Agile vs Teal: fundamental difference in wide adoption potential

What constitutes the fundamental difference in the wide adoption potential between Agile and Teal?

For me, the main difference is that Agile offers a clear, win-win value proposition, while Teal lacks a compelling business case for corporations.

The What?

Agile provides tangible benefits for both corporations and agile practitioners. Corporations gain shorter time-to-market and higher employee engagement, leading to improved efficiency and a stronger EBITDA. 

Meanwhile, agile practitioners appreciate the emphasis on self-management for knowledge workers—allowing teams to drive their own productivity. This mutual gain is what makes Agile sustainable and valuable in the corporate world.

In contrast, Teal presents a more abstract proposition that goes beyond the conventional, tangible mindset of companies. Its three core breakthroughs—Evolutionary Purpose, Wholeness, and Self-Management—are not typically central to corporate agendas. As a result, Teal lacks a clear, measurable value proposition that organizations can easily adopt. 

The scarcity of concrete examples and proven success stories makes it challenging for executives to see a compelling business case. Most importantly, the question of why it matters remains only vaguely addressed, especially within the time horizons that are relevant to majority of companies.

In practice, I've seen Teal initiatives dismissed in large corporations, absent from executive agendas, and met with skepticism in casual conversations. Teal proponents, often from smaller or family-run businesses, are seen as out of touch with the priorities and agendas of large corporations.

So What?

Can we realistically expect corporations to embrace Teal principles? After all, we created corporations and taught them market economics—not civil economy or the broader role of society. Expecting corporations to transcend market logic is like expecting an AI that hasn’t been trained in math to solve equations.

Corporations follow the logic of growth: they’re structured to maximize profits, not address societal issues. They don’t comprehend the civil economy, the meta-crises we face, or the broader role societies play. This responsibility lies with governments, not corporations. Corporations are built to leverage society for growth, not to address socio-economic inequalities.

Now What?

The shift we need will come from society—not corporate boards. Societies must reassert their role in the socio-economic landscape and redefine the purpose of corporations. Executives serve their shareholders and the profit-driven structure they were taught; true change must be demanded from outside.

If you resonate with this perspective, explore Good Companies Economics on my website or dive into my Good Companies book. It is rooted in the philosophies of @Stefano Zamagni’s Civil Economy, John Vervaeke’s Meaning Crisis, and Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations.

The updated edition, released last September, includes more visuals and charts.

Human Purpose is the next Big Time Transformation

Are good products most important? Is Business Agility most important? Is Collaborative culture most important? Well, not anymore. Not to mention frameworks, projects, or technology... Those all are just the hygiene levels, the necessary conditions for companies of today to survive. They are important, and we need to keep mastering them, yet those are not sufficient conditions for companies of the future. 

The next decades will bring a shift towards Good Companies, as I call them. Good Companies will drive us to a meaningful future by helping us to fulfill our humankind mission: to leave the world better than it is now. To respond and to internalise this new meaning of their existence is the necessary condition for companies to survive in the future. 

As the first step we will need to restore our own integrity and meaning to be strong enough to create such companies. This task requires us to redefine the current societal meaning of business and the mental model of the economy. It is high time for us to update all the legacy we inherited from our grandparents and create our own response to the living conditions of today. 

p.s. See also the full EvoMap here.

Yves Morieux 2014 TED talk - another call for applying the KISS rule at work!

 Keep It Simple Stupid rules 😀 This is just another example. 

This almost 10 years old is very much to the point and funny classic.

Interestingly Yves was able to present many lean and agile principles and ideas without using agile jargon at all 🤔

Three distinctive features of SAFe which I highly appreciate

Three distinctive features I highly appreciate about SAFe are:

