UNMESS book by Morten Elvang

UNMESS book by Morten Elvang is the best piece on lean portfolio management I have read since the release of SAFe LPM.

I had a chance to read the book on my way back from #XP2023. I like it a lot. For precise language, for funny bits of dialog with the reader, for jargon vocabulary one can only learn in the field, for the 5 questions, 3 interactions, connections to #cynefin and for the dancing metaphor.

Introducing the Collaborative LPM, the author managed to cross the "framework / process feel" which is present in SAFe LPM and navigate me as a reader through Complex area of Cynefin. CLPM fits there naturally as it is aware of the nature of complexity in this quadrant and applies the style of action recommended by Cynefin. This is a powerful promise to me. I'd really like to see CLPM in action!

The Joseph Pelrine's Mentoring Codes

About a year ago Joseph Pelrine shared his thoughts and reflections on mentoring in this LI post. 

After a year I find myself coming back to it regularly. The mental frame is generous, developmental, and resonating. I copy it here to spread the word and, honestly, for easier reference for myself. In the same spirit of easy referencing I dared to coin the name for this frame.

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further due, here is the copy of the original post of Joseph. 

The Joseph Pelrine's Mentoring Codes 

Some thoughts on mentoring. During a recent conversation with a young friend, I was saddened and shocked to hear that they were looking for someone to mentor them, but all the people they asked demanded lots of money to do so (n.b. they work in a completely different field, so I can’t help them). 

I guess I’m stupid. I could have earned a lot of money from the people I’ve mentored. But I don’t work like that. For me, 

helping others is a social norm and a moral responsibility

My mentoring doesn’t come free of charge, though. I ask for 4 things from the people I mentor: 

1. Make me proud of you. Always strive to do your best. You won’t always succeed, but I’ll help you learn from your failures so that you get better. 

2. Don’t go dark on me. Stay in touch with me and let me know how you’re doing, especially if you’re not doing well. Sometimes we can pick up subtle clues to potential problems that will help us get better. 

3. Look for opportunities for us to work together. Even though I’m not asking you for any money, I don’t mind if your company or your client supports our work financially 

 

4. Pay forward. I’ve only gotten to where I am because my mentors gave freely of their knowledge, and only asked of me what I’m asking of you. As Edith Piaf (supposedly) once said: "when you've reached the top, send the elevator back down for the others".

p.s. Joseph has remained our guru since the dawn of resonate. 

Leadership and management by Henry Minzberg

I am throwing at you a few thoughts on leadership and management that I selected from the interview with Henry Minzberg. There is more in the interview and I encourage you to spend more time on it. 

Quotes:

The trouble with leadership is that it implies an individual. When you say leader, you do not mean a group, you do not mean a community, you don't mean several people, you mean someone. And it's hyper individualistic. And what we need is a community shift not leadership.

Leadership for me is also an intrinsic part of management. They are not separate. In order to manage you need to lead. In order to lead you have to manage. Managers who don't lead are boring. Leaders who do not manage don't know what's going on. So those two things are intricately tied together. But we need to get to the community shift - we need to get to this idea that organisations are great because people are truly pulling together. By paying CEO 300 times more than an employee you are not sending this message, you are sending an opposite message.

Years ago I used to go around giving talks about what’s wrong with MBA programs. And finally people started asking: what are you doing about this? And I used to answer I am an academic, I am not supposed to do anything about anything, I am only supposed to complain.

I maintain that MBAs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences. The wrong people because at the beginning the assumption is they are going to create managers or leaders. Nobody has ever created a leader in a classroom. Nobody has ever created a manager in a classroom. Just as nobody ever created a swimmer in a classroom. You learn to swim in the water. And managers learn to swim by being managers. And only there they can be developed. So we need much more of an involvement and learning from experience.

To learn management, forget learning leadership, nobody learns leadership, start with people who understand management, and then emphasize not the science of management, of which there is little, but the art of management, and particularly the craft of management. Management is about experience. Sit around the table, share the experience, reflect on experience, and learn from each other.

Full material, thanks to Antoinette and Otti from goodorganisations.com is available on their website.


p.s. There is also an interesting continuation into how managers should approach their learning, based on example of strategy formulation following the leadership section which has a selection of beautiful and refreshing thoughts. E.g. Ikea strategy invention, analysis vs synthesis approach, etc. It starts right after the leadership section, approximately 1:30 hours into the interview.

ESG Transformation - making it work and be impactful

“Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.”

― Peter Senge

Is ESG going to significantly impact #the-necessary-transformation or is it just #follow-the-herd reflex?

The story of Tariq Fancy is an example of what happens when one tries to start a transformation from a wrong starting point - from the frozen middle of beneficiaries of the current status quo... 

One player of a bigger game cannot simply start playing by some other rules of the game than the rest of the players during the game - all players need to start a new game based on the new set of goals and principles, and on a different pitch too. 

The necessary transformation needs to start from redefining the rules of the game on a deeper level. In my Good Companies book I advocate for the rules of the game to be derived from a meaning making system. We need to start from Humanity Purpose, and only then redefine the Societal Meaning of Business, and only then deriving the New Mental Model of the Economy, and only then we can expect different behaviours of companies.

