Pitching the Agile Mindset to Stakeholders

TL;DR: The Big Picture of Agile
Let’s face it: While your enthusiasm for the big picture of agile practices is admirable, your stakeholders will most likely be moved by one thought only at the beginning of the transition: “What’s in for me? How will I now have my requirements delivered?”.
Read on and learn about one way how to kick-off the transition to a learning organization by pitching a simplified version the big picture of agile practices to your stakeholders first.
There Is Just One Spotify
Being a part of the team that builds and scales an organization from scratch over several years is rare privilege. Ben Linders pointed out recently that There Is No Spotify Model, and that you „shouldn’t copy it in your own organization“.
According to Henrik Kniberg, scaling Spotify…
…wasn’t a big re-make, more like a continuous stream of small iterative improvements to our organization and process. We have been growing for three years, and the way we work today has evolved naturally over time.
(Note: He is talking about an organization that has been carrying an agile mindset in its DNA from the start.)
You—on the other side—are more likely to be a member of a corporation that decided to become more agile to improve its standing in the innovation game. (Remember Marc Andreessen’s “Why Software Is Eating the World”?)
In your case, there is an established organization with its own flavor of structural particularities. There are hierarchies, there is politics and probably one form or another of silo thinking, or local optimization attempts. And cross-departmental communication has long been an issue.
There are likely people who will lose with the move to an agile organization. An organization that is build on top of formulating hypotheses, and running experiments. An organization that embraces failure, self-organization, and the acceptance of accountability. (To my experience, command