• Dual operating model: decoupling of org structures from value streams. Honestly, in many companies it was a real cracker to start transformation promptly as the restructuring efforts of the functional hierarchy was a fragile topic. The org structure usually represented decades history of how senior managers were building the organization according to their vision, and yes some of them were also building their kingdoms, trying to shape the organization by how they thought was best for it. Thanks to the decoupling of these two aspects, it is possible to start a transformation swiftly while giving the re-structurization as much time and respect for people, their ambitions, and visions, as it needs. From my perspective the nature of these two processes: organizing around value and organizing functionally is indeed of a different nature, and the timelines are of different magnitute, and as such it deserves to be treated separately.
• Organizing into operational value streams. Designing the value streams, as described by SAFe is logical and elegant. It is an exercise I recommend to all organizations, even to those that think they have it sorted. Why? Because it will add transparency to why we organized the way we organized. I believe, to know this logic is highly important to everybody in the organization. Not only will people understand that it is an act of conscious design, but they will also respect it. Trying to design the value streams surface the choices that have to be made and the multitude of options there usually are to choose from. People quickly realize there is a degree to which the design decisions are tough as there usually are multiple equally good designs. On the other hand, the usual lack of such transparency weakens the belief that leadership knows what they do when they announce a re-org to employees, causing people to spend too much time divagating. 
• PI Planning. Planning at scale always seemed a daunting task to me. All those hundreds of people on one hand and the will to invite them all into the planning process, to make sure decisions are made where knowledge is. That has always been a challenge in my career. And here SAFe offers invaluable help for me. It offers me a template of a facilitation scheme for the PI Planning event that does exactly that. Whatever people say, I rarely see such great support.

p.s. Give any tool to bureaucrats and they will turn it into a heavy process that will make people suffer

p.p.s. Give any tool to skeptics and they will prove it does not work in our case

Attribution: Photo by Tony Hand on Unsplash

Method Hexi vs SAFe

So, what do you think about the new Method HEXI initiative of Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Co.? 

Will it end the method wars? Will it make even more fuss and add to the already existing complexity in the method arena? Will it start ego wars? Ah, excuse me, they already started a long time ago :) Are these old tricks refurbished? Is there a point to fighting against SAFe?

I am sharing my first impressions on Method Hexi here briefly, after listening to a couple of webinars about it. This one in particular:

Here are my initial thoughts as of today. Let me revisit the topic in some time to see how my understanding evolves.

• Honestly, from my perspective, there are more important issues that need to be solved beyond how effective is SAFe or whatever other method... The meaning of the whole business world and the purpose of the economy are more important to me these days. More about it can be found in my book. I wish Dave Snowden refocused on what is more important. It looks like he is engaged in method matters more than wanting to influence the future of humanity. Imho, it is not time to concentrate on what we do best, on optimizing ways of working in this case, it is time to focus on the meaning dimension of reality and our existence. We need leaders there!
• It has been an existing practice for decades that people were mixing techniques and tools and methods to get best results. The idea that mixing needs to be introduced like a discovery of the 21st century with a special blessing from Snowden, sounds strange. It lacks respect, and faith in the intelligence of practitioners. Honestly, I rarely meet ideological individuals who stick to one method or tool. Of course, one can sell everything to bureaucratic and politically steered companies, but that won't be fixed by Hexi. The real question is why decision-makers choose a particular solution, what drives them and how this driving forces can be balanced or reframed. These are questions that Snowden and most of Agile community ignore to answer while focusing on accusing SAFe of being at least controversial in terms of its value.
• SAFe is what it is. It is as good a starting point for your journey as anything else, as long as you start to customize it for your needs on the first day! 
• The problem is not about SAFe - it is about what bureaucrats do to it, and in fact what they do to any method, which distorts their original sense and value.
• The metaphor of object-oriented programming, polymorphism, method overriding, etc smells 90s... I don't like it. It does not feel right in this context - it speaks to IT people not to businesspeople who are decision makers. 
• And as an off topic only: I spent years on OO design and programming and need to challenge the metaphor: same concept can be introduced simpler, my gut feel says, without a need for polymorphism. This is what I learned about dealing with complexity when programming in C++.

Wandering vs efficiency by Jeff Bezos

I treat this quote from Jeff Bezos as another recognition of value of intelligence beyond rational intelligence and problem solving at work. Very much aligned with the direction I have been evangelizing towards :)

Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.

Source: 2018 Letter to Shareholders

The Joseph Pelrine's Team Health Index

Finally! It turns out that I am a part of a bigger group of people who think that Psychological Safety itself is not a sufficient factor in a team's health. Yes, psychological safety is a necessary condition for teams to be healthy yet, there is more to it.