Please find the reference to the original material @medium.com here:

The Secret Diary of a ‘Sustainable Investor’ — Part 1

By Tariq Fancy
August 2021

Contractor's fate - characteristics of entrepreneurial approach to career

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

For those of you who are considering becoming a contractor or already are contractors and looking for peer stories this is a very personal glimpse of my experience after a decade of being a contractor.

• Energy (in)balance. It is hard to maintain the energy balanse. This job is really about radiating your energy. I need to cumulate the energy and then radiate it into the human system of the client. I invest in others, both in individuals in companies, I help them grow, I help them achieve success. Lots of people I helped got a career boost thanks to what we did together and thanks to my contribution. Some are grateful, some others are not, assigning success to themselves. Once the job is done the split of benefits is drastically unequal: career advances vs a time to leave for me.  I enjoy that I helped them yet also wish there was something long term in it for me. No, there is nothing long term for me except satisfaction. It is difficult to absorb some of the energy back to compensate for the energy invested. Only a fraction of clients calls again. 

• Yes, it feels lonely sometimes. I work with some of my best friends at resonate.company yet we rarely work together at the same client. Working together is exactly what made us friends and we knew we wanted to repeat this experience, but it is not so easy. So, the synergy effect suffers.

• Lifetime adjourning. It feels lonely also because I have initiated a lot of Communities of Practice within client organizations and enjoyed being the "founding "leader" and then I had to leave them. So, I know a lot of friendly people in companies, yet I have to adjourn to make space for them to grow and become leaders.

• It is you who needs to pull the trigger and leave. For hygiene I tend not to work with the same client for more than 18 months. The power of the external perspective I bring deteriorates with time and I feel I become trapped in the internal perspective as everyone else. At the same time diversity of your exposure to various clients is what makes you attractive and appealing for clients, so even when it is tempting to stay, you should leave to build your value proposition.

• Long-term sense of ownership. As long as there is plentiful of high energy emotions during client engagements, engagements are usually short term, in months, sometimes a year. There is nothing that extends for 5, 10, 20 years and you can say it is your child, your creation. No product, no business unit, no company. They all have new owners. Except for my company, the one I continuously create, of course. That is why I am a part of a bigger digital boutique together with my friends. Our company is something that will outlive me hopefully. And, except for other assets you create - a book for instance, or other acting in addition to your regular contracts. I authored a few books and that is what heals my sense of long-term ownership. As you can see, the long-term ownership becomes your own duty. You cannot rely on a ready to use logo that simply is there and invites you to build long-term ownership simply by identifying with it. By the way, this need for long-term authoring is sometimes perceived by sponsors of contracts as "not engaged enough". I find such framings very unjust, narrow, and missing the understanding. Contractor's duty to develop her own company deserves respect in the same way as a full-time employee's commitment to spend their lifetime in one company. They both look for fulfillment through contribution to something bigger than themselves individually.

• Yes, it feels great to be on my own! No boss, not an aspirational one, not a stupid one. Would I exchange it for a full-time job engagement? May be. It depends :) For sure it would need to be a full-time job with friends and with a high dose of autonomy. It happened to me that my old friends have hired me as a contractor to help them with some topics and it felt really good. I did not care what form the collaboration took formally: a contract or full-time position. It was of secondary importance as long as I could be collaborating and co-creating with friends. 

• Jealous full-timers? I meet lots of people who initially feel a bit jealous of the freedom that is associated with contracting. Many people never had the courage to try, which I fully understand - it takes a characterological profile and a mixture of courage, stupidity, and risk appetite. Sometimes it just takes a coincidence. In my case, it happened naturally, as my first job back in 1998 was remote and in a small company so it did have aspects of contracting. And, by the way, if it makes it easier for you - I never thought I would be a contractor. Some people still say I have the worst profile for a contractor ever. The truth is that I start every job with a thought at the back of my mind that it is going to last for a lifetime. Coming back to my point - being jealous says a lot about the person who is jealous, about some lack, about an unfulfilled need, about questioning whether her style of investing time and building career, and sometimes about the need to go wild. Let me say, that as a contractor I experience jealousy in the same frame but in the opposite direction - I am sometimes jealous about stability, long-term focus, and ownership, about personal development budgets, about weeks of paid holidays, about paid sick leaves, etc. Again, let's appreciate we are just humans trying to contribute and fulfill our lives, and let's respect each other.

The Home movie, Bertrand and Besson, 2009

Home is a 2009 French documentary film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The film is almost entirely composed of aerial shots of various places on Earth. It shows the diversity of life on Earth and how humanity is threatening the ecological balance of the planet. Read more on The Wikipedia.

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.

Community silo-idosis vs collaboration

When I observe the silo effect when it comes to communities of interest, e.g. Agile, Teal, Sociocracy, Holacracy, Org Development, Coaching, etc. , I deeply believe there is a better way to bring value to this world. I see plenty of events, meetup groups and communities tailored in a silo shape. Those are characterized by separate agendas.

What if we create a cross-domain communities? They would be able to deliver end-2-end value stream to the customer, woudn't they? Having experienced the power of interdisciplinary approaches I have no doubt the synergy of working together would take the communities to the next level of maturity, and next level of impact!

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