On certifications

I hear a lot of criticism of individuals who share the fact they have completed a course with a certificate on social media, especially on LinkedIn. And, as you know me :), I am blogging about it as I think this criticism misses the point. Certifications can be valuable, no need to hate those, it's better to understand the context.

One cannot stop people from being proud of making a step ahead to being closer to what they identify with. And there is nothing wrong with it - each of us wants to fulfil herself / himself in life and this is only possible to achieve if one understands her/his identity first. It is for a reason the Identity level is high in the Dilts pyramid. Plus I cannot imagine hard work and breaking personal barriers without celebration!  

Having said that, it is a completely separate matter how their identity expresses itself on the level of capabilities and behaviours in reality of a specific work environment. So one cannot hire people based on their identity, but based on their skills, behaviours in a specific environment. It is a mutual responsibility of both a recruiter and a candidate to understand the match on all levels, before committing. (Well, one can also run a test for a couple of months and decide based on evidence and experience).

And finally, yes - many people believe that the route to mastery leads through certifications. And Imho these two are related to some extent. My belief is rooted in the Shu-Ha-Ri development model. And this is why I'd advice everyone interested in taking courses to look for ones that are led by practitioners who have hands-on experience vs theorists (unless you strive to become a theorist). Even more I'd encourage to replace courses with learning through work in a natural setup as courses pull people out of their natural environment into an artificial environment. So invite your guru and work with her/him in your work environment.

On the matter of organizational and human limits

In my experience companies, teams and individuals very rarely exhaust the full potential of a particular method or a particular approach - what they keep reaching much more often and much earlier is the limits of will. This is where enrolment breaks down and people disconnect. As the proverb says: "Do not tell me it cannot be done, admit it straight away that you do not want to do it".Where there is will, people will find a way. No need to worry about a method. Just focus on your goal. This will free you from the strongest limits of all - the internal barriers you got used to believe in.

And when it comes to methods the rule of thumb remains unchanged - choose the right method for the situation at hand. One does not caress her cat with a chain saw... (well, unless it is Stephen King's novel...)

The Lifecycle of Ideas

Everything in this universe has its lifecycle. Stars, planets, ecosystems, animals, companies, etc. No surprise that the same applies to Ideas.

How many times you saw people hyped up by some new cool idea or technology? And then you saw some of them disappointed to an extent that the idea or the technology was not a silver bullet? And then you saw people trying to accommodate it and get the best of it? And finally you saw the idea or the technology growing mature enough to enter the commodity phase.

According to the Gartner's research the adoption lifecycle of a new technology follows a specific pattern called the hype cycle. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle. Looking at this model I am tempted to apply it to lifecycle of new ideas. I will describe how both the understanding of applications builds up as well as will point out how individuals of different PST personal profiles find their natural comfort zones in this proces.

When it comes to new ideas, the Peak of Inflated Expectations phase is a "religious phase"- when people's minds get inspired and in the absence of direct experience, are driven by beliefs rather than factual evidence and fed with buzzwords. This phase is necessary for an idea to spread - people adopt new ideas on the Why level. This is a phase for entrepreneurs, leaders and generally people with the Pioneer profiles, aka early adopters.

The Trough of Disillusionment and Slope of Enlightenment are the phases where individuals with Settlers profiles try to apply the new idea into various areas in which the idea promises some kind of pain relief and/or improvement and/or breakthrough / disruption. This is where high hopes are validated, lessons learnt through applications and general body of experience is gathered and cross-pollinated widely. The "WHAT is possible" and "HOW to add value" questions are answered in practice.

And finally, when an idea flows through the hype cycle to reach Plateau of Productivity beliefs and expectations are replaced with direct exposure and physical experience. Some hopes die out, the scope of applications of the idea finds its natural horizon. This is where broad population of people understands the value of an idea, its practical applications and how to best utilize it, including the necessary tooling and specialized infrastructure to utilize it. In fact the Idea is no longer just an Idea - specific Artefacts have flourished from the Idea and entered their Wardley's lifecycle from Genesis to Commodity. It is definitely a place for people with Town Builder profiles to shine. And also a place where the world is ready for birth new ideas...! :)

Bonus thoughts ;)

1. Victor Hugo: Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. 

2. One needs to take into account the environment in which an Idea was born. There are usually forces in the environment trying to maintain the existing status quo.

