hand on your shoulder, and can you lead me to the conference room?"

Through that sort of interaction, I get this quiet time alone with CEOs, board members, managers, analysts, secretaries, janitors. They remember me and bond with me a lot quicker. There's no reason to feel sorry for me-in many ways, I feel like this has been a benefit to building my career, not a disadvantage.

McKinsey: What air travel obstacles do people with disabilities typically face?

Michael Swiatek: At Avianca, we looked at the touchpoints in a typical customer journey across four major categories of disability-auditory, cognitive, mobility, and visual. We found about 90 pain points-things as simple as getting off a plane and finding a restroom or other services if you are a blind/low-vision passenger, and as complicated as trying to fit a wheelchair on board a plane.

Wheelchairs probably pose the biggest challenge for the industry and a real engineering challenge for manufacturers. Wheelchair users can't take their own wheelchairs on board an aircraft, and the process for loading wheelchairs into the cargo hold of an aircraft varies depending on who made the chair, how it's been designed, the manufacturer of the aircraft, the size of the cargo door, the size of the cargo hold, the layout of the airport on the tarmac, the training of the ramp agents-it goes on and on. And if you load all the weight in the back of the plane first, sometimes the tail of the plane tips down. A wheelchair can weigh more than 300 pounds. Someone has to be thinking about how to load multiple wheelchairs on a plane so that the process doesn't create flight delays, damage to the plane, or damage to the chairs. We're identifying more and more of these kinds of pain points. We just need to tackle them one by one.

McKinsey: You've developed a perspective-actually, a framework-for how to do exactly that and create more disability inclusion in air travel. What does it involve?

Michael Swiatek: There are five key tools: we need to raise awareness of the issues people with disabilities face. We need to provide ongoing training for airline employees-in leadership and on the front line. We need to explore process reengineering. We need to take advantage of digital technology. And we need to manage what I call the "hardware" of accessibility.

McKinsey: What does "hardware" refer to in this case? The actual nuts and bolts on a plane?

Michael Swiatek: A good example of hardware is an accessible lavatory, which airlines can buy as a unit from a supplier and install on their planes. The lavatory has expandable walls, which allow enough space for a wheelchair to be able to turn 360 degrees or for two people to fit inside. This would allow wheelchair users to get in and out by themselves.

Here's another example: I recently noticed that the flush button on the plane I was on was outlined in LED lighting, and I was amazed because finding the flush button on most airplanes is very difficult for blind/low-vision people. Using LED lighting in this way, or using braille on seat numbers, is a great help.

Here's one more example of what I mean by hardware: airports could offer autistic passengers a dedicated sensory room that would help them feel comfortable traveling, so the two hours spent in a terminal wouldn't be as stressful.

McKinsey: Is there sufficient time, management attention, and funding to invest in this hardware, given everything that the travel industry has been through the past few years?

Michael Swiatek: Accessibility, like any issue, is always difficult to prioritize and find time for. It's a hard balancing act at all companies and in all industries, and ours is one of the more complex industries to manage through. For example, the average profitability per passenger in 2022 was $2.25, which, to have the return on capital to invest, should be something more like $10 or $12. And if we need to account for the cost of assistants who can push wheelchairs and help people with physical injuries or disabilities get to the gate, that one trip can cost up to $60. The finances are tough, no question. But transportation is a human right; we need to make accessibility affordable.

McKinsey: How do you envision collaborating with other stakeholders to do that?

Michael Swiatek: Well, it definitely needs to be a collaboration rather than a competition-from the wheelchair manufacturers to the aircraft manufacturers to the airports to the airlines, and so on. It's starting to happen. I was at the International Air Transport Association's World Passenger Symposium in Chicago. Accessibility is a track, or topic, that they started offering in 2018, I believe. The attendance is growing every year, and the ideas are getting better and better. My contact list now is over 1,000 people and reaches all over the world. The start-up environment, the entrepreneurism-there are hundreds of smart people trying to solve [accessibility] problems. For instance, there are now autonomous wheelchairs that can guide passengers through the airport rather than passengers relying on humans to push the wheelchairs. The collaboration is already happening.

McKinsey: What metrics or indicators will you use to track progress against accessibility goals in air travel?

Michael Swiatek: The key performance indicators [KPIs] are clear: we want to reduce the number of complaints. We want to reduce the number of broken wheelchairs. One KPI we're developing involves circumstances in which stairs are used instead of a jet bridge to get passengers on and off the plane-that is, we want to ensure that the flights with more passengers with disabilities are the ones that get assigned to the jet bridges. The outcome we want is better-served passengers who are happy and will fly with us again.

McKinsey: We've talked about how airlines can help passengers with disabilities. What can airlines do to build awareness and empathy among their own employees?

Michael Swiatek: That awareness really needs to start with our educational system. I get a little frustrated that, when I'm hiring a 25-year-old flight attendant or check-in agent, I have to teach them about disability awareness and inclusion. It feels like this is something they should've learned when they were six years old, nine years old, 12 years old. According to various resources, about 15 to 20 percent of the population has a disability. You're going to run into these people. You're going to work with these people. We need to build that awareness through our societal institutions, not just wait until someone has a customer-facing job and choose that time to teach them about disability.

But what companies can do is start talking to people with disabilities, and start including them in their C-level board discussions. It's important to build external advisory committees of people with disabilities to use your products, give you feedback, and help you design products in a more universal, commonsense way.

You need that representation. In my humble opinion, my company has been able to make the progress it has, in part, by my being in the C-suite. The CEO is my colleague and my friend, and he can't ignore the fact that people exist who are blind and low vision. And because he's super engaged in it, guess what? So is the rest of the company.

Companies also need to emphasize ongoing training in this area. It can't be, "Here's a 400-page manual. Read it." That's not going to stick with people. At Avianca, we're building very short, 45-second clips where I explain what a mobility cane is. We're filming short videos with members of our external accessibility group, which includes people with different disabilities, and they are reminding people, for instance, "This is my wheelchair. It's like an extension of my body-please ask permission before you touch it." We're also in the process of creating a laminated card with dos and don'ts that employees can use when interacting with people with different kinds of disabilities.

McKinsey: What advice do you have for other leaders-inside and outside the travel industry-on how to promote more disability inclusion?

