We human beings are susceptible to the pervasive and rampant «illness»: «Overreactionitis». At the first sign of problems like delays on a project, discrepancies in the budget or customer complaints we respond with overreactionitis. This describes an overhasty and for outsiders often seemingly headless fire-drill of an organisation. Overreactionitis will lead to apparent short term achievements at best, but hardly ever to sustainable results, since the described incidents only show the symptoms of the problem – and not its cause. The underlying cause of the problem remains unclear and cannot satisfyingly be solved with Overreactionitis; in most cases it even aggravates.
How can you identify the real cause? We still recommend the good old formula: keep cool, stay warm-hearted and be proactive. This gives us the best premise to get to the cause and root of the problem with 5-Why-Questions.
An example from our experience: we were able to show the upper management of a financial service firm through our Agile Organisation Assessment , that the flood tide of emails and meetings everyone was complaining about were really just symptoms. The real cause was nested in the organisation: each department head was given goals, that conflicted each other in interdepartmental projects. The meetings and emails were merely ineffectual attempts of employees to solve these clash of goals.
This is why we recommend to begin an Agile Transformation Project with the Agile Organisation Assessment. It helps us to differentiate between symptoms and their underlying cause to work with you on finding the right steps to a sustainable solution. Please contact me if you wish to learn more about this subject.