3. Since this is a blog about personal integrity and evolution of workplace, its natural to reflect on state of the major ideas of the recent decades: Agile (Schwaber at all), Spiral Dynamics (Beck) and Reinventing Organizations (Laloux). How would you describe maturity of these three big ideas at the dawn of 2020s? 

p.s. Hint: To find out my personal thoughts check out the Workplace section of this blog and also on the resonate website.

Interview: What's on a mind of a Systemic Coach - Michelangelo Canonico

"Agile movement is in a confusion. We need to stop trying to change the world using the magic word of "agile". Step back, seek for renewal, open up the doors for other notions."

I had a really good time conducting the interview. It was designed to be a surprise interview to catch the instinct responses and for the interview to be as realistic and natural as possible. 

In this interview Michelangelo Canonico shares his personal experience with Agility, transformational engagements, systemic coaching, and even about constellations!

What's On a Mind of... a Business Strategist - Interview with Chris Daniel

The interview with Chris Daniel was conducted remotely by Piotr Trojanowski, on Aug 31st 2020. 

Part I: ON MY STYLE

What is the source of your satisfaction when coaching organisations?

Breaking status-quo. 

People do not call me when things are going smoothly for them, but rather when they face an obstacle that they are not sure how to cope with. I augment their knowledge of the field with Wardley Mapping, and they learn how to verbalise their strategy concerns and ideas which they already knew but could not efficiently express. Once that happens, once I see first complicated matters discussed, I feel content and my job is nearly done.  

How do you typically start your engagements?

It is usually an introductory call when we together try to identify the area which we will work on. It may be a problematic outsourcing contract, disrupting competition or internal inefficiency. This is a starting point after which we assemble a team that will work on the challenge. Those two steps, in my eyes, decide about 80% of the value the customer gets. 

On which aspects do you usually focus on first?

In the world of Wardley Mapping, we call it Landscape. Those are all those things that are around your organisation that influence it but you cannot change them (regulatory requirements, customers, shareholders, competition, providers). If you add forces that influence the Landscape, you get a pretty good understanding of the context of the work that you are supposed to do, and better alignment. 

How do you recognise the impact?

I could say that as a result of my work, important projects are launched or cancelled or money are spent or saved, but the reality is that you never know (nor can you know) what impact can be attributed directly to you, especially that you never get a chance to compare with alternative versions of reality.

I do my job in the best way I can. And I am ready to say I was wrong, I assume I am wrong, and if even with that assumption customers are willing to act in the way Wardley Mapping tells them, the situation can get only better.

What is the toughest issue for organisations to change?

Organisational knowledge. Organisations learn just like humans. 

They store knowledge in the form of processes, procedures and policies. Once such a thing is approved, and once people change jobs, we have policies that may or may not be relevant for a current situation, and nobody knows what the case is.

Managers avoid breaking stuff, so those artefacts sometimes live for decades unchallenged.

Please share a story from your experience

Anonymised answer because of NDA:

I was helping a customer who was pushed by the provider to migrate a particular solution to the cloud. The customer was not sure whether the migrations was a win-win movement, they suspected it was a move that helped the provider only, especially given earlier experiences they had with the provider.

After a not-so-long analysis, the customer figured out that:

(1) they did not trust the provider to meet SLAs during and after the migration. The impact on the customer would be unacceptable.

(2) the migration could be a win-win move.

(3) There was no action that could change the situation without inducing too much risk.

(4) Not changing anything was safe for the organisation.

(5) Other opportunities were more interesting.

Sometimes, this is perhaps the toughest conclusion - there is not much that can be done, so it is better to focus on things that you can change. This customer had plenty of other opportunities, the one that was analysed looked important, but it was not.

I found it to be an act of courage, and I have seen similar situations resolved without taking any actions. Waiting is an action, too.

Part II: DOMAIN OF BUSINESS STRATEGY

How would you explain what Business Strategy is?

The Business Strategy, for me, is about continuous learning what is your current situation, what resources you have available, what opportunities do you face, and in which direction you should move, all of that, of course, with a great degree of uncertainty.

What is the relation between a Strategy and Risk Management?

