During an Agile transformation, the strategy applied about how new practices should be introduced, either top-down “push”-based or team-driven “pull”-based change, will lead to very different outcomes. These two approaches have different impacts on people, teams, and the overall system of work.
Push-based change happens when a practice or framework is mandated from above, by a centralized group, a team’s manager, or external consultants. Push-based change is a structured process to achieve a designed target state. It relies on a sequence of steps including selecting practice, change management, communication, rollout, training, and reporting.
Pull-based change is more of an organizational capability. It’s a type of self-organization where a team identifies a challenge and pulls in a practice or a new way of working to solve it. Instead of depending on activities, pull-based change requires certain capabilities: team agency, autonomy, culture, the permission to adjust processes, the ability to adapt internal roles and responsibilities, the ability to diagnose challenges and co-create solutions, and the data to measure outcomes.
Problems Come from Push
Pushing a practice onto a team bypasses the team’s own problem-solving process. With push-based change, the team becomes the object of the change, while management acts as the subject, the ones making the decisions.
When companies pursue push-based change, “practice compliance” becomes some part of the system. If results don’t improve, the conversation shifts to whether teams are following the process correctly, rather than on whether the processes were appropriate in the first place. Sometimes processes can be inappropriate for a particular context, and other times processes miss addressing the real cause of performance issues.
When process adherence becomes a goal, it takes focus away from the value that the practice was supposed to deliver.
With push-based change, the tool becomes the goal.
Pull-based change avoids this goal-seeking behaviour. Because pull-based change relies on empowered, self-organizing teams, it eliminates the need to track practice adoption and micro-manage. Pull-based change is a more focused approach that starts by asking “What’s happening now?” and focusing on how teams can better achieve their goals.
Pulling the Next Best Step
Teams shouldn’t be expected to solve complex problems perfectly on the first try. Pull-based change doesn’t just mean giving teams the responsibility to solve a problem, it also requires building a continuous improvement culture where teams can:
- Identify a challenge.
- Formulate a working theory.
- Run a small experiment.
- Gather feedback.
- Learn and adjust their approach.
Pull-based change is better aligned with Agile principles. Rather than trying to get it right the first time, pull is more incremental and iterative. This ongoing process creates more ownership, motivation, and trust.
Pulling Change is a Cultural Capability
Teams can’t be told to do pull-based change; it’s not a decision management can make. Pulling change is a capability that requires the right culture, leadership, organizational support and environment to succeed:
- Trust from Managers: Managers set boundaries and trust their teams with the autonomy to design their own ways of working.
- Psychological Safety: Teams can openly discuss their challenges, bottlenecks, expose knowledge gaps, and propose new ways of working.
- Flexible Roles: Teams can adjust who does what and roles and responsibilities to accommodate new ways of working.
- Clear Goals and Data: Teams and managers are aligned on their goals and outcomes. Teams have the information they need to understand whether their changes are working.
Another requirement for pull-based change is a safe-to-fail culture. If a team’s change fails to deliver the expected results, the team needs to know that management won’t come in and take over.
Conclusion
“True agility means that teams are constantly working to evolve their processes to deal with the particular obstacles they are facing at any given time.” — Lean Enterprise
Upfront, both approaches to change have their own challenges.
Pull-based change requires building the organizational maturity to enable pull-based change, trust, creating a continuous improvement culture and nurturing psychological safety.
Push-based change requires selecting the right process, designing new systems, new teams, doing change management, rollout planning, communication, training, and reporting.