 

According to Joseph Pelrine to assess the team's health it actually takes three factors into consideration. Here is the full equation: 

The Team Health Index = Psychological Safety + 

                          Empathy + 

                                      Thought Diversity 

or actually this should be a multiplication equation to highlight that the combination of these three factors is what impacts the final result:

The Team Health Index = Psychological Safety x 

                          Empathy x 

                                      Thought Diversity

Only now I feel comfortable that we have set up the stage properly. This triad of factors as a whole is what really matters when we talk about team health. I think this equation should be called somehow and framed together as "Pelrine's Team Health Index" ;) .

Countless number of times I met teams who were "just" safe. Safe ot the extent that there was no development possible. They missed empathy and rejected any thought provoking challenges from external stakeholders and/or clients. Many times all other voices were treated as endangering the status-quo. And those teams were let to proceed with their limited worldview and produce solutions. And those solutions reflected the worldview of those teams as a natural consequence. Only when solutions turned to be suboptimal with hard evidence, the status-quo could be challenged and a space for a wider discussion was opening.
To some extent it is called a learning loop, yet there is a thin line between the necessity to learn by failing versus getting things done effectively by upfront collaboration through empathizing and being open.

In terms of system dynamics, an exchange and mutual benefit between a team and its stakeholders / clients, one could say that a team needs to give back for Safety with Empathy and be grateful to external voices for enriching their Thought Diversity.

Thank you Joseph Pelrine for bringing the full picture together in your post!

Simple truths, episode N: Process is dead

Process is dead. When it comes to process everything has been said. Starting from theory of constraints, through Value Mapping, kanban, complexity theories, lead time & cycle time optimisations, dependency management, to the magic of incremental approach based on short iterations, incremental approach to delivery and product creation, goal and result oriented approaches, scaling, continuous improvement and operational excellence. 

In case of IT projects this knowledge shortened the software delivery live cycle from 3 years in 1980s to 1sec 2010s. 

Nowadays there exist multiple ready to use process governance frameworks that present enormous value and quality: Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Nexus, Less, to name a few. They really do a great job.

What is more: everything can be done when it comes to process. Nobody has reached the process optimization end though. Not because it is impossible to optimize further - the options here are endless. Nobody has reached the process optimization end because on the way down this route companies discover issues on their way to their effectiveness that with time destroy the energy of the process improvement effort. Due to the attribution error, the issues are attributed to the process / framework itself and the framework gets blamed and accused that "it does not work for us". 

Yet the true reasons of not reaching expected effectiveness improvements lay somewhere else. The expected effectiveness boost is not reached because process is only one of a few elements of an effective company. It is usually the one that is explored as first. And it is usually the last one... Most companies begins and ends within the process optimization aspect. And if they try again, they try in the wrong way - they try to apply another process governance framework...

Given the above vicious cycle it comes as no surprise that the process area is the area of the biggest buzz and the best money for consultants, majority of which never needed to look and explore beyond the process frameworks. These guys will not make your organization effective in the long term. They are capable of setting up a delivery machine, but that is it. Where is human in this machine? This question remains unasked and unanswered.

Few companies and few leaders think wider. I guess you do if you are reading this. 

Process is the easiest piece of the organizational effectiveness puzzle for us humans. It is logical and tangible - natural food for our neocortex brain.

What needs to follow in parallel to implementing an effective process are the areas of 

• organizational culture - how we get things done here, 
• organizational design and architecture - how an organization supports flow of value, and
• leadership style - what mindset and behaviours leaders promote. 

These areas add ocean-deep and ocean-wide potential into the big picture. One can cross the barriers of the machine metaphor as the work in these areas is with people and for people. 

All four dimensions are complementary and all are equally important. They are also closely related - one cannot grow and reach higher levels of maturity without others growing in parallel. It was Michael Spayd who I learnt from the special name for this phenomenon - the idea of all four dimensions tetra-arising.

p.s. Thanks Maciej Rusinek for triggering me to articulate my thoughts!