This requires a short introduction to Taleb works - peolpe in general (including risk specialists) put too much focus on Gaussian distributions. Real life risks are far less predictable than many of us think, and this is the reson why many risk management frameworks give us sense of protection without doing much. But if you accept our limits in how we measure and quantify risk, you get a pretty holistic framework that does not differentiates between Risk & Strategy. They are the same, because you can define a risk called 'Strategic Failure' and derive your entire strategy from it.

What is the race as of today in the field of Business Strategy? Is it about who will make it to the 1% of the population that will join the Space colonisation vs those 99% who will not?

My this year's challenge is to focus only on things that I can change. The race, its fairness, prize & winners do not fall into this category, so I am afraid I will not answer this one.

How can one be a follower of the 3 Big leaders at the same time? I mean Dave Snowden, Simon Wardley, Nassib Taleb? 

I do not want to diminish the work of any person from the Big 3, and while I do appreciate their different attitudes, I think they are very convergent in their thinking. Moreover, to me things that they differ are the source of complementarity between them rather than conflicting them. I guess I should play the question back: "How can you follow only one"?

What is the hygiene level in the Business Strategy that all companies simply must obey?

Know your customers, who they are and why they are using your products and services. And I mean a true "why", not because of "we are the best". This is an entry point that allows you to think about how your customers may change over the years, pick up subtle change indicators and prepare accordingly. 

What is the delight level in the Business Strategy that all companies should aspire to? 

We have just started our adventure in Business Strategies and Situational Awareness, so many years may pass until we learn what the ideal is.

In other words, I have no idea, but I can only imagine that experimenting more seems like an excellent direction to explore. 

Part III: THE JOURNEY

When you take a retrospective look at the last decade of the Business Strategy field - what outcomes are most valuable in your opinions?

This is something vaguely defined as the position - how well is company positioned to exploit current market opportunities and how well can it spot and transition to other fields. This trumps everything else, but, unfortunately, is not immediately visible in the company balance sheets, so only unlisted companies may find this attractive.

From the perspective of shareholders, it is all about profits, not strategy. They "do strategy" on the portfolio level. 

How would you describe the state of the Business Strategy field at present, in the beginning of the 2020s?

It's 2020 and we seem to have just learned that the world is so complex that we cannot predict results of our own actions (Taleb, Snowden, plenty of others). We are still trying to figure out how to reconcile goal-oriented budgeting and planning with the exploratory, experimental nature of strategy. Some companies do that, some pretend doing it, and plenty of others does not understand what is the difference.

What the Business Strategy needs most to continue making an impact?

Leaders willing to take risks and field experts willing to speak up, but mostly the former. When the environment is supportive, experts talk.

How do you imagine a business-wise successful company that is a Good citizen of the world (in terms of sustainability of ecosystem and human disintegrity)?

I refuse to speculate, but I can identify a few first steps which will help any company - calculate your carbon footprint and make sure you have nothing to be ashamed of. 

The Summer Series - Episode 3: AI-liberated from competition and performance race at workplace

Welcome to the resonate's Summer Series again. Hope you are enjoying your personal time this summer!

This series is meant to be a series of reflections on what we do on daily basis. The reflections taken from an external, disconnected perspective, so that it influences you to improve and evolve. Please enjoy with proper mental distance and hopefully a glass of Chardonnay in your hand.

Episode 3: AI-liberated from competition and performance race at workplace

The AI influence on our lives has clearly been a subject of interest and discussions all around the globe for decades. Today I take a perspective on the AI's influence from the angle of human relations at workplace. 

As we experience it these days companies look for highly performing individuals to be able to compete with their market competitors. This leads to creation of specific work environment in which high performers contributing to the competitive race are valued over any other type of workers. Here is my hypothesis: 

Performance of individuals will no longer be the most sought trait of individuals in the AI era. Employers will be looking for purely human traits that AI cannot replicate as human relations will be even more important than today.

And here is my thinking behind the hypothesis:

In the MIT Technology Review’s article titled Elon Musk’s Neuralink says it’s nearly ready for the first human volunteers, Elon says: Even under a benign AI, we will be left behind. With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we will have the option to go along for the ride.

During an event in San Francisco yesterday evening, the startup unveiled a sewing-machine-like robot used to implant ultrafine flexible electrodes deep into the brain to detect neuron activity.