Michael Swiatek: You can't regulate human kindness. You can't regulate common sense. You can't regulate empathy. But I do think we all just need to be a little more kind with one another. If you're at the airport, and someone is sitting there quietly, and you notice that everyone else has left the boarding area, and that one person still sitting there 15 minutes later, maybe they didn't hear the announcement that the gate has changed. Ask if they could use a hand.

We just need a little bit more civility in the world right now.

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Senior airline executive and inclusion advocate Michael Swiatek outlines the changes required to enhance travel experiences for those with disabilities.

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Useful phrases for comparisions at B1 level up 

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English Idioms Course The English language has some idiomatic expressions that emphasize a particular quality of a person or thing by comparing it

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Independent work on Touch and Comparison

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Quick on your feet: think for a minute of your favorite athlete. Unless this person is a bodybuilder, strength and sheer power are only part of the story. For most sportsmen and women, real success on the playing field comes with a certain hard-to-teach nimbleness-the ability to quickly take in new information and adjust strategy to achieve a specific result. Part of the appeal of sports is the excitement that comes with constant change, and-discounting the vicissitudes of luck-the result comes down to how athletes apply their abilities in response.

Change is also a constant in business (and, yes, life). Agile, in business, is a way of working that seeks to go with the flow of inevitable change rather than work against it. The Agile Manifesto, developed in 2001 as a way of optimizing software development, prioritizes individuals over processes, working prototypes over thorough documentation, customer collaboration over closed-door meetings, and swift response to change over following a set plan. In the years since its inception, agile has conferred competitive advantage to the organizations that have applied it, in and out of the IT department.

As our business, social, economic, and political environments become increasingly volatile, the only way to meet the challenges of rapidly changing times is to change with them. Read on to learn more about agile and how to adopt an agile mindset.
Learn more about McKinsey's People & Organizational Performance Practice.
What is an agile organization?

Let's go back to sports for a minute. Maybe you're a great free throw shooter in basketball. You make nine out of ten shots when you're by yourself in your driveway, shooting around for fun. But when you meet friends for a pickup game at a nearby court, your shot is off. People keep jumping in front of you when you're trying to line up, and maybe the sun is shining in your eyes from an unfavorable angle. You make maybe a couple of shots the whole game. The following week, disappointed by your performance on the court, you decide to make a change. Rather than doubling your practice time shooting in your driveway, you mix up your routine, practicing your shot at a couple of different courts at different times of day. Maybe you also ask a friend to run some defense drills with you so you can get used to shooting under pressure. Maybe you add a layup to your shot practice. This is a shift to an agile approach-and increases the likelihood that you'll perform better the next time you play pickup.

Traditional organizations are-much like you shooting free throws in your driveway-optimized to operate in static, siloed situations of structural hierarchy. Planning is linear, and execution is controlled. The organization's skeletal structure is strong but frequently rigid and slow moving.

Agile organizations are different. They're designed for rapid change. An agile organization is a technology-enabled network of teams with a people-centered culture that operates in rapid-learning and fast-decision cycles. Agility adds speed and adaptability to stability, creating a competitive advantage in uncertain conditions.

What is kanban and what is scrum?

Kanban and scrum are two organizational frameworks that fall under the umbrella of agile.

Kanban originated in the manufacturing plants of postwar Japan. Kanban, which is Japanese for "signboard," was first developed to prioritize "just in time" delivery-that is, meeting demand rather than creating a surplus of products before they're needed. With kanban, project managers create lanes of work that are required to deliver a product. A basic kanban board would have vertical lanes for processes-these processes could be "to do," "doing," "done," and "deployed." A product or assignment would move horizontally through the board.

The idea of scrum was invented by two of the original developers of agile methodology. A team of five to nine people is led by a scrum leader and product owner. The team sets its own commitments and engages in ceremonies like daily stand-up meetings and sprint planning, uniting in a shared goal.

Scrums, kanban, and other agile product management frameworks are not set in stone. They're designed to be adapted and adjusted to fit the requirements of the project. One critical component of agile is the kaizen philosophy- a pillar of the Toyota production model -which is one of continuous improvement. With agile methodologies, the point is to learn from each iteration and adjust the process based on what's learned.
Learn more about McKinsey's People & Organizational Performance Practice.
What are the hallmarks of an agile organization?

A team or organization of any size or industry can be agile. But regardless of the details, all agile groups have five things in common.

1. North Star embodied across the organization

Agile organizations set a shared purpose and vision for the organization that helps people feel personally invested-that's a North Star. This helps align teams with sometimes wildly varied remits and processes.

2. Network of empowered teams

Agile organizations typically replace top-down structures with flexible, scalable networks of teams. Agile networks should operate with high standards of alignment, accountability, expertise, transparency, and collaboration. Regardless of the configuration of the network, team members should feel a sense of ownership over their work and see a clear connection between their work and the business's North Star.

3. Rapid decision and learning cycles

Agile teams work in short cycles-or sprints-then learn from them by collecting feedback from users to apply to a future sprint. This quick-cycle model accelerates the pace throughout the organization, prioritizing quarterly cycles and dynamic management systems-such as objectives and key results (OKRs)-over annual planning.

4. Dynamic people model that ignites passion

An agile culture puts people at the center, seeking to create value for a much wider range of stakeholders, including employees, investors, partners, and communities. Making change personally meaningful for employees can build transformational momentum.

5. Next-generation enabling technology

Radical rethinking of an organizational model requires a fresh look at the technologies that enable processes. These include, for example, real-time communication and work management tools that support continually evolving operating processes.

Agility looks a little different for every organization. But the advantages in stability and dynamism that the above trademarks confer are the same-and are critical to succeeding in today's rapidly changing competitive environment.

How should an organization implement an agile transformation?

According to a McKinsey survey on agile transformations, the best way to go about an agile transformation is for an entire organization to transition to agile, rather than just individual departments or teams. This is ambitious but possible: New Zealand-based digital-services and telecommunications company Spark NZ managed to flip the entire organization to an agile operating model in less than a year.

Any enterprise-wide agile transformation needs to be both comprehensive and iterative: comprehensive in the sense that it addresses strategy, structure, people, process, and technology and iterative in its acceptance that things will change along the way.

Transformations vary according to the size, industry, and scope of the business, but there are a common set of elements that can be divided into two components.

