This is Johanna Rothman's November 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.
I've been working with Stephanie, a senior leader who's trying to nudge her organization to more organizational agility. Not because agility is so “good,” but because they want to quickly launch new products and new versions of existing products. They think these products will allow them to capture new customer segments. And, they want to avoid losing their current revenue streams. All of this effort requires innovation and collaboration, both in teams and across teams.
That's the culture change required for any kind of agility. Stephanie realized she had to invite everyone to change.
Instead of trying to plan “everything” as in a roadmap, they're creating team-based experiments and reviewing the results as they proceed. That's why they're using Deming's Plan-Do-Study-Act, as in the image above. And since all of their products are software, they can create multiple experiments and study the results of each. Every experiment means they can replan and create more experiments.
They have never tried this much innovation before. However, their old idea of “plan the strategy with long roadmaps” failed, for the fifth time in just four years. Instead of pretending to “know” their product strategies, they expect to change each product's strategy as soon as they know the result of each experiment.
So far, Stephanie has succeeded in these ways:
- The managers have a single overarching goal. That goal is to fulfill the organization's strategy. That means they can work as a collaborative cohort. They have already reduced the time it takes for them to make decisions about the project portfolio and all the product strategies. (Read more in How to See the Blind Spots That Maintain the Current System, Useful or Useless.)
- Because the managers collaborate, their team members collaborate. Even better, every team member collaborates and optimizes “up” to fulfill their product strategy, not a specific manager's goal.
- All that collaboration means everyone has reduced their WIP, decreased their cycle time, and increased throughput. (See Flow Metrics and Why They Matter to Teams and Managers.)
The employees feel more ease and excitement as they work. The customers are ecstatic—no one is pushing to see a roadmap because the organization continues to innovate quickly. And the senior leaders are seeing some validation for their overall strategy. But the middle managers? Some of them are having a little trouble.
Middle Managers Feel Adrift
Some of the middle managers are uneasy. They can't argue with results—Stephanie's ideas are working. But these middle managers cannot use their previous measures based on resource-efficiency thinking. Instead, the managers have to use their empirical data based on flow efficiency and trust the teams to deliver.
There's no point in asking anyone about velocity because the teams measure their cycle time. Worse, the teams don't even estimate in a way these middle managers understand. Instead of considering a given story's duration, the teams eyeball each story and ask if it looks like the right size, where the team can finish the work in a day or so.
Many of these managers want to support this organizational agility effort. They can see that the teams are working better. But they are nervous. Mostly because these managers don't know why their old metrics are “wrong” and the new metrics are “right.”
It's not a function of “wrong” or “right.” Instead, it's about the story the metrics—and the employees and customers tell.
With that, I will leave you with a small cliffhanger. I'll send the rest of the story in Part 2.
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See you next month,
Johanna
© 2025 Johanna Rothman
Pragmatic Manager: Vol 22, #11, ISSN: 2164-1196