This is a great story from Todd Kromann, Agile Coach at Walmart, and part of my contribution to BOSSA Nova: Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy, by Jutta Eckstein and John Buck.
A tiny cohort of four agile coaches was able to invite thousands of IT employees and contractors at Walmart to shift the organization’s work from 10% agile to 90% agile in less than two years. We simply invited the people doing the work into Open Space, in more than 30 one-day events, hundreds at a time.
We didn’t impose a methodology, a tool or a metric. We offered invitation, autonomy, and options. We asked everyone to find ways to make their work more agile. That was the purpose and all the ideas went up on the wall, completely open and transparent. As the work took off, “Agile Champions” helped the four coaches spread the invitation and the results.
Formally, the business adopted agile concepts such as founder’s mentality, design thinking and Team of Teams. These were promoted from the CEO level and the IT coaches had little involvement. Walmart has several agile ‘thought leaders’ on it’s board of directors and they contributed to the net effect.
Because this was very open, the story is hard to define. The scope could be as low as 4000 or into the 10’s of thousands depending on who you ask. The Bentonville business depart- ments were included (it was open) and business folks usually opted to attend.
Today, I get reference checks for Agile coaches from Walmart, and these are often people I’ve never met. Any of our cham- pions claim that title. I think that’s a side effect of an open transformation. So, the concept of 4 coaches is only correct in the narrow sense of 4 people whose full time job was coaching. By the end we scaled up to 6 full time coaches in Bentonville and perhaps a dozen worldwide. This was federated so, again, it’s hard to define.
While the numbers are hard to pin down, the net effect is not. We are now 100% agile in that it’s more awkward to opt out than to opt in. We no longer have any Agile coaches. If you ask anyone at Walmart how we became agile, they will likely say they did it by themselves 😉 An open transformation is like an avalanche. It just takes a few snowballs and after that, it’s chaos.