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

My elevator pitch on the anti-patterns of Agile transformations

I was asked recently in a quite informal and time-bound discussion to share a few examples of known anti-patterns of Agile transformations. This topic has somehow become a topic of my high interest, as there is so many insights from multiple organisations in my mind. You can see a lot of resources at my website or in my mini book. I share the insights openly as I deeply care for transforming the workplace. And between us - after all these year of Agile, there is many highly appealing ideas beyond Agile that being Agile is currently a hygiene level not an avant-garde.

Anyway, I spontaneously came up with a kind of an elevator pitch, and listed these 3 anti-patterns without any up-front prep:

1. Big Bang approach - I witnessed transformations that started with a lengthly Design phase, say 9 months - 1 year of designing the new target state in a small group of executives and senior management. I believe than during this phase there is more value in actually de-freezing this stakeholder group than there is in the design. 

And then on Day 1 the master plan and the playbook are released to the wide audience and the expectation is to kick off in the new setup without significant glitches. After all we have done the prep work for you, right? All you need to do is just follow the script.

Nothing more illusional as you may know - on Day 1 people are surprised, confused, ask a lot of questions, there is disbelief, they feel betrayed. And indeed, it is an example of heavy up front process which is not verified in live so one gets unexpected feedback and the investment misses its goal.

I usually recommend to avoid Big Bang nature approach to transformations, and giving yourself a chance to include your employees in the transformation, invite them to co-author and co-own the workplace based on a shared purpose right from the beginning. Stating your goals vs throwing solutions. A classic, right? The smoother the experience and more inclusive approach is, the more and more you prove you are serious about Agile. After all, this way you show that the Agile transformation is your first initiative driven in an Agile way!

2. Horizontal approach

There is a tendency, backed up by The Conway's Law, to structure the transformation team in synch with the structure of the company leading the transformation and/or in synch with the structure of the company that is undergoing the transformation.

In many cases I have seen Agile transformations aiming to flatten the org structure, yet at the same time, the structure of the transformation team was significantly hierarchical. As a result I saw for example a setup in which an account leader who interacted with sponsors, there was a transformation leader who interacted reported to the account leader, there were Agile coaches who interacted with all parties within tribes and were supposed to report to the transformation leader, etc. And there was usually a gap between these layers, which resulted in suboptimal communication and information flow, and misunderstanding of intensions and goals.

I am a big fan of vertical setups in which the transformation team is actually a team, yes - a cross-functional team and it actually operates as a team, using itself an agile ways of working rather than reporting and splitting tasks, delegating work and reporting. Sounds as an obvious approach, but believe me it is still rather rare. In the vertical setup the transformation team acts across the whole hierarchy, meaning that individuals in the team operate in a Zoom-In and Zoom-Out mode. They Zoom Out to  see the whole landscape and plan the next steps and then each of them Zooms In according to what they agreed on to support the organisation and teams and individuals in going through the transformative change.

3. Put the old Performance and Incentive systems aside for the moment

During the first weeks of a transformations there is usually a hunger of information as employees try to re-model their behaviours according to the new value suit evangelised by the company. They need to understand their new or altered roles and responsibilities. Going further they also need to map what is evangelised as the highest value to incentive programs and performance management systems. And as you can image these programs are not yet existent and scheduled for later in the transformation backlog. And this topic distracts employees from the core change. Usually the lack of clarity or inconsistency within this particular area feeds directly into the resistance against the change. 

Honestly, the only approach I have seen that actually worked is to define an intentional target state so that people anticipate the governing principles and keep the old systems in place for the first 6 months in a frozen form, e.g. everybody gets the same scores of 60% for the next months before we work out the new systems. Of course it would be ideal to have these new systems in place as these are fragile matter, however these systems need to ensure "justice" and as such require wide consultations to reach the consensus. Remember that the procedural justice is what makes people to accept whatever is worked-out.

All right, that's all I can do on a Sunday morning without harm to my family - please stay in touch and share your thoughts. I am open to share more. You can also purchase the mini-book I mentioned above for more throughout and holistic view.

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.

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!

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

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. 

Evolution of workplace & Future of Work map assets made public

We have decided to publish the map under the Creative Commons license (BY+NC+SA) and open the map for your voluntary contribution. Our intention is for the map to become a living documentary of the evolving workplace. Let us know your experience with it. More information here.