1. The first phase of an agile transformation involves designing and piloting the new agile operating model. This usually starts with building the top team's understanding and aspirations, creating a blueprint for how agile will add value, and implementing pilots.

2. The second phase is about improving the process and creating more agile cells throughout the organization. Here, a significant amount of time is required from key leaders, as well as willingness to role model new mindsets. The best way to accomplish this phase is to recognize that not everything can be planned for, and implementation requires continuous measurement and adjustment.

Culture is a critical part of any agile transformation. Agile is a mindset; it's not something an organization does-it's something an organization is. Getting this transition right is key to overall success.
Learn more about McKinsey's People & Organizational Performance Practice.

Agile is a mindset; it's not something an organization does-it's something an organization is.

Who should lead an agile transformation?

The single most important trait for the leader of an agile organization is an agile mindset, or inner agility. Simply put, inner agility is a comfortable relationship with change and uncertainty. And research has shown that a leader's mindset, and how that mindset shapes organizational culture, can make or break a successful agile transformation.

Leaders need three sets of capabilities for agile transformations:

Leaders must evolve new mindsets and behaviors.

For most of us, the natural impulse is to react. Research shows that people spend most of their time in a reactive mindset-reacting to challenges, circumstances, or other people. Because of this natural tendency, traditional organizations were designed to run on the reactive.

Agile organizations, by contrast, run on creative mindsets built on curiosity. A culture of innovation, collaboration, and value creation helps nurture the ability to flexibly respond to unexpected change. Creative mindsets also help members of an organization, at all levels, tap into their core passions and purposes.

Roche, a legacy biotech company, recognized the importance of a mindset shift at the leadership level. When the organization decided to build an agile culture, it invited more than 1,000 leaders to a four-day immersion program designed to enable leaders to shift from a reactive mindset to a creative one. Today, agility has been widely deployed within Roche, engaging tens of thousands of people in applying agile mindsets.

Leaders must help teams work in new and more effective ways.

Agility spells change for both leaders and their teams. Leaders need to give more autonomy and flexibility to their teams and trust them to do the right thing. For their part, teams should embrace a design-thinking mentality and build toward working more efficiently, assuming more responsibility for the outcomes of their projects and being more accountable to customers.

Leaders must cocreate an agile organizational purpose, design, and culture.

A critical organization-level skill for leaders is the ability to distill and communicate a clear, shared, and compelling purpose, or North Star. Next, leaders need to design the strategy and operating model of the organization based on agile principles and practices. Finally, leaders need to shape a new culture across the organization, based on creative mindsets of discovery, partnership, and abundance.

For tips on how to develop agile leaders, see " Leading agile transformation: The new capabilities leaders need to build 21st-century organizations."

How can we build inner agility?

Inner agility can feel counterintuitive. Our impulse as humans is to simplify and solve problems by applying our expertise. But complex problems require complex solutions, and sometimes those solutions are beyond our expertise. Recognizing that our solutions aren't working can feel like failure-but it doesn't have to. To train themselves to address problems in a more agile way, leaders need to learn to think beyond their normal ways of solving problems.

Here are five ways to build inner agility:

1. Pause to move faster

This can be tough for leaders used to moving quickly. But pausing in the middle of the fray can create space for clearer judgment, original thinking, and purposeful action. This can take many forms: one CEO McKinsey has worked with takes a ten-minute walk outside the office without his cell phone. Others do breathing exercises between meetings. These practices can help leaders interrupt habits to create space for something different.

2. Embrace your ignorance

Being a know-it-all no longer works. The world is changing so fast that new ideas can come from anywhere. Competitors you've never heard of can suddenly reshape your industry. As change accelerates, listening and thinking from a place of not knowing is crucial to encouraging the discovery of original, surprising, breakthrough ideas.

3. Radically reframe the questions

We too frequently interrogate our ideas, asking ourselves questions we already know the answers to-and worse, questions whose answers confirm what we already believe. Instead, seek to ask truly challenging, open-ended questions. Those types of questions allow your employees and stakeholders to creatively discuss and describe what they're seeing, and potentially unblock existing mental frameworks.

4. Set direction, not destination

In the increasing complexity of our era, solutions are rarely straightforward. Instead of setting a path from one point to another, share a purposeful vision with your team. Then join your team in heading toward a general goal, and in exploring and experimenting together to reach common goals.

5. Test your solutions-and yourself

Ideas may not work out as planned. But quick, cheap failures allow you to see what works and what doesn't-and avoid major, costly disasters.

In times of stress, we often feel ourselves challenged. Rather than falling back on old habits, inner agility enables us to embrace complexity and use it to grow stronger.
Learn more about McKinsey's People & Organizational Performance Practice.
What is deliberate calm?

Deliberate calm is a mindset that helps leaders keep a cool head during a crisis and steer their ships through a storm. It's not something that comes naturally: in times of uncertainty, the human brain is wired to react rather than stay calm. The ability to step back and choose actions suited to a given situation is a skill that must be cultivated. In their 2022 book Deliberate Calm, McKinsey veterans Jacqueline Brassey, Aaron De Smet, and Michiel Kruyt describe their personal self-mastery practices to offer lessons in effective leadership through crises.

One important lesson? Not all crises are created equal. Inspired by the thinking of Harvard Business School professor Herman "Dutch" Leonard, De Smet differentiates between routine emergencies and crises of uncertainty. Routine emergencies can be dealt with using past experiences and training. But crises of uncertainty are different. In these moments, where you don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes, you can't fall back on what you know. "If you are in an uncertain situation," says De Smet, "the most important thing you can do is calm down. Take a breath. Take stock. 'Is the thing I'm about to do the right thing to do?' And in many cases, the answer is no. If you were in a truly uncertain environment, if you're in new territory, the thing you would normally do might not be the right thing."

For more from De Smet and his coauthors, check out their discussion on The McKinsey Podcast, their interview, or order .

What is an agile transformation office?

Establishing an agile transformation office (ATO) can help improve the odds that an agile transformation will be successful. Embedded within an existing organizational structure, an ATO shapes and manages the transformation, brings the organization along, and-crucially-helps it achieve lasting cultural change.