Imagine the times when AI is significantly more intelligent than human. And the fact of its dominance is widely accepted by individuals, societies and governments. These will be liberating times for many - individuals will not be the highest performers in the area of executing logical tasks in the Universe. Naturally, for some individuals the declaration will be painful and will take a form of: Not that I like it but I have to accept it.

In terms of intelligence, i.e. IQ, individuals will be assessed and measured as very similar and close to each other: the variation between 50 to 150 IQ points that spans the whole range of intelligence available for human beings will simply become a single point around the value of 100 on the wider scale of intelligence available for AI. What seems to be big differences among individuals today will be neglectable when compared to AI IQ power. Imagine AI systems with IQ on the level of 10^6. The Roger Waters post-war dream that We are all equal in the end will come true in this aspect :) 

What does this IQ equality mean to relations at the workplace and to hiring preferences of companies? Clearly the competitiveness and performance will no longer be in the center HR interest as AI will be dominating in this area. Employers will be looking for purely human traits that AI cannot replicate as human relations will be even more important than today. The more human one will be, the more chances s/he will have to get a job.

In this way the two cardinal traits of individuals sought for in the "Orange" evolutionary level of the workplace, performance and competitiveness, will no longer be in the center of employers’ interest. Many people will be able to quit the exhaustive game of corporate career race and will be able to relax, and concentrate on developing their personal humanity. People will have more reasons to live in harmony, focused on the welfare of their societies, local communities and the environment they live in. As a consequence the "Orange" evolutionary level will be left behind allowing workplaces and societies to evolve beyond IQ dominance.

What a liberating thread of thought!

The Summer Series - Episode 2: The ultimately depressing, or liberating?!, model of organizations

Welcome to the resonate's Summer Series again. Hope you are enjoying your personal time this summer!

This series is meant to be a series of reflections on what we do on daily basis. The reflections taken from an external, disconnected perspective, so that it influences you to improve and evolve. Please enjoy with proper mental distance and hopefully a glass of Chardonnay in your hand.

Episode 2: The ultimately depressing model of organizations

There has been an ongoing dispute which approach to evolution of companies is better: to reform current companies or to start building companies n.0 from scratch and let the current ones die out. 

Personally, I keep both options open :)) The key for me is that the companies as we know them need to evolve (see my other blog posts on why and the wider context). Since both of the above ways can contribute to the evolution I am supporting both of them in parallel. There is no need to choose a specific ways at that point on time. That would be premature optimization.

Anyway, if you are serious about organizational design and future of work than you definitely have your views on the topic and hence you are a part of this discussion. And since you are a part of this discussion you need to know and respect all of the existing points of view. It is easy to accept the constructive models that bring meaning to your work. It comes much harder, at least for me, to accept destructive models. Yet I have learnt the humility to familiarize with and accept all possible perspectives: it is fair in the first place and also helps me in limiting biases of my mind and thus develop personally. This blog post is a great example of such a case.

Today I want you to reflect on three inter-related concepts: The Gervais Principle and The MacLeod's Organization Lifecycle. These were introduced in the Ribbonfarm blog back in 2009 by Venkatesh Rao in his blogpost The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office".

Read on carefully - these might be depressing models, you have been warned :)

The Gervais Principle is for me the ultimately destructive successor of the already depressing Peter's Principle:

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

The MacLeod's organization lifecycle is for me the ultimately destructive model of an organization lifecycle:

A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.

The Whyte school of management is for me the ultimately destructive school of management:

Organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs. Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. So while most most management literature is about striving relentlessly towards an ideal by executing organization theories completely, this school, which I’ll call the Whyte school, would recommend that you do the bare minimum organizing to prevent chaos, and then stop. Let a natural, if declawed, individualist Darwinism operate beyond that point. The result is the MacLeod hierarchy.

Personal journey

[I expect you to spend some meaningful amount of time on the above quotes]

Now a bit of my personal reflection and my personal journey so far. For most of my career I would qualify myself to the Clueless cast, and for the rest - to the Losers cast. And honestly for a long time I did not not know what to do about these concepts. I mean: How to take my efforts at work seriously? Where to seek for fulfillment?, etc. My mind was just clueless... :) I had been trying to ignore those, as my best way of dealing with the concepts, for most of the time, but they were coming back... 

