A journey of self-transcendence - towards expressing myself

Summarizing my experiences and building my own understanding of what is important, what is meaningful and what is relevant resulted in a few mini books published on Leanpub and one fully fledged book - Good Companies, published on amazon. Clearly writing is my channel of expression.

The journey took me a few years before I was able to make my own sense of reality, extract the essence of my experience and use it to switch to the forward-looking frame. In this new frame I discovered endless potential for growth and transcendence. For me personally, for companies, and for societies.

Even now, one year after the Good Companies book was published, I resist removing a weekly reminder in my calendar that I set years ago in order to shape and define the rhythm of my efforts. Clearly the journey has transformed me and became a cornerstone of who I am, of my identity.

What's for you in my story?
1. Hear your inner voice, grow up to your mission, let it become the source of your actions.
2. Find your natural channel of expression
3. Let the change happen despite the associated feeling of "losing control" and departing from what you are used to and how it used to be, from your comfort zone.

The leader's compass when joining a company

What should be your first steps principles when joining a new company in a leadership role? What should you focus on? How should you seek to be impactful? An attempt to summarize my experience.

I have recently joined a small yet well-recognized company, in a role of an Interim CTO, to help them make sense of digital product development. Let's say that historically there are a few blank spaces in the value creation equation. In spite of strong business vision the company could not sort out its value delivery and was drowning in frustration of the crew that led to personal conflicts. Quite typical, nothing unusual, definitely nothing to be ashamed of, and a lot to be proud of! So I found myself in my comfort zone.

I realized I had enough comfort and space to consciously focus on how I am going to lead. I always aspired to such conscious approach, but as many, never could fully implement it ;) There was a thought in the back of my mind: "Finally I got my chance!". In parallel, there was also a debt in my mind, debt towards myself, a debt that I got myself into during the last time I was playing a role of an IT Director. Let's just say, I could have done a few things differently back then. When I was looking for my next engagement I was determined to step into the management role again, because I thought about myself that I never felt more ready to play the role of IT Director again.

So I joined with a strong need to use the opportunity to learn. It is a small company and much less complex than enterprises I used to work with in the past. After a few days of the initial observations, listening and orientation I asked myself about cardinal principles I would follow as a base in my role. 

The leader's compass when joining a company:

1. Click with people, gain their hearts. 
   Remember that the initial credit of trust, a.k.a. riding on a free fuel, will end in a few months. Similarly, your unique perspective, so different and thus so valuable, because coming from outside of an organization will evaporate. Use the time wisely to proof in action that you are a trustworthy person.
   
   
2. Build a map of a landscape of the organization in your mind.
   Listen more than talk. Ask the right questions. Observe. Seek patterns and anti-patterns. 
   
   
3. Identify your allias
   There are teams and individuals in the organization who were waiting your arrival as dessert awaits rain, suppressing hopes for their ideas to be implemented and their will to contribute to be understood, appreciated, and encouraged. Usually, these people are among the most valuable people in the organization. You cannot afford to lose them.
   
   
4. Share your initial observations frequently. 
   Your initial observations as as fresh and as refreshing as spring vegetables, or oranges during winter (I live in Poland atm). Feeding your observations back to the organization serves as a mirror, causes a reflection and at the same time lets your colleagues to get to know you.
   
   
5. Help individuals get to know yourself. Introduce your personal style by revealing what you value and what mindset you are driven by. This is far more important than jumping into action immediately.
   
   
6. Share your plans frequently. Don't let uncertainty to slip in and disperse the initial energy and credit of trust. People need direction.
   
   
7. Set expectations by setting a timeframe. When I joined everyone was expecting a significant change. As we know the change lasts in time and cannot be pushed. Yet timeframe matters. By sharing timeframe of how you envisage your first weeks and months lets your colleagues align their plans and expectations.
   
   
8. Hold the pressure to conform to the existing ways of how we do things here (culture).
   You are a hope to change the existing culture. Otherwise, you are most probably a hiring mistake. You were hired for a reason and in the leadership positions this reason is more than tackling with the operational issues. It is usually about introducing a systemic change. Mature organizations understand that, and definitely mature hiring managers understand that. Make sure to communicate your need to assess "how we do things here" and consciously click into the existing one or your votum separatum to the existing culture.  
   
   
9. Select your first battles carefully. Not every battle is worth fighting. Perform consequence analysis. There certainly exist issues to be worked on yet in your first steps people expect a look forward not a look backwards.  
   
