A refreshing switch from enterprise to small scale

During my first weeks of work that I had started recently, my family and colleagues were empathizing with me asking about how I found the company. I came up with two metaphors that I feel are describing my thoughts quite accurately. To give you the context I started my career in small startup companies, spent the last decade with enterprise size companies, and joined a small company a month ago.

Boeing vs light plane. Joining a small company of 40+ persons after working in enterprise size companies feels like switching from piloting a Boeing intercontinental to piloting a light recreational plane designed to carry two persons. It feels light, agile and lean - every manoeuvre is possible! A decision made in seconds? Yes! Talk to a person responsible directly? Yes! Find a spot for a meeting today in calendars? Yes! Talk to the CEO? Surely, yes! :) This feels absolutely amazing! 
Also, activities like planning a workshop for the product team a week ahead is possible. Defining the strategy for IT department, nominating chapter leaders is doable darn fast! And so on.

City habitants vs villagers. Another change when changing the scale so rapidly is the change in interactions with people. Interactions are direct. There are no line managers, hierarchies, etc. Awesome, easy. Yet the most significant change is in how people present themselves. What do I mean by that? Enterprise makes people feel and behave as if they were anonymous, similarly to how I find habitants of big cities. One interacts with a shoal of anonymous, similar people. One cannot have time to distinguish them by investing in building individual relations. In a small scale the interaction is of a completely different nature. It resembles the interaction between habitants of a small village. Firstly, everyone knows each one - there is no anonymity. That's how I like it! There is no thing that your colleagues will not know about you. Also, personal characters are fully visible. I say the characters are sharply cut from wood by a talented artist. Everyone has a personal cut. The same applies to me, too!

Overall, this change of daily experience feels refreshing to me. Real people and high decision power to create reality every day! Sounds awesome, doesn't it?!

Role of Leadership Teams at Scale

The role and nature of leadership differs depending on the size of a company.

In small companies, everyone is a leader. People have direct access to the Source - the primal purpose of the company. Oftentimes, they were among the initial cohort that founded the company, or were hired as the first after co-founders. In such an environment, it is natural to be driven by purpose and play multiple roles. Thus, it is natural for everyone to be a leader and participate in the organic dynamics of peer leadership and situational leadership, stepping in and out of this role based on skills and interests. I call this leadership dynamic, an organic leadership.

This is by far my favorite environment, which mimics life dynamics very closely. Notice that in our lives we play multiple roles, e.g., fathers or mothers, husbands or wives, shoppers, chiefs, renovators, taxi drivers for kids, romantic lovers, etc. Also notice how we share the leadership role with our partners, neighbors, and local communities.





What about leadership in big companies, a.k.a. leadership at scale? To some extent, big companies can copy the blessed dynamics of organic leadership from their smaller cousins. The divide & conquer principle is a mechanism to achieve this via tribalization and delegation.

As long as big companies understand the natural beauty of organic leadership, and would like to copy the dynamics, there are limits to this copying. The vertical structure is a clear limitation. As long as organic leadership can blossom on a single level of an organizational structure, it is difficult to replicate it across levels. Leadership at scale enforces intentional leadership - senior managers need to assume they will not be able to interact with every individual and every team directly. The techniques and tools of communication need to take this landscape characteristic into account.

Hierarchy and structure introduce containerization and divisions, which define boundaries for organic leadership. The further up the hierarchy we take into account, the more pressure and ego are at play, and the more individuals are expected to impose their will and control to deliver the results expected by shareholders. Inevitable division between the powerful and the powerless starts to play a dominant role in defining the style of leadership.

In parallel, as another limitation of structuring, big organizations are simply addicted to imposing strict and narrow roles & responsibilities, fixing the scope of their expectations of individual contributors to be experts in one or few disciplines. This is already visible during recruitment processes, which are usually focused on hiring individuals possessing specialist skills ready to be exploited here and now. A talent-oriented approach to hiring is, in my experience, a myth. Conformance to the existing culture and leadership style is oftentimes a non-verbalized requirement.

All the circumstances above act as filters that narrow down and weaken the will and opportunities for individuals to use their organic leadership.

Accepting, for the sake of this discussion, that these aspects exist as a part of the reality of big companies, the question about the role of leadership in big companies remains relevant. Senior leadership teams still have a key role to play. It is a part of their responsibility towards each single individual who spends their irreversible time trying to contribute to a company.