I find the concepts deeply logical - the concepts are precisely formulated, elegant, models are coherent and based on purest logic. For most of the time I found them ultimately destructive. This summer I have found those concepts ultimately liberating too... 

They are liberating from meaning, from hope of contribution, from burden of the an expected outcome, from any long term responsibility towards any organization, etc. And in the first place the concepts are liberating from the mental frame of ability to contribute and expectation of fulfillment. The mental model was at the core of my feeling of being torn apart, yet I took a desperate attempt to stuck to it - I have always treated meaning and responsibility as the original reasons to engage with organizations. 

Now, being ultimately liberated by these concepts, I feel empowered to do what I trust is most appropriate and valuable for an organization at any particular time disregarding of what I am asked to do. And most importantly I feel empowered to stick to my skills, interests and values as the source of a fulfilled life. 

It feels like I came a long way from my initial understanding of my role in organizations (the Losers cast and the Clueless cast) through the shock of discovering alternative perspective, through negation of the "destructive" models, to rebuilding myself into a new mental model that actually leads me to personal liberation, empowerment and productivity. 

Now I belong to the Losers cast, and I feel good about it as I made my own sense of the concepts and re-calibrated my expectations, and so I am not torn apart anymore. Looks like a bit more self-aware Loser! :)

Manifesto for The New Economical Order

This is another post under the umbrella title of #resonateSummerSeries. Hope you are enjoying your personal time! I did enjoy mine and came up with the Manifesto for the New Economical Order this hot afternoon.

Being a big fan of Agile Manifesto, back from 2001, I think we need to leap ahead as the world needs us more than ever. We need to re-focus to the threats resulting from the ever-growing debt of human civilization.

When I think about the rescue paths for the mankind, it turns out the path leads through re-defining the purpose of the economy itself.

See the Manifesto for the New Economical Order @ https://www.resonate.company/newOrderManifesto

9th August 2020.

The Summer Series - Episode 1: State of Agility 2020: What community members say about State of Agile?

Since we have reached the summertime and we all deserve a dose of rest, relaxation and the associated uncontrollable wave of retrospective thoughts while our minds are wandering, I decided to offer you the resonate's Summer Series that is meant to be series of lightweight reflections on what we do on daily basis. Please enjoy with proper mental distance and hopefully a glass of Chardonnay in your hand.

Episode 1: What community members say about State of Agile?

When I started thinking about the year 2019 as of the last year of a decade and as such a natural time for a decade worth retrospective of Agile movement I started asking members of Agile Community about their personal reflection. There is lots of people who spent 10+, 20+ years pioneering in Agility and introducing it into organizations, so the experience we have accumulated is huge and throughout. As you will see in the below my subjective set of collected opinions, I found a wide set of reflections, starting from complete satisfaction and enjoying the comfort of the comfort zone, through moderate optimism to lighter or heavier frustration. As you can imagine those who were satisfied were not very creative in thinking about necessary improvements for the next decade of 2020s. On the other hand those who felt moderate optimism or were frustrated were actively contemplating the ways and opportunities to improve. Only a hungry artist is credible the proverb says. What I also observed is that the global Agile Community is, of course one may say, not free from confirmation bias and group bias and not any better in being able to building the objective perspective than any other group, say the poor waterfall guys at the dawn of "The Age of Agile". After all, we are all contained within the same system of evangelism for Agility. Yet, I must admit, I did not expect that much of self-satisfaction and in general that much of symptoms of the Warren Buffet's ABC of business decay (Arrogance, Bureaucracy and Complacency). And what is coaching about in the first place if not about the ability to transcend the barriers of the self. So I keep smiling to myself about this discovery and to my naivety that the global community of coaches can do better when it comes to fighting human built-in biases :) 

Anyway, The most interesting voices in my opinion, came from the practitioners, who spend their career plowing through the rocky daily reality.

Personally, as long as I am quite doubtful about the ability of the generation of Agile fathers to evolve (since they are not very hungry anymore and in fact became the dominating predators of The Age of Agile), I am very optimistic and pleased to see all the novel thinking and feeling arising in the younger generation of leaders empathizing with concepts beyond Agility. Clearly we have had enough time and learnt the strengths and limitations of Agility in practice and we know that both exist.

