McKinsey’s agile advice is fallacious, self serving bull

If you are one of the tens of thousands of experienced agile coaches on the market you should know that McKinsey is telling CEO’s not to hire you. In a recent article, McKinsey told executives that there are no good agile coaches in the market. They said that the agile coaches available are dogmatic and won’t fit your organisation culture. The only solution is to hire McKinsey to set up an agile coaching academy that turns staff with zero agile experience into expert coaches in 12 weeks.

“outsourcing these key roles will often lead to an influx of agility coaches who are disconnected from a company’s culture and want to dogmatically apply agile the way they know it rather than the way it needs to be molded to a particular organization.” McKinsey, Growing your own agility coaches

The solution to this “war for talent” is to pay McKinsey many millions to build an agility coaching academy for you which takes hundreds of staff with zero agile experience and turns them into expert agility coaches, product owners and agility leaders in 12 weeks. They saw a large Bank and Telco do this so now they are experts in it.

McKinsey’s argument is logically fallacious, self-serving bull.

How can there be no good agile coaches when there are a million+ people with a formal agile certification from one of the reputable agile certification bodies? Surely a lot of them must have hands-on experience coaching an agile team.

How can it be wrong to bring in agile people with a different culture when an agile transformation requires a change in the organisations’ culture?

How can McKinsey consultants provide useful advice on selecting agile coaches when they have very little practical experience in agile teams?

How can you create expert agile coaches in 12 weeks when it takes years of practical team experience?

How can the tens of thousands of people who joined the Agile Alliance which says that agile is a mindset with no place for dogma, be dogmatic?

“Agile is a mindset informed by the values contained in the Agile Manifesto and the 12 Principles behind the Agile Manifesto.” Agile 101, the Agile Alliance

“There is no place for dogma and one-size-fits-all thinking.” Enterprise Agile Transformation, Agile Alliance

As consultants like to say, McKinsey is on the right road but going in the wrong direction. Michael Kusters wrote a more detailed shredding of McKinseys argument in “Agile Academy — McKinsey, you get it all wrong!”