In my opinion, the key role of leadership at scale is to tell a compelling story. A story of why it is important that we are all here and of what it enables in the future. The compelling story opens up and enables employees to build their identity as employees of a particular company.

Identity is one of the highest levels of the Dilts neurological levels model.

Employees driven by their identity are attracted to the goals of a company with unmatched strength. They are able to go through daily burdens and systemic crises much easier. In fact, to some extent, they are liberated from focusing on what’s not working and focusing on what needs to be done. Such reframing makes their lives easier and makes them see the meaningful goal and not the obstacles. The story enables them to grow.

Identity bonds individuals with organizations, makes it easier to socialize, to feel needed, and, in the end, to contribute. Identity is born of a compelling story provided by a leadership team. If you are a leader, start your day contemplating what story you offer to the people you lead. How do you express the story, and most importantly, how do you live this story?

The task seems simple, yet it gets obscured easily without proper attention, reflection, and action. Maintaining your ability to be consistent and persistent in sticking to the story you share requires a dedicated effort. Make sure you devote proportionally relevant time to this task individually. Make sure you devote proportionally significant time to this task as a leadership team. Invite HR people into this conversation. Make it a habit. Etc, etc. I am sure you can handle the how and have plenty of your own ideas by now.

As an executive coach or advisor, make sure to prioritize maintaining the leadership story on the leader’s agenda. It has a higher chance of paying off in the long-term than many of operational activities you need to support, like performance optimization, urgent interventions, crises management, etc. Establishing the mechanism propelling a compelling story will make your work more fulfilling, not to mention - easier. I argue that a compelling story is a necessary condition in the journey of creating a healthy organization.



Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

This article was also published on my LinkedIn page.

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

Big Dipper Org Constellation

Each time I see an org structure like this I take a deep breath and pause for a while... Omg, that is a vanity show! How do I influence such organization... The Warren Buffet's ABC of Business Decay is in front of my eyes... 

• Should I bother? As they say: do not change what is there, focus on the new, the old will need to adapt or extinct
• How many levels are there between the vision maker and the implementers? What does it tell me about the culture of this organization?
• What is the agenda of the middle layers? Can it be anything else than politics and kingdom wars?
• What is the domain knowledge decay curve across these layers of bureaucracy? Usually, team managers and above have insufficient skills to be active knowledge contributors. They happen to be structural proxies.
• What happened to the inverted pyramid model? Ah, sorry, wrong question - they have not heard about it most probably. 
• What happened to the hands-on leadership by example role modelling? But we don't have time, we have more important strategic topics on our agenda... Don't believe that - it is the usual excuse.
• How to evangelize for 0-layer onion structure? It's going to be controversial for some, but I am still going to say it: this is why I like the dual operating metaphor of SAFe as it cuts off the kingdom wars from value streams!
• How to dismantle the egos? You don't. Usually, it's too late. 
• How to connect teams with the source of truth? Through Value Streams!
• How to celebrate real doers? Locally, in value streams. Accept the fact the hierarchy will always get a higher bonus and career development opportunities.
• How not to disconnect? I would like to hear it from you! I saw multiple ways, people are creative.
• etc

Leadership Development programs - the vicious cycle of solving the wrong problem...

 Why does the business world put so much effort and attention into the Leadership Development programs? Seriously. Have you ever wondered what problem these try to solve?

 

Let's do a round of all stakeholers involved to understand their perspectives and expected value. Clearly the intention of Sponsors is to develop leaders to be better leaders, to perform better, to be more effective and to build a stronger organization. For Participants, it's nobilitating to belong to the leadership cohort, they feel special and rewarded. For Trainers and Coaches, training leaders is nobilitating as well, it brings a lot of self-esteem, so they feel special and rewarded, not to mention remuneration aspect. Indeed I met whole flocks of consultants who dreamt about getting access to the leadership development level programs. This is the level where one can feel impactful. In this vicious cycle everyone feels happy, so it lasts.

My challenge is: Leaders know what to do, they do not need special trainings. We, human, are good and justice and ethical by nature, by design, we are equipped to make right decisions. The real question is why leaders cannot apply all the goodness and the knowledge in their organizations? Why do leadership efforts not blossom, and do not stick in spite of best intentions?

Here is my perspective: leaders cannot apply their natural goodness and wisdom, because the goal and the rules of the game of companies are different, leaders' goodness does not apply in this game, and is neither compatible nor usable in the context of the current purpose of companies. 