So I leave you to it - a non-representative, subjective sample of opinions on the State of Agility I collected between 2019-2020 during various Agile events and on social networks. My questions had a form of a typical retrospective questions in the context of the decade of 2010s: How would you compare the Agile world 10 years ago and at present? What has changed systematically? What do you think about this direction? Is the direction good? How close it is to your heart? What you would do differently? What are the obstacles to Agile adoption? What will be the systemic change in 2020s?

Enjoy and share your perspective!

p.s. This blogpost belongs to a series of blogposts under the title Tthe State of Agile on the evolution of workplace and future of work. The related blogposts I shared earlier on the topic are:

• Workplace 2020s - the current state and the aspiration for 2020s
• Aspirational vs Effective Influence of Agile community
• Obstacles of Agile Adoption and Aspiration for 2020s

The Davos Manifesto 2020 - spreading the good word and the original article

The original article is published here, I am copying it just to have a copy for myself really, so that I do not have to keep track of what happens to the original. My understanding is that the article can be copied under CC SA+BY+NC licence.

Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, by Klaus Schwab.

A. The purpose of a company is to engage all its stakeholders in shared and sustained value creation. In creating such value, a company serves not only its shareholders, but all its stakeholders – employees, customers, suppliers, local communities and society at large. The best way to understand and harmonize the divergent interests of all stakeholders is through a shared commitment to policies and decisions that strengthen the long-term prosperity of a company.

i. A company serves its customers by providing a value proposition that best meets their needs. It accepts and supports fair competition and a level playing field. It has zero tolerance for corruption. It keeps the digital ecosystem in which it operates reliable and trustworthy. It makes customers fully aware of the functionality of its products and services, including adverse implications or negative externalities.

ii. A company treats its people with dignity and respect. It honours diversity and strives for continuous improvements in working conditions and employee well-being. In a world of rapid change, a company fosters continued employability through ongoing upskilling and reskilling.

iii. A company considers its suppliers as true partners in value creation. It provides a fair chance to new market entrants. It integrates respect for human rights into the entire supply chain.

iv. A company serves society at large through its activities, supports the communities in which it works, and pays its fair share of taxes. It ensures the safe, ethical and efficient use of data. It acts as a steward of the environmental and material universe for future generations. It consciously protects our biosphere and champions a circular, shared and regenerative economy. It continuously expands the frontiers of knowledge, innovation and technology to improve people’s well-being.

v. A company provides its shareholders with a return on investment that takes into account the incurred entrepreneurial risks and the need for continuous innovation and sustained investments. It responsibly manages near-term, medium-term and long-term value creation in pursuit of sustainable shareholder returns that do not sacrifice the future for the present.

B. A company is more than an economic unit generating wealth. It fulfils human and societal aspirations as part of the broader social system. Performance must be measured not only on the return to shareholders, but also on how it achieves its environmental, social and good governance objectives. Executive remuneration should reflect stakeholder responsibility.

C. A company that has a multinational scope of activities not only serves all those stakeholders who are directly engaged, but acts itself as a stakeholder – together with governments and civil society – of our global future. Corporate global citizenship requires a company to harness its core competencies, its entrepreneurship, skills and relevant resources in collaborative efforts with other companies and stakeholders to improve the state of the world.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with our Terms of Use.

Written by

Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

State of Agility 2020: Effective vs Aspirational Zone of Influence of Agile Community at the dawn of 2020s

I am going to start this blog post by repeating how I started of my blog post back in April on the Obstacles to Agile adoption and Aspirations for 2020s: 

Instead of "doing" more Agile transformations and expecting to see different outcomes, get out of the hamster wheel and allow yourself for a deeper reflection. This reflection of mine on the Obstacles of Agile adoption and Aspiration for 2020s is an invitation to Inspect & Adapt the decade of 2010s, build on it and move forward in 2020s.

Staying in the above context, today I am sharing another 1000s words worth image that basically says: Hey, Agile Community, it is time to reflect as we have been investing our efforts sub-optimally and have been missing out a lot of unexplored potential for a bigger change in the dominating style of ways of working of today's companies. 