To set up an ATO for success, an organization has to make three design decisions:

1. Agree on the ATO's purpose and mandate

An ATO needs a purpose just as an agile organization needs a North Star. This step links an ATO specifically to the "why" of the transformation. An ATO's mandate can include driving the transformation strategy, building capabilities, championing change, coaching senior leaders, managing interdependencies, and creating and refining best practices.

2. Define the ATO's place within the organization

While an ATO's reporting lines will depend on the organization, usually the leader of successful ATOs reports to the CEO or one of the CEO's direct reports. This ensures tight alignment and support from top leadership.

3. Determine the ATO's roles and responsibilities

Regardless of an ATO's size or mandate, the following core capabilities should be managed by a strong transformation leader:

Execution leaders own the transformation road map, assessing and adjusting it on an ongoing basis.

Methodology owners gather lessons from the transformation and refine and evolve agile practices and behaviors.

Agile coaches guide teams through their transformations, helping to instill an agile culture and mindset.

Change management and communications experts maintain lines of communication through periods of change.

As agile principles become the norm across industries, an ATO can help usher in an agile transformation regardless of the design choices an organization makes in setting it up.

Can remote teams practice agile?

Agile teams typically rely on the camaraderie, community, and trust made possible by co-location. The remote work necessitated by the COVID-19 crisis has put this idea-along with many other assumptions about work and office culture-to the test.

While the shift was sudden, talented agile teams working through the crisis proved that productivity can be maintained with the right technology in place. Here are some targeted actions agile leaders can take to recalibrate their processes and sustain an agile culture with remote teams.

1. Revisit team norms

Tools to ease teams into remote work abound-these include virtual whiteboards, instant chat, and videoconferencing. But they still represent a change from the in-person tools agile teams usually rely on for ceremonies. Team members need to help one another quickly get up to speed on how best to shift to virtual. Teams also need to make extra effort to capture the collective view, a special challenge when working remotely.

2. Cultivate bonding and morale

In the absence of in-person bonding activities, like lunches or spontaneous coffees, team members can bond virtually, such as by showing each other around their homes on a video call, introducing pets or family members, or sharing music or other personal interests. Being social is important in the virtual space, as well as in person, to nurture team cohesion.

3. Adapt coaching and development

Team leaders who normally do one-on-one coaching over coffee should transition as seamlessly as possible to remote coaching-coffee and all.

4. Establish a single source of truth

In person, agile team processes are usually informal. Teams make decisions with everyone in the room, so there's not usually much need to record these discussions. In the virtual space, however, people might be absent or distracted, so it's important to document team discussions in a way that can be referenced later.

5. Adjust to asynchronous collaboration

Messaging boards and chats can be useful in coordinating agile teams working remotely. But they should be used carefully, as they can also lead to team members feeling isolated.

6. Adapt a leadership approach

When working with remote teams, leaders need to be deliberate in guiding team members and interacting with external customers and stakeholders. Simply put, they need to show-in tone and approach-that everyone is in this together.

Now that it seems likely that remote work is here to stay, it's all the more important that teams reinforce productivity by purposefully working to sustain an agile culture.
Learn more about McKinsey's People & Organizational Performance Practice.
How can public-sector organizations benefit from agile?

The pandemic era and its attendant sociopolitical and economic crises have placed new pressures on public-sector organizations. In these situations of urgency, agile can help public-sector organizations better serve citizens by being more responsive.

Compared with the private sector, where agile has had a clear impact on the overall health of organizations, the public sector doesn't immediately seem to be a great candidate for agile methodology. Government processes are often slower moving than their private-sector counterparts, and agencies are frequently in competition for funding, which can discourage collaboration. Finally, public-sector organizations are usually hierarchical; agile methodology works best in flat organizational structures.

But according to McKinsey analysis and experience, agile tools can still have an impact on public-sector productivity. As with any agile transformation, the approach should be tailored to each specific department, team, and organization.

Government entities, for example, might focus on short-term, results-driven management styles. OKRs and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are agile concepts that can transform planning and resource allocation for governments. Agencies, for their part, can benefit from increased collaboration and cross-pollination made possible by agile operating models.
For a more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey's People & Organizational Performance Practice. Also check out agile-related job opportunities if you're interested in working at McKinsey. Articles referenced include:

"When things get rocky, practice deliberate calm," November 10, 2022, Jacqueline Brassey and Aaron De Smet

"In pursuit of value-not work," October 24, 2022, Elena Chong, Christopher Handscomb, Tomasz Maj, Rishi Markenday, Leslie Morse, and Dave West

"Why an agile transformation office is your ticket to real and lasting impact," June 30, 2021, Amit Anand, Khushpreet Kaur, Noor Narula, and Belkis Vasquez-McCall

"All in: From recovery to agility at Spark New Zealand," McKinsey Quarterly, June 11, 2019, Simon Moutter, Jolie Hodson, Joe McCollum, David Pralong, Jason Inacio, and Tom Fleming

"Leading agile transformation: The new capabilities leaders need to build 21st-century organizations," October 1, 2018, Aaron De Smet, Michael Lurie, and Andrew St. George

"Agile with a capital 'A': A guide to the principles and pitfalls of agile development," February 12, 2018, Hugo Sarrazin, Belkis Vasquez-McCall, and Simon London

"A business leader's guide to agile," July 25, 2017, Santiago Comella-Dorda, Krish Krishnakanthan, Jeff Maurone, and Gayatri Shenai

"ING's agile transformation," McKinsey Quarterly, January 10, 2017, Peter Jacobs, Bart Schlatmann, and Deepak Mahadevan

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In this McKinsey Explainer, we look into what agile methodology is all about, and how organizations can harness this unique system to achieve real results.

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Quick read - women managers in sport are doing it better 

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Quick read - women managers in sport are doing it better 

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Women sports managers create a far more positive experience for their teams than their male counterparts. Partner Drew Goldstein and colleagues find that women in the sports industry report feeling more supported by women managers than they do by male managers. At the same time, women in sports administration face negative effects in an industry dominated by men, including a lack of opportunities for advancement.

Image description:

A series of bar graphs comparing the responses of women in the sports industry on 5 actions taken by their managers-depending on whether their managers were women or men. Overall, women managers were perceived as more consistent than their male counterparts in providing emotional support, checking in on well-being, ensuring manageable workloads, preventing burnout, and promoting an environment where challenging topics could be discussed.