   
10. Avoid manual interventions.
    Treat the current state of how things work as a legacy. This is the lagging world. Do not waste your effort on trying to change the old habits and thinking - sometimes its better to let them die out. I prefer to focus on strategic themes first. The leading question is "how will we work together" (new culture)?
    Still there is value in interventions. Do not hesitate to intervene when you spot an intervention that would make it easier for everyone to understand what you value and where your thinking is rooted.
    
    
11. Be inclusive. Invite people to co-create the NEW. 
    Do I need to say anything about it?
    
    
12. Find a mentor or a coach. Or both. Depending on your situation you may need a domain advice or help in making sense of the reality.
    
    
13. Join peer communities. CIOs / CTOs.
    Leverage knowledge exchange.
     
14. Remember a few quotes
1. If you want to go fast - go alone, if you need to reach far, go together" a.k.a. The Leader's Dilemma
2. Build leaders not followers (David Marquet)
3. Build a system that is independent from yourself (David Marquet)
   
   
15. Focus. Use a systemic approach. Now, finally!, you are set up to act! There is always more to do than it is possible to handle. You need to use your time wisely. What will you focus on? How will you seek the biggest impact? Where will you look for smells? How will you improve? 
    Personally I am a big fan of The Douglas Talbot's Creating Extraordinary Organizations and the Organizational Engineering Model.

Good luck, share your experience with me!

Leadership in times of "Agile is Dead" awakening

 When I hear someone says "Agile is Dead" I hear a disappointment, nostalgia that the time has come to say goodbye to something highly valued and meaningful, and also I hear hope there is a way to save Agile. 

Do not mix commoditization of ideas (i.e. Kano model) with their death. On the contrary, commoditization means the ideas become ubiquitous. Your business model may be dead, but not the ideas.

On the level of "Agile" buzzword - I don't care. It's probably better that it is dead. Personally, I hope that certifications are dead - all these 2 days trainings for thousands of dollars need to disappear. The quality of those trainings was tragic, their impact - negative. The existence of those trainings clearly reflected the existence of the Agile bubble. A word of mouth and an appealing productivity boost story caused the irrational pressure both on individual level and inside companies to follow the herd. This is how myths and cargo cults are created. Pragmatism and practical daily routines, e.g. XP, design thinking, coaching, is what counts for me. Cutting through the smalltalk and buzzwords, making decisions, getting things done count. Getting the best out of people and empathy count.

On the level of an idea - I do care. Agile is not dead. First, we barely touched agility as the whole thing (take the Integral Agility perspective to understand my point of view). Second, there are ideas building on agility that can take us to the next level. By us I mean not only companies, but in the first place individuals, societies, and the whole humanity. 

For those who narrow down the meaning of Agile to organizational effectiveness (aka performance machine), this may sound like claptrap, and I expect them to be among those preachers of 'Agile is Dead'. Don't worry abut these guys - they represent the fixed mindset, and clearly have not appreciated all the lessons learnt from two decades of the Agile era. If you paid them for leading you through Agility journey, I can imagine you find yourself disappointed - leaders abandon you once their business model, i.e. evangelizing without responsibility, collapses. That's the worst thing one can expect from a leader...

Personally, I was processing all the signs of disintegration of the idea of Agile, all the corruption and manipulation that led to the 'Agile is Dead' slogan very carefully. I wrote a few mini-books sharing my perspective on the phenomenon (see Agile 2020s - The Great Retrospective). First of the books were focusing on sharing experiences from the trenches, from the enterprise companies (see The Secret Ingredients of Agile Transformations, or The Landscape of Enterprise Agile Transformations). The latest book, Good Companies, takes a different stand. I have drawn an inspirational future of what is possible if we really care. It took a deep personal journey to discover all the beauty, and all the burden necessary to let the beauty shine, of where we can be if we focus our potential on what is important.

I strongly encourage you to find your own answers, coin your own meaning, and shape your own path, preserving a proper distance from the mainstream mourning of the Agile is Dead' transition.

As a side note, let me brief you with a bit of my personal transformation. If Agile is really dead, that would mean we are able to masacre even the most valuable ideas. I isolate myself from such thinking. I see it differently: we are so trapped in the wrong framing, we do not even realize there is one, and as a result we lost the ability to follow what is important to us. The reductionist frame and the group biases don't let us assess the situation clearly. 