I initially planned to write a longer article about the situation and how the Agile Community actually engages in organisational transformations, what value we generate and what can be improved. Well, after sketching the below image I think there is no more need for writing anything more - the image is pretty clear where we are at the dawn of 2020s...

Scary? Challenging? Motivating? Join me in creating a more influential future!  

 

The Effective Work Environment framework v2.0 is publicly available!

The Effective Work Environment framework that I have been using since 2014 is now published on our website. I decided to publish The EWE under the Creative Commons license (BY+NC+SA) for your voluntary feedback and contribution. Feel invited to try it out and help me improve it! My intention is for the EWE to become a living documentary of the evolving image of the current landscape of companies. Let me know your experience with it.

The Effective Work Environment framework - The EWE, is a visualisation and a breakdown of all the aspects of the current landscape that companies exist in. As a result it defines how we, resonate, have been engaging in the transformation efforts. It helps us sense where a company is at the moment, its strengths and unmet needs, and start eliminating the gap between the aspirations and the current state. 

More information on the EWE Homepage.

Minibook: The landscape of Enterprise Agile transformations

Hey, this time I feel really proud - I have published a bigger piece the enterprise Agile transformations! It is a minibook really, so I do not want to put it here as a blogpost - it would be killing long to scroll down :) Instead please find it in the Resource library of the resonate website.

This minibook is the second of three pieces I have planned in a trilogy on Agile. The first one is The Evolution of workplace and Future of Work.

Brief

There is an ongoing discussion in the Agile community about the Spotify model and the rationale for copying it. The discussion goes as far as saying: “There is no Spotify model, there is only the snapshot Spotify culture”. This statement seems to have become the fragile consensus and the equilibrium state for many Agilists. In parallel, there also exists physical evidence that the entity called the “Spotify model” exists. Starting off from this widely known motif I share my personal experience with Enterprise Agile Transformations. 

Price

If you are willing to support me financially you can also buy the book online. Or you can decide after reading :) 

Feedback

Anyway, let me know what do you think as it is fuel for me to share more.

My "virtual interview" with Dave Snowden

Earlier on this week, Gene Gendel kindly offered an open session with Dave Snowden with an opportunity to ask questions upfront. So I asked my three questions. And David spent a section of his session on answering those. I wish I could provide even more context to David, so that he understood fully where I was coming from, yet still the answers I got are enough food for thought to at least start a good discussion.

Here go my questions:

What systemic change can you predict in the ways of working in the decade of 2020s (after agile delivery, product & customer focus, business agility in 3rd millenium so far) ?

The one thing you can say is that there will be more fads. There seems to be this desire for some sort of a universal recipe to come out every two or three years which everybody picks up on. I think what some of us are hoping is that complexity... remember like Systems Thinking replaced Scientific Management in the 80s, we can see some evidence that Complexity Theory is now replacing Systems Thinking.

And by the way, I had a great privilege of teaching leadership with Peter Drucker on a series of executive seminars and one of the things we agreed on is that Complexity Theory and Scientific Management have a lot in common, and they both disagree with systems thinking. People condemned Scientific Management, but actually it empowered human beings to use their judgement. Scientific Management automated what could be automated but then it looked at apprentice models and lifetime employment for managers and supervisors [in which?] it recognised the need for human judgement. What Systems Thinking is being consistently trying to do since the 80s is to actually remove human judgement and reduce it to a series of spreadsheets and processes. 

And that by the way is the disastrous aspect of Holocracy. I mean Holocracy is a program written by somebody who does not want the responsibility of making management decisions and if you ever saw the need for management decisions going to the current crisis as a point where you have to do things differently. 

So in terms of predicting what will happen I am not sure. I mean I think virtual working has become easier but it is also creating more stress. For example if you spend too much time in Zoom, you are getting visual stimulation but the brain and the body aren't picking up chemical signals which they normally expect in a physical meeting so the stress levels go up. 

(...) I think it is going to be a mirage of different things as we come through. 

I think the attempt to move software development methods into business practice is doomed to fail. It will work for marketing and HR which has so short lifecycle projects, but the idea you can use Agile methods in strategy could only be devised by somebody who has never been in corporate strategy. And I have yet to find any of the people who advocated to spend any time in corporate strategy whatsoever, which is deeply political in its nature - it is not short-cycle like [method?] development.