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To read the report, see "The business of sports and the quest for inclusion for women," April 5, 2023.

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Women sports managers create a far more positive experience for their teams than their male counterparts.

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Sport - is it just about money? A US view 

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Sport - is it just about money? A US view 

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In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing's Molly Liebergall chats with Linda Flanagan, a journalist and former cross-country coach, about her new book, Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids' Sports-And Why It Matters (Penguin Random House, August 2022). K-12 sports in America have transformed from a fun, active, and accessible pastime into a high-stakes, expensive competition, Flanagan says-but it didn't used to be this way. An edited version of the conversation follows.
What went wrong with organized K-12 sports in America, and when?
It all started in roughly the 1970s. We had a terrible recession, high inflation, and as a result, public funding for parks and community programs-including community sports-declined. When that happened, private teams and leagues started to fill the void left by community programs. At the same, Title IX hugely accelerated the number of girls playing sports, so there was a greater demand as well.

The perspective of parents and what they owed their kids also started to shift around the '70s, when American culture moved away from any collective sense of responsibility around rearing kids and toward it being almost entirely the family's responsibility. As a result, parents felt they needed to step up and do everything possible to give their kids every advantage; it's all defined by economic anxiety and concern about the future.

All of these forces converged, along with the greater stakes of college athletics-we all know about college admissions and how crazy that can be-to turn youth sports from primarily community-based, low cost, local, and cheap, into a feast-or-famine situation, where low-income areas have very little while middle-to-upper-income areas have quality programs that are privatized and serious.
How does America's culture of youth sports compare with other countries?
Youth sports in America differ dramatically from youth sports in other parts of the world. In China-and we've seen this in the Olympics-it's a top-down, federal selection of the top athletes. They're plucked out and cultivated-pulled from their families and developed. Obviously, this is very different from how we do it here.

In many developing countries, there aren't any organized youth sports to speak of that are state-run or even private-many youth sports are run by NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], which use it to almost bring up the population. In Europe, youth sports are not school-based, they're community-based. While schools have PE or physical education, they don't have school teams, so sports are community-based, local, and cheap. The emphasis is on developing kids' agility and having fun, and the teams are smaller.

They have a culture that's geared toward children, their development, and their enjoyment of sports, rather than our system, which is based around adults, adult supervision, seriousness, and competition. We have age-group champions for second graders; they certainly don't have any of that in Norway or most of Europe.

Norway is the model we all hold up as the ideal to follow because they have incredible participation rates among kids: 93 percent of kids play sports. They have enormous medal counts at the Olympics, too.[Norway has] a culture that's geared toward children, their development, and their enjoyment of sports, rather than our system, which is based around adults, adult supervision, seriousness, and competition. We have age-group champions for second graders; they certainly don't have any of that in Norway or most of Europe.
How has the commercialization of youth sports affected existing social and economic inequalities?
The bottom line is that household income is the driving factor in who plays and who doesn't play. Data is very hard to come by in youth sports because there's no governmental body that collects it, so the Aspen Institute stepped in. They've studied the participation rates on teams and activity levels of children and matched it with income.

They're directly correlated: in families where household income is less than $25,000, children are three times as likely to be inactive as children in households making over $100,000. Those same low-income families' children are half as likely to be on a team; the money alone is an enormous barrier to entry for low-income families.

A good chunk of parents spend 20 hours per week on their children's sport, which is simply impossible for low-income families. If you're juggling jobs, you can't drive hither and yon on weekends and after school, especially if you have more kids. This is a massive barrier to entry, and as a result, sports have become entirely linked to class.

There's also the time investment that parents are expected or required to make if their kids are going to join these teams. A good chunk of parents spend 20 hours per week on their children's sport, which is simply impossible for low-income families. If you're juggling jobs, you can't drive hither and yon on weekends and after school, especially if you have more kids. This is a massive barrier to entry, and as a result, sports have become entirely linked to class.

The other factor here is that low-income schools don't have sports options in the way middle- and upper-income schools do. At least a third of the lowest-income schools have no school sports at all. It's unavoidable-the link between physical activity and income. Obesity rates are higher among low-income kids and families, and most obese children will remain obese as adults. During the pandemic, the obesity rate went up to 22 percent of kids between the ages of two and 19, which is mind-boggling.
How has the pandemic impacted both organized youth sports and neighborhood free play?
The good news about the pandemic is that it had the effect of pushing kids outside. It returned them to the roots of playing basketball outside and going for runs or rides-if you live in the kind of community where that's possible. I certainly saw it where I live. Bike sales went way up-you couldn't get a bike around here-so that was the good news.

The bad news, as far as sports participation goes, was that both the school teams and the travel teams shut down, at least for a while. Of course, it depended on the state: "blue" states tended to shut down for longer. More recently, there's been a stalling of free play-biking, individual-type sports, or other things you can do outside-and a return to travel and school teams.

There has also been a return to investing in travel teams: more than half of parents are now spending and devoting the same or more time to their kids' sports as they were before the pandemic, but this, again, is class-based. Hispanic and Black families are spending less money and devoting less time to youth sports since the pandemic largely stopped impacting sports participation. We're seeing a return to what we had before the pandemic, with class-based differences being hardened or worsened. As long as the incentives remain as they are, I don't see that changing.
Between extra trainings, off-season teams, top-of-the-line gear, and more, how can parents tune out commercialization and tune in to what their child wants?
I think most parents-at least older parents-would say that one of the hardest things about having kids is keeping perspective. To keep perspective, start by asking yourself some questions to find out whether you have in fact lost it.

If you go to a party, how long does it take you to bring up the fact that your child plays sports? If it's less than five minutes, that's probably not great. Would it be devastating to you if your child quit? That's not great either. It probably means that it's taken on greater importance to you than it should have.

If you go to a party, how long does it take you to bring up the fact that your child plays sports? If it's less than five minutes, that's probably not great. Would it be devastating to you if your child quit? That's not great either. It probably means that it's taken on greater importance to you than it should have.

To keep perspective, if you agree you've lost it, there are various tricks you can use. I encourage you to ask for guidance from older people who have been through this-it's very hard to know what's right when you're in the thick of it. Practice distancing: pretend you're a fly on the wall and observe the situation as if you were an outsider. That might help you see if you're too enmeshed.