The "Evolution of workplace and Future of work" online course

My course on "Evolution of workplace and Future of work" is online. Enjoy! The course provokes a human-centric view on evolution of work and evolution of purpose of work. It helps you out of the hamster wheel of the single loop learning and encourages a deeper reflection on the purpose of business. It summarizes the evolution of work in the recent decades and state of Agility at the end of 2010s. In parallel the webinar equips you with a set of tools that will be useful to design your own vision of the future (Wardley maps, double learning loop). The webinar is for all people-oriented leaders and practitioners, including CEOs, Agile Coaches, HR officers that sense a friction between how their companies function and needs of employees and societies. For leaders who see limitations in how we work these days and look for inspiration for alternative ways of working: alternative ways of engaging people in their company’s mission, but also an alternative purpose of work in the first place.

Enjoy the free time-limited access promotion till Thursday, 9th April 2020. Here is the link:https://www.udemy.com/course/evolution-of-workplace-and-future-of-work/?couponCode=56A60A058160CD56F7BC

State of Agility 2020: Obstacles to Agile adoption & Aspiration for 2020s (textual)

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 dacade of 2010s, build on it and move forward in 2020s.

This is to share with you my observations and reflection on the condition of the workplace at the dawn of 2020s and inspire you to reflect too. First, I share the sources of obstacles that I identified and their nature. Then I draw the aspirational, much more appealing, perspective on what is possible in 2020s, if only we remove the obstacles.

For quite some time now I have been having second thoughts on what stops Agile from being fully adopted in a long term sustainable manner. I saw too many transformations just scratching the surface, or being implemented mechanically following a template. And then after some time it was becoming obvious that Agile did not stick. And clients were saying that they could not realize the value added by the transformation. This is why I decided to spent some time to investigate the topic deeper, so that I was able verbalize this gut feeling. What are these invisible forces causing the issues with adoption? And what is possible if we eliminate those? 

This is to inspire you, encourage you to reflect too, and join the wider discussion within the #agile2020s hashtag.

Sources of obstacles to Agile adoptions vary from implementation faults to the very purpose of the business and economy today.

My current understanding is that there are two factors influencing transformations: implementation faults and residual issues. Implementation faults are all the issues related to how we do transformations. Eliminating them is a matter of optimization: it is possible and it actually has been happening based on the experience we gathered in recent years. On the other hand the residual obstacles are rooted deeper in the context of transformations.

I categorize the residual obstacles into two groups: the first group that I call “Orange goals” and the second group that I call “Purpose of business”.  

The first group reflects my realization that many agile transformations try to achieve Orange goals, like increased profitability. This results from the fact that many companies are still rooted in the orange mindset. Such transformations may apply a number of elements of Agility to achieve their goals, however it does not mean that the organization will become more mature on the scale of the evolution. The organization will remain Orange. One cannot transform into more mature state in the evolution by setting goals on the level below the expected end-level of a transformation.

Secondly I realized that we cannot get further into the evolution of Workplace until we reformulate the purpose of the business. It is the current purpose of the business and economy that itself is the residual obstacle to agile transformations. In fact the current purpose of business is also a root cause of what I call the technical debt of human civilization: unsustainability of environment and unsustainability of human integrity.

To eliminate the Residual obstacles a deeper change is necessary. They cannot be removed without changing the nature of the goals and the currently dominating purpose of business.

Workplace 2020s - the current state and the aspiration for 2020s

And here is the comparison of the current reality of the workplace and the aspirational reality for 2020s.

As you can see the current reality reflects what I already talked about: the degradation of the role of Agile transformations, residual obstacles and so on.

The aspirational reality shows what is possible if we manage to improve on the Implementation faults and in parallel we manage to deal with the residual obstacles. Can you even imagine the power of reframing the purpose of the business? Can you imagine Corporates as good citizens of the world? I cannot wait to see how societies will benefit from this change! I cannot wait to see how our planet will benefit from it! And I cannot wait to see how we as individuals will benefit from it!

With this perspective, I am leaving you in the good frame for reflecting on your experience. This is just a high level pitch on the topic. A more in-depth material follows on the Evolution of Workplace and there you will find more granular view of the landscape. Stay tuned by following resonate as well as the hashtag #agile2020s on social media.