There was a really bad paper which came out lately which said all the big tech giants were Agile and therefore they had succeeded whereas the other guys weren't Agile so they failed. And that is another example of retrospective coherence. There reality is that the big tech giants were the first into their markets, so they were apex predators. And an apex predator survives no matter how incompetent they are until the market conditions shift again. So there are massive inefficiencies in Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, it is just that they dominate their spaces so you do not notice the inefficiencies and this habit of trying to fit success into whatever your framework is, it's got to stop. If somebody adopted Agile consciously and then reported success I would believe it, but saying "this company was successful and I re-describe them as if they were Agile - that's [snake on sale?]". So I don't buy that.

How humanity should handle the "technical debt" of our civilization? i.e. unsustainability of the global ecosystem (extinction of species, climate change, exploit of resources, growth of population) and of human condition (life - work disintegration, mental condition,etc).

We are not going to do it without at least partial extinction. Let's get real on it. The global warming is serious and the major economic power in the world is not taking it seriously. And there is no way, I mean COVID is just a minor to what is probably going to come in my lifetime. I used to worry about my grand children, then I worried about my children and now I am worried about me, and I am 66. We are going to see catastrophic failures of the ecosystem which will make COVID what it actually is which is a chance to get it right for the worst thing coming. And I think that is what we have got to be careful to be honest - I mean we will survive as species, but what survives becomes key. So the technical debt is going to be recovered catastrophically. It does not mean that something good can come out of it. 

What is your view on the evolution model of the Spiral Dynamics, Clare Graves, Don Beck ? Is the business world / society model ever to become "Teal"?

This is one of the worst books ever published by the Agile movement. The other one is Lean Startup. Lean Startup and Reinventing Organizations are both by cult-like figures. They are both based on completely inaccurate use of cases. Lean Startup goes and studies a bunch of successful companies, identifies the things they did in common, and says "If you do these things you too will be successful". He did not study companies who failed. We did that when I was at IBM with Dorothy Lenner at Harvard. And we found that all companies that failed did exactly the same things as the companies that succeeded. What you have got is a market with high amount of entrepreneurs so some are bound to succeed. So it is not that his advice is bad, but it is not going to cause a relationship. The second, but the worse one is Reinventing Organizations. It is even worse because where you have got a guy with religious ideology who only reports the aspects of the cases supporting the ideology. He reports on use of Holocracy at Zappos and kind of like casually mentions, but does not really emphasize the fact that huge amount of people who were fired. He reports on self-organizing communities, but every single one he does was draconianly imposed by a centralised manager. It did not emerge naturally. So he is highly selective on the cases. He is also involved in this evolution model. I feel really sorry for Claire Graves. Spiral Dynamics originally evolved as an explanation of how societies progress, if you go back to the original theory. And it is very Western, liberal culturally specific view of the historical progress. It is neo-colonial in its nature. If you buy into this particular view of history, it is very good description of history: it talks about the stages you go through. You cannot take a framework designed to handle large movements in history and apply it to individuals or organizations. It does not move across. It also has the implication than the higher levels are better then the lower levels. I remember about having an argument about it with Beck at a conference, and I remember him saying "you do not understand my arguments because I am torquoise and you are just an angry blue or angry green" or something. And it is a classic: "I am in the elite so I do not have to account for myself". That is how cults work. Wilber is particularly bad at this - he does not tolerate dissent. I remember having badges made which had proud to have brown on them. And the next day I got accused of "why are you doing this - brown is not one of the Spiral Dynamics color". And I said "Well, that's exactly the point". The idea you go through this linear progression is just a very bad framework. And self-organization is something that only happens within constrains and it is only appropriate within certain contexts, and it is not a universal goal or achievement. I do not know of any examples quoted in this book where you could not tear his conclusions apart if you did just two days of ethnography in the organizations. The cases do not back up the theory in practice. And I will make this general point, and sorry to people in the Kanban movement and everything else: hierarchical models of maturity are very dangerous in a complex system, because they instantiate past practice, they do not actually enable new practice. And they focus people on achieving what was retrospectively seen to be good rather than what may be good in a more uncertain future, and so they only work in an ordered system. 

I strongly recommend watching the full webinar here as Dave touches on many interesting aspects.