Another trick is to practice advising a friend. What would you tell a friend who was in this situation? If they were to say, "Should I miss my mother's 80th birthday in order to take Sally to the lacrosse game on Sunday?" How would you advise the friend?

Also, go forward in time and say, "How will this look in six months? How will this look in six years, or 20 years? How will I view this problem then?" Again, it is incredibly hard to step back and see what's important when you're in the thick of it. One friend, whose three kids were all in sports, said to me, "This town conspires to make you lose perspective." If you understand that going in, it might be a little easier to maintain some distance when you're in the thick of it.
Why should parents skip some of their children's games?
It's important for parents to skip games every now and then, for two reasons. One is it helps parents carve out our own activities and interests so that we're not completely wrapped up in our kids' pursuits. It's also good for kids if you're not there at every game; it's not healthy for children to think that they have to have their parents in the stands or watching in order to compete.

Kids' sports are meant to be for kids. If they can't play when you're not there, there's something unhealthy going on, and I think most parents can probably recognize that. I understand the desire to watch because it's fun when your child is good, it's exciting, and your friends are there. It all feels like fun, but over the long term it's healthier to put a little distance between you and your child's sport-not only for yourself, but for your child.

It's not healthy for children to think that they have to have their parents in the stands or watching in order to compete. Kids' sports are meant to be for kids. If they can't play when you're not there, there's something unhealthy going on, and I think most parents can probably recognize that.

What would you say to a parent who is panicking because their child wants to quit the sport that they have played for years?
I appreciate the challenge it must be for parents whose kids want to quit, especially if they've invested hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in their kids' sports. I appreciate that that must be difficult because it feels like a sunk cost at that point, but kids' sports are for kids, and they need to be the ones making these decisions because they're the ones playing.

The more parents spend on their kids' sports, the less kids like them, and the less they feel an intrinsic desire to play. If they want to quit, it could very well be because they either never liked the sport in the first place and were kind of bamboozled into it or because they've played for so long and have specialized for so many years that they're sick to death of it, in which case I'd just get out of their way, because it's going to happen eventually.

The more parents spend on their kids' sports, the less kids like them, and the less they feel an intrinsic desire to play.

At some point, kids who have been playing sports for too long are going to have to stop playing. If they want to quit when they're in high school, I would get out of the way and invite them to try other activities. There's more to life than sports.
What can managers and business leaders learn from good coaches?
A good coach is a good manager; a good manager is a good coach. The main qualities to demonstrate are strength and warmth. Strength shows players that you know what you're doing, that you're competent, and that you're the right person to follow. Warmth shows that you care about them. If kids or employees feel that you don't care about them, they're going to be less apt to care about you or their job. That is a basic principle.

With coaching, as with being an employer or manager, you have to model what you want to see among your staff. If you come in late every day and then get angry when people turn up 15 minutes after they're supposed to arrive, that sends a terrible message.

A good coach is a good manager; a good manager is a good coach. The main qualities to demonstrate are strength and warmth. Strength shows players that you know what you're doing, that you're competent, and that you're the right person to follow. Warmth shows that you care about them.

As a coach, I couldn't possibly be indifferent to the sport and expect my girls to care about it. You have to care about it yourself. You also have to be scrupulously fair, especially with the top performers, because they're the ones for whom-certainly in athletics-it's easy for coaches to look the other way if they violate a rule. There's nothing more undermining of team unity than that kind of uneven application of the rules.

I also think we need to meet them where they are. Sometimes coaches get teams that aren't full of naturally talented kids-they're beginners and not the star team you might've hoped for. You have to meet them where they are, and likewise with managers. Maybe this wasn't the hire you wanted; maybe you inherited these employees; you have to meet them where they are and do the best you can with who you have, not who you wish you had.

Finally, I think it's very tempting as a coach to celebrate the successes of the most talented people-the one who scored the goal or ran the fastest. Likewise in business, it's tempting to celebrate the most successful performers, but if you want to have a team that works together-that has a common goal and purpose and is united-you have to recognize everyone's contribution, including the slowest kid on the team in running, or the one who's the reluctant scorer. Everyone needs to be recognized for their contribution and celebrated.
What surprised you most in your research or writing process?
There's a lot that surprised me. One thing is the unanimity among researchers, especially in the medical community, about how terrible all of this is for kids. My interest in the subject came from my own hunch about what was happening, and then when I explored it and talked to doctors and researchers, I found that it's pretty unanimous: the way we're running youth sports is bad for kids and not great for families.

Specialization may result in some kind of honey pot in college down the road, but in the short term, and even for kids' long-term health, it is not great. I was very surprised at the unanimity among the medical community. I was also surprised by the results of one study, which looked at Division I athletes-the most vaunted athletes in college.

Specialization may result in some kind of honey pot in college down the road, but in the short term, and even for kids' long-term health, it is not great. I was very surprised at the unanimity among the medical community.

The research team found that later in life, those players were less active, had worse moods, worse physical functioning, and less social satisfaction than their contemporaries in college who hadn't played a varsity sport. It really gave me pause. What is this about college sports? Why are we celebrating them so much when it's not necessarily great for those young people down the road when they're adults? Those were just two things that surprised me, but there were plenty of surprises along the way.

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Author Talks: It's time to make youth sports about kids again

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In an interview about her new book, "Take Back the Game," Linda Flanagan pulls back the curtain on youth sports in America, revealing a money-centric system rife with barriers for low-income players.

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In 2018, Scrum.org and McKinsey started collaborating around a shared purpose: to help companies innovate how their organizations, teams, and individuals work. In this article, the latest in a series of research and insight papers, we examine the differences between doing work and creating value in an agile context. The findings here are based on interviews with agile practitioners across the Scrum.org community.
How valuable is the work you do? The productivity gains realized from moving to agile have felt great for teams, but are they seeing better customer outcomes and organizational performance from the adoption of agile?

Agile and scrum have never been more widely adopted and these methods are delivering results across many performance measures. For example, in our McKinsey Global Survey of 2,190 participants, highly successful agile transformations were shown to result in a 30 percent increase in customer satisfaction and operational decision making, while the speed of decision making increased by five- to tenfold.

