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.

Evolving to become truly yourself

We are all chasing for a meaningful life and becoming truly ourselves is a cornerstone of this effort. How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you felt that, in spite of your knowledge, experience, positive emotions and dedication, you could not achieve the impact you envisaged as possible and desired? Such moments are crucial for many reasons, including opportunity to reflect & retrospect, but most importantly, in the context of this article, such moments are crucial because they define who you become. Or even more precisely: the way you handle such situations are crucial to who you become.

Immediate behaviors

Let's see how the action flows in such situations. If you decide to frame such a situation in your mind as a case of hitting your head against a wall then your reaction can be twofold: you can either (1) become aggressive or you can (2) become passive. Such framing results in a limited set of options at hand: you quit, you decide to start over again or you accept the reality at the cost of becoming numb. No need to say that in all these options you are far from where you would like to be. Becoming aggressive means that you decide to fight for your point of view and opinions and let your frustration out even at a cost of sacrificing your relations. Then you have even more reason to quit. If you still believe your opinions will bring good, you start over again, investing even more energy to make things right this time. However the wall is still there and this particular reaction archetype will push you in the same framing: as a result the archetypes will loop you back to the same options: quit, start again or become numb. After so many attempts you are drained of energy, see no hope to change anything and either you quit or become numb. There is a probability that even when you start in a new place, the pattern will repeat itself. Aggressiveness and passiveness are the two archetypes of immediate reactions that our minds inherited from predecessors. These are both automatic reactions originating from the level of the automatic mind.

Situational Awareness

Now imagine that your situational self-awareness enables you find another alternative - you (3) act assertively. Assertiveness prevents you from burning out personally and lets you keep your relations in a good working condition. This is possible thanks to a skill to take time for a reflection. And a reflection lets you look at the situation in separation from the "I" perspective. You can actually look at the situation from multiple perspectives - you are now a cold-blooded external observer. You keep the archetypal behaviors under control and can have more objective, or at least less biased, view of the situation and choose your options consciously.

So what do you see detached from your own "I" perspective? You see an individual embedded in the Current Reality while dreaming of being embedded in the Ideal Reality and being stretched by the forces of tension in the Expectation Gap between these two realities. The individual can behave twofold: (1) s/he can be trying to get Current Reality closer to Ideal Reality, or (2) s/he can be leaning towards accepting the Current Reality. There are two currents in the Expectation Gap one can ride. The Creative Tension current that through Learning leads you to Meaning and helps you pull the Current Reality up closer to the Ideal Reality. You need psychological safety and allies to keep paddling in this current. And there is the Destructive Tension current that through Declining leads you to Numbness and keeps you imprisoned in the Current Reality. In the end the destructive current makes you accept the Current Reality, whatever it is, as your only reality. How quickly you drift there depends on the level of fear and isolation you are exposed to.

Reflection

How do you like this perspective? I do like the perspective a lot, because such framing shows that it is my decisions that create myself. This is where personal responsibility is born. This is where courage is born. This also shows that Meaning is Responsibility not a Need! Now the Cartesian question "What will happen if I do not act on the situation?" becomes striking and thus, through a scary vision of the future based on not acting, motivating to act! Now, after building the objective perspective on the situation, we are ready to explore all the options.

Options

Decisions you make on this level of situational self-awareness are the decisions that create yourself. Options expand on the continuum starting from baby steps of Continuous Improvement and ending at the big bangs of Discontinuous Disruption. The continuous improvement builds on the last stable state to transition to a new stable state adjacent to the previous one. Where continuous evolution is insufficient, discontinuous disruption can take a system further away from the current state helping to surpass being stuck in the local optimum and keep evolving further to a state less related to the current state.

Decision making

Remember that the goal of decision making is to expand your influence on the Current Reality. You need to expand what is under your Control and what you Influence while limiting the part of the Current Reality that you can only passively Acknowledge.

And finally, to ensure the decisions you make are of high quality, you need to look closer at how your decision making approach looks like. We human question, challenge and adapt how we make decisions surprisingly rarely. It usually takes a completely changed environment that we need to adapt to even if we do not want to. No surprise that going through change is difficult as the decision making process is one of these automatic processes that one does not realize without additional attention and awareness. According to the Double Loop Learning the decision making can be adapted twofold: (1) by adapting the current mental model of the decision maker and / or (2) by adapting the decision making rules.

Encouragement

We are all chasing for a meaningful life and becoming truly ourselves is a cornerstone of this effort. You would not be who you are today without mentally stretching yourself and learning in difficult situations. Be good to yourself and be patient, give yourself time. It has always been a journey and it always will be. Keep the Cartesian question in mind: "What will happen if I do not act on the situation?" and catch the Creative Tension current!

Special thanks to @Saranya Jeganathan at superpptdesigns for creating the poster based on my manual sketch.

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.