A breakthrough is required, and possible as presented in Good Companies, to offer the world the best of who we, humans, are. A journey starts from the current state of how we interact with the world, i.e. Careless Exploitation and leads to state of the Caring Guardianship. It is a state where an independent observer, e.g. one of the species inhabiting the Earth can call our interactions with the world a caring guardianship. I believe this is the best of us that we owe to offer to this world. Whether we can make it will be the ultimate answer of meaning of our existence. 

This shift in understanding our role here results in shifts in cardinal aspects of how we understand the meaning of business, the mental model of economy, the relation between societies and the economy, etc. We have not yet started the journey! In my case the triggering event for opening the quest for Good Companies were the observations from many companies that I worked with, and the existing frictions not addressed, not even recognized(!) by digital and agile transformations.

Surviving service market collapse together!

When I (re)started my consulting career at the beginning of 2020 I was so pleased to be on my own again! The feeling of the wind in my hair, endless opportunities, and being a skipper of my own fate. After 4 years it still feels natural for me, it reflects who I am. However, these 4 years turned to be the most challenging period in my career. First due to COVID-19, and this year, 2023, due to the effect of "the most expected recession ever" when companies literally cut all budgets to their roots.

I have been working in IT industry for 20+ years: I followed a technological career path for circa 12+ years, then got involved in running teams and projects, then I evangelised all the best practices of IT, software engineering practices, starting from XP, ending at Enterprise Agility, to massive companies that were lagging behind the innovation levels of their competition. In a way similar to many IT people, I was pulled out from IT work to play a bigger, "societal" mission to help those companies catch up. And then the mission was exposed to the market conditions of 2023. 

Instead of doing purely the domain work I spent a significant portion of my time on pre-sales and marketing activities. (By the way, allow an off-topic here: this is why I claim that companies should replace hiring for positions with hiring to a distribution of roles, where, as in our personal lives, we play multiplicity of roles. Positions are oftentimes to rigid structuring limiting value generation and contributions).

Here are the lessons learnt that I feel I should share with my peers: advisors, contractors, small boutiques, expert think-tanks, etc.

1. You are still the same valuable (wo)man! Your knowledge and expertise are needed. It's not the right time of the cycle though. 

2. Don't panic. Understand and respect the market cycle. There are things you can control, things you can influence, and things that concern you (which you cannot change).

3. Invest in yourself - as countries extend their engagement in public service work during crises, you should also invest in yourself. Get ready for the new cycle! Refresh your value proposition - the market will require more in the new cycle as the overall body of knowledge grows and experiences from the past are processed and transformed into new ideas and needs. 

In my case, for example: I passed SAFe SPC certifications (never needed it - my experience was self-explanatory). I have caught up on th AI / ML trends and progressed on the Google Cloud Machine Learning Engineer Path towards Google Certified Professional exam. (it's been great fun by the way to see all the concepts that were "theoretically possible" when I was a student, implemented at an enormous scale).

4. In parallel - refresh personally: first close all open loops from the past. Process experiences, accept them. Look for what new qualities have emerged through your experiences. Find your preferred channel, reading, writing, physical activities, art, and leverage it to process the cloud of thoughts into clarity. 

In my case, my natural channel is writing (check out my Good Companies book, available on amazon) and (amateur level) sports. 

Before jumping into new endeavors, you need to understand, refresh your understanding, who you are, who you want to be, where your skills are, where your interests are, where your values call you. As they say: start with the end in mind.

5. Take special care of and pay special attention to your relation with your life partner. They may not be fully aware of the sources of your changed behaviors. Put yourself in their shoes and see how this "infected" you infects them, their stability, their roots, so that they do not lose ground under their feet - they are used to relying on you, they have relied on you for years. 

For example: I took my wife on a trip to Paris that we have been postponing for years. This was the best trip ever!

6. Network heavily - during recession there are plenty of people who lost their jobs or contracts. It's not an easy time and you may not want to go through it alone. You also may not want your peers to go through this alone. There is a certain level of pressure coming from societal norms for those labelled as "unemployed". For me, historically, the network has been the most effective source of work. 

Again, what I did in this area: I promised myself to reach out to one person I used to work with in the past every weekday. It really feels great.

p.s. I am planning a separate post on what I did with the blessing of more free time that was usually the case.

Credits: Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

InfoQ article: How to leverage Good Companies to Fight Civilizaitonal Debt?