Agile approaches ensure continuous improvement and make clear for the team the tasks to be completed clear through a daily and weekly cadence. They also allow for opportunities to reflect and improve on how the work gets done. But here's the rub: teams that adopt agile often do so with an industrial mindset, focused not on value but on work. When done right, agile can unlock the power of bottom-up intelligence, innovation, and highly motivated teams that own not only the work but, more important, the outcome that work creates.

Often in agile teams, there is attention on completing work to the detriment of a focus on creating value. There are several symptoms of this overemphasis on work at the expense of value. First, sprint or product backlogs include tasks, and status is measured through task completion. Second, efficiency is seen as more important than outcomes with a focus on velocity-which results in the primary aim of sprint planning to fill team capacity for the two-week period. Third, customers are not connected to teams-most team members don't talk to customers, and customers are rarely present at sprint reviews. Fourth, outcomes are not measured, so there is no clear, measurable definition of success beyond the velocity of the work completed. Producing things faster is the aim, rather than aiming for defined outcomes.

We take the idea of value as being commercial market value (see, for example, " The Liberators" and its piece on value). There are other kinds of value, however (for example, efficiency, customer, future). For market value, a product's success is measured by the number of potential users and customers who are aware of it. Invariably, product development involves efforts to increase this awareness, to move into new markets, or to distinguish from competing products. This work creates market value. Given the potential impact on organizational performance for those able to implement successful agile transformations, organizations should be highly motivated to move beyond a focus on work to a focus on value (see sidebar, "What is value versus work?").

Organizations are waking up to value focus

Organizations are increasingly adopting objectives and key results (OKR) as part of their agile transformations, thereby ensuring that success is well defined (the O in OKRs), understood by the whole team, and measurable. This is emerging as one key component to get teams to focus on value.

Further, there continues to be growing interest in lean user experience and design thinking. Combining these approaches with agile helps to ensure a focus on the end user. A number of recent academic articles explore this topic. Our review of recent academic literature suggests that more than 90 percent of organizations are practicing agile.

An adoption of agile practices should, according to a recent McKinsey survey, correspond to a 30 percent increase in customer satisfaction. But we aren't seeing more than 90 percent of companies getting those returns. Our fundamental view is that many organizations using agile are ultimately doing so to deliver work and not value.

The 2020 update of the Scrum guide also made value more explicit. With a focus on value, the guide now includes a new commitment to the product backlog that provides a description of the product goal. The aim was to move away from the idea that the product backlog is an ordered backlog of work where product backlog items are tasks that the team diligently works through. Teams are now more clearly invited to write each backlog item so that it describes a defined product goal. This makes it easier for teams to be self-managing and innovative. More important, it also brings greater focus and clarity to the outcomes and value that teams are creating.

With this reemphasis on value, there are four key missed opportunities that companies can take to shift their focus from productivity to value.

1. Management treats agile teams like cogs in a machine without empowering them to focus on value

The opportunity

There is a systemic leadership gap in defining business problems, setting a vision, and positioning a mission in the context of value. For some managers, agile represents an opportunity to return to a time-and-motion approach to work. But this builds on the knowledge of 19th-century mechanical engineer Frederick Taylor: managers are willing to let agile teams decide how they work but not willing to let go of control to enable teams to optimize the value of what they work on and when.

"Customer value is business value, but many teams focus on output, shipping something, getting a new feature out. They do not engage with the customer enough. They do not experiment with the customer and deliver real learning about what the customer values or not." -Jeff Gothelf, author, Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams

In our global survey of 93 agile practitioners, 48 percent of respondents agree that in their organization, their team's purpose is handed down to them; they have no say in it. And 44 percent of respondents disagree that team members are empowered to challenge organizational goals. In addition, in the crucial area of budgeting, 65 percent of respondents disagree that their organizations' budgeting processes are transparent and that a typical team understands how the budgeting process might affect them.

"While I am a coach, and I admire good coaches, agile coaches often frustrate me. They're often uncomfortable with value metrics and focus on team harmony and culture while underemphasizing business impact. Culture, harmony, and safety are all important, but delivering value is existential. Unless teams deliver measurable business outcomes, harmony is irrelevant and safety is an illusion for the teams and everyone in the business." -Evan Campbell, chief transformation architect, Gtmhub

The solution

This is about giving teams greater agency and empowering them to make their own decisions. There are three steps:

Make the organizations' strategic plans transparent to scrum teams so they can better understand the purpose behind their efforts and how their work fits in.

Empower product owners to make budgetary decisions.

Empower developers to make design, architecture, and delivery decisions.

A large consumer-packaged-goods organization needed to deliver a next-generation product to market in an aggressive time frame. Senior leadership tried the "Tayloristic" model of dividing this large body of work into smaller teams, each of which didn't see the entire picture and were not empowered to make decisions without running it by a central steering committee (composed primarily of senior leaders).

After a few months, management realized the product launch was going nowhere. So they pushed all decision making (including financial, architecture, and delivery) to their agile teams, providing a clear vision of the customer outcomes they expected to change. They also provided guardrails, such as releasing a product to a customer every few weeks and getting their feedback. Additionally, management encouraged the teams to challenge the status quo and aggressively solved for organizational inefficiencies that this way of working made transparent. The result was one of their best products. It was released in record time by five teams of excited, motivated people who felt they had made a difference.

2. Work is prioritized by the size of the task and team capacity; the team itself is not focused on or measuring value metrics

The opportunity

Teams are not focused enough on creating value, as they don't have a sufficient understanding of the metrics that define success. It is often easier to "fill the hopper" and have the team start working on tasks that take them to capacity than to reflect on what creates value.

In our global survey, 46 percent of respondents agree or strongly agree that during sprint planning, their teams ensure that everyone is fully utilized, with only 25 percent disagreeing. Moreover, teams habitually define success or feel accountable in terms of activity and delivery as opposed to-or in preference to-outcomes and value. There is insufficient time spent on defining goals for the team, who the end customer is, and what purpose the work of the team is serving.

"Many of the executives I talk to focus on team efficiency and ask me to put in metrics that highlight waste and when people are not utilized to 100 percent. The reality is that by focusing on everyone being busy, they remove the opportunity for working together to deliver great customer outcomes. And when the team realizes that at a review, it is often too late." -Daniel Vacanti, cofounder, ProKanban.org

The solution

This is about defining success not in terms of activity but in terms of value. Get your teams to think more about value. There are three key elements:

The product owner should work with management to define success clearly, including measurable metrics with targets that correspond to what customers value.