My call today is: Trust your leaders, do not try to change them, instead change the environment you need them to operate within - change the companies instead. Transform companies into good citizens of the world by redefining their social meaning and purpose.

Photo by Mathias Jensen on Unsplash

Simple truth about a need for balancing codification of best practices and fresh innovation

For all these companies that grow fast and try to codify their best practice into some sort of DNA, or just a palette of processes and routines, here is a simple reminder straight from John Kotter that codifying needs to be balanced with spontaneous so that the whole spectrum of personal profiles is represented and thus the diversity necessary for continued innovation and growth is maintained. Otherwise codifying simply filters a range of profiles, e.g. entrepreneurial profiles, out causing bias towards what is known. Clearly entrepreneurs, aka Pioneers, aka Innovators need less rigid environment and more freedom.

https://vimeo.com/74875986

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.

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! :)

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 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.

Stakeholder capitalism and Conscious Capitalism

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

"Capitalism, as we know, it is dead. We’re going to see a new kind of capitalism—and it won't be the Milton Friedman capitalism, that is just about making money. The new capitalism is that businesses are here to serve their shareholders, but also their stakeholders — employees, customers, public schools, homeless and the planet." 

Marc Benioff,Chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce

New mental models of capitalism

All you dreamers out there - you need to be aware of this!

There are two new trends when it comes to the mental model of capitalism: Stakeholder Capitalism and Conscious Capitalism. I am currently not sure these are just two different names used for the same idea or sibling ideas. However both seem to be very similar and going in a direction that I personally would like to change the world!

Stakeholder capitalism is a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of all their stakeholders. Among the key stakeholders are customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders and local communities. Under this system, a company's purpose is to create long-term value and not to maximize profits and enhance shareholder value at the cost of other stakeholder groups.

Conscious Capitalism is a philosophy stating that businesses should serve all principal stakeholders, including the environment. It does not minimize profit-seeking but encourages the assimilation of all common interests into the company's business plan.
I am delighted that these ideas are discussed both in the World Economic Forum in Davos 2020 and the Business Roundtable 2019. 

What do I think of these ideas? 

Well, first of all they both seem to be emerging concepts at the moment, with many question marks and space for fleshing them out more precisely. However, even in the current shape they constitute significant sign that the dominating mindset set by Milton Friedman back in 1970s has been challenged. At least by a fraction of the business world. 

On the other hand, the obvious shortcoming I can see when reading about these new ideas is that they do not say anything about 1) the structure and 2) the principles of shareholding. I believe that the new capitalism needs to, and will change the principles of who can become shareholder of a company. Shareholders as they are now: being arbitrary, random people and/or institutions looking for profit / Return of Investment, with extremely limited interest in what actually a company does, how it does it, and why, will simply be creating friction, if not be contradictory, to the new mental model of business.

Secondly, both ideas assume that the financial dimension and the notion of shareholding will still be in place when it comes to purpose of business. I guess this is a safe assumption for the next step in the evolution of capitalism since we assume evolutionary change. However I prefer to leave this gate open in long term, as it may turn out that the new mental model of capitalism, or business, or any kind of societal life of the future will need to challenge and replace this assumption. Getting to this stage seems to be a song of far away future now, however it is worth managing expectations straight away and framing it properly from the very beginning: none of the current assumptions and principles of capitalism is written in stone and unchangeable.


p.s. As a result of this finding I have updated my Evolution of work chart to contain both the Stakeholder Capitalism and the Conscious Capitalism as sub-entities contributing to emergence of "Companies as good citizens of the world" entity in the evolution.

Atlassian CEO: An obligation to act: The new social contract of business

“Many companies focus only on the Return on Investment and delivering profit for shareholders. But times have changed. As business leaders we should listen to the views of the workforce; focusing on our impact on society delivers a return of its own. It’s now on us to respond” said Scott Farquhar, co-CEO and co-founder of Atlassian.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200309005313/en/

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

The MIT's Animated History of Work

The unsustainability of human integrity has been of of the aspects of the "technical debt" our civilization has caused. We are responsible for eliminating the debt and building the future of work that serves the purpose we want it to serve!

"We are not just pawns controlled by globalization, technological changes, or any other force totally outside of our control. If we take the right actions and work together, we can shape the future of work in ways that work for all" 

- Thomas Kochan, Shaping The Future of Work (2015)

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.