After my #XP2023 talk, Ben Linders led me through the process of publishing an interview article on InfoQ about my ideas from the Good Companies book (available on amazon). Not an easy task, but here it is. I learnt a lot!

Thanks Ben, I do appreciate!

Here is the link: https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/11/good-companies-civilization-debt/

#goodcompanies #infoq

Whole-Mind Thinking by Alan Seale and my renaissance of Human Integrity

One of the books that took me by surprise is Alan Seale's Transformational Presence. 

I may say I have a resonating relation with this book. The book first surprised me with novelty of its narrative, then gave me relief that I was not alone, apparently not the only one who thought this way, helped me make sense of what I had sensed yet could not name for a long time, equipped me with a frame and vocabulary to use, and gave me strength to talk about the new perspective I learnt openly. 

I am grateful to Alan for enabling all those above-listed personal developments of myself. 

I am also surprised what a strong mark the social formatting I received in childhood left on my mind. For years I was not aware of this transparent layer of norms through which I was perceiving the world.

Examples of my discoveries in the book are The Whole-Mind Thinking and the The Whole-Being Awareness. They are central concepts which put together define the mental frame presented. I pictured the essence of The Whole-Mind Thinking on the poster below while I leave it to you to find out what The Whole-Being Awareness is.

I used The Whole-Mind Thinking in my book Good Companies to illustrate the wholeness and architecture of human intelligence in the first transformation story: Story 1: Renaissance of Human Integrity. 

I believe Story 1 is the most natural place to start the transformation - in order to transform the world, we first need to be strong and integral ourselves. The mission we need to accomplish needs us strony and integral! 

The Good Companies Economics - 11 Paradigm Shifts within the Integral Economy Model

Why seeking redemption, or 'giving back', has been the mantra of successful business people while they should, and promisingly could, focus on changing the game!

Really, why is that? Why are so many successful business people blind to this option? Why does it take half of a human life to realize the simple truth that the only thing that matters is to Leave This Planet a Better Place? And why, even when conscious of that, do they pursue the wrong path?

I dedicated my Good Companies book to research this, and our other surprising blind spots, and irrational actions of business world today. I come back from this journey with an overwhelming load of evidence of our foolishness, but also as a new rebuilt me, with the reinforced agenda to change it! There are many calls for us to wake up and many aspects we need to revisit.

The alternative implementation of all the levels of the Integral Economy Model, or IEM in short, I present in #goodcompanies book, offers an alternative approach. Rooted in our deepest humankind needs of fulfillment by Leaving This World a Better Place, it restores the meaning of business and the economy as tools in hands of societies, as #transformation agents and as vehicles which will drive us to a meaningful future.

The roots of these otherwise irrational behaviors are located in our value systems, i.e. in the Mental Model of Humankind, in the Societal Meaning of Business, and in the Mental Model of Companies. In order to change the behaviors, we need to start transforming ourselves as humankind on these three invisible levels of the iceberg.

For example, we are trapped by our understanding of success, and by its relation to happiness, purpose and fulfillment in life. We are trapped by our understanding of the role of companies, business and the economy for societies. Also, we are trapped by our anxiety, a.k.a. the Civilizational Debt, caused by the pace of change on this planet. Yet, predominantly we are trapped by the belief of our impotence - that we are too small, and the system has been too dominant for us to change it.

The choices our grandfathers took when they were building their world are no longer helpful. It is time to contribute our generation's best and update these choices for the sake of the future generations.

Otti, thanks for the inspiration for this post in your post. p.s. Well-designed personas, I must say! - a medieval baron, a lawyer, and a businessman. A representative set indeed 😂

Two Transformation Intention Checks

I think we all deserve a dose of vaccination against glorification of "arbitrarily chosen shared values" as the pivotal transformation axis.

What resonates strongly with me in Otti's post are the two elements that open up space for trust and prove the intentions of originators of a transformation, namely

1. the need for redistribution of power and wealth, and
2. the goal of mitigation of the root causes vs taking the risk of reinforcing a rotten system

These two Intention Checks, as I decide to call them, are core to bear in mind, strive for, track and validate continuously when designing and leading a transformation.

These two Intention Checks are also promising candidates for becoming the pivotal transformation axis, and for becoming an explicit element of a transformation contract.

And also, these two are the litmus paper test, or smell sensors, of openness so necessary in organizations.

See also LI posts to read the whole discussion.