Spend time and effort to create a baseline of these metric. This won't be easy but is the only way to understand whether the team is having the desired impact on outcomes versus outputs.

Celebrate impact on those metrics as a success instead of only completion of a to-do item that kept everyone busy-100 percent utilization is not a good sign.

A European telecommunications company had a prepaid-mobile team that was focused on creating new and elaborate offers for their current and future clients, yet they never actually checked to see whether the customers were happy. They quickly realized they were losing customers (the number of active prepaid mobile cards was dropping) and furthermore, they learned they had the lowest customer satisfaction score in the market.

Every two-week sprint, they sought to improve at least one thing that was adversely affecting their internal and external customers; they started measuring what really mattered (in this case, the number of active cards and their relative value) and they looked into internal customer satisfaction scores of call-center employees, as well as the number of calls about their product. All these changes helped them go from position four to position one in their customer satisfaction score, and they realized that their clients wanted one simple offer, not many different ones.

3. Agile coaching is biased toward enabling scrum done right at the expense of value delivered well

The opportunity

While agile coaching is essential for the establishment and smooth running of agile practices according to agile principles, it can focus too much on getting the process right to the detriment of the focus on value. Similarly, scrum masters tend to focus on velocity and speed of decision making to the detriment of making value-based decisions.

In our survey, 54 percent of respondents say their typical scrum master or agile coach spends significant time helping teams do agile "the right way" as opposed to engaging teams in ways that enable them to build "the right thing." An example of this thinking is a blame game; we often hear, "My team delivered everything they could, but the product can't be released to production, because the design team, the data team, the testing team, the other development team, the legal team, and the controlling team didn't do their part. But my team is perfect."

"Agile coaches frustrate me. They do not dig metrics and rather focus on the team harmony. Team harmony is important but in the context of delivering value. They need to work with the business to drive harmony while delivering real outcomes." -Evan Campbell, Gtmhub

The solution

This is about scrum masters and agile coaches recognizing and using the already strong correlation between organizational alignment, team empowerment, and the team's understanding of value that we found in our survey.

There are two key components:

More than 70 percent of our survey respondents agree that agile coaching helps them gain value from transparency, inspection, and adaptation (empirical process control).

While agile coaching should help the team understand value directly (for example, by having them focus on the success metrics described above), it can also help to pay attention to broader organizational alignment and transparency that then lead to value.

Our survey also shows the link between agile coaching and alignment and empowerment of the organization. These, in turn, demonstrate that they are correlated with an understanding of value, implying that agile coaching that targets organizational alignment may positively "move the needle" on value.

A Japanese pharmaceutical company saw the effects of this firsthand when its agile coaches and scrum masters focused an inordinate amount of time trying to get scrum right. They mistakenly assumed that some common practices in the industry, such as applying user stories and story points, were required scrum practices. However, when they spent time removing these complementary practices-along with several layers of people who acted as proxies between users and engineers-the notion of value became more transparent to their engineers.

Scrum masters and agile coaches started changing their viewpoint, collaborating more with their teams to establish basic customer personas and impact maps for the primary users and customers of their product. They worked through the network of proxies in the organization to bring their teams closer to the customers they defined. This resulted in a profoundly different level of drive from their teams.

The teams, which could get firsthand information about how their users and customers were affected, could autonomously and effectively determine why, what, and how to work every sprint. Removing the network of proxies resulted in better team empowerment, and making customer impact transparent resulted in better alignment with organizational goals. Overall, this resulted in effective value being delivered every sprint.

4. The whole team isn't engaging with customers enough

The opportunity

Often, the agile team-and, more important, the product owner-are isolated and prevented (by structure, process, or culture) from actually interacting with customers. They become-and feel-like a cog in a machine, unable to engage with the outside world. The product owner turns out to be a poor (but necessary) proxy for interacting frequently with customers. Equally, team colleagues might not want to initiate and maintain relationships with customers, because it is stressful and requires them to leave their work bubble.

This can become culturally embedded within an organization. Many businesses think that they know best and don't want to engage with customers, preferring to broadcast rather than to listen: "We just need to tell them what's right." This might be true, but continued dialogue can help to smooth the transition of the product and also create advocates to whom other customers can relate.

"I hear from my team that they do not need to talk to customers. That they know best. But from my experience, they need to ask better questions. There is always something to learn when you get a customer in the room, and you are listening to them rather than telling them." -A senior IT leader at a financial-services company

It's common in many organizations to assume that a product owner is the only one who is supposed to talk to customers; they represent the voice of the customer. Unfortunately, this assumption is another common misunderstanding of both product owner and scrum team accountabilities. The primary accountability of a product owner is to bring transparency to the notion of value and to the bets made in pursuit of that value, through a product backlog and a product goal.

More broadly, a lack of customer interaction means the team is blind to understanding how to create value for the customer; there is often a culture of giving stakeholders a perfect solution and then refining or polishing it further. This approach reduces the opportunities to course correct based on early customer feedback.

The solution

This is about listening widely, deeply, and carefully to customers and finding the right formal way to do this. There are two key stages:

Mandate that each sprint review has a customer representative. If the team can't get access to someone to represent the customer, then question the value this work provides and how you can better serve the customer. What review meetings would they attend?

Ask the team to engage with customers during the sprint-ask them questions! Access to customers and other stakeholders is not owned by managers. Everyone in an agile team should be able to have time with customers or people who represent them.

A large technology company was moving to a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. It was well known that salespeople used the current system only just before quarterly business reviews and that the real customer data was held by each salesperson. This was diminishing the team's ability to treat customers well. The company was large, complex, and had many different needs placed on this customer data.

The traditional approach was to embark on a massive requirements exercise, to talk to every stakeholder, and to build a huge and complex CRM system. Instead, they decided to engage a small representative group of salespeople up front, focusing on their needs to get the data in. They also introduced an incremental approach to delivery, giving these salespeople access and seeing if it worked for them. Slowly, they built the CRM system, engaging more salespeople and making them feel that they owned the CRM system.

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Are you working for work's sake or creating value?