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94% of problems in business are systems-driven and only 6% are people-driven. —Attributed to W. Edwards Deming
The transition to a better way of working can be made. But not with the change management they teach in business school.
Evolutionary Organizations aspire to eudaemonic purpose—missions that enable human flourishing.
individual roles have a purpose that, if properly articulated, eliminates the need for lengthy job descriptions.
Legacy Organizations are obsessed with measurement, often using it as a form of control—to find and punish weak performance. But when we obsess over metrics, we fall victim to Goodhart’s law, which states that a measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.
sometimes our purpose is to take humanity to new places, places they can’t yet see for themselves.
Clarify your purpose so that you can see it three decades down the line. Then tighten up your road map for the next half year.
motivation is connected to a sense of purpose, meaning, and belonging.
When you join a Legacy Organization, the default assumption is that you don’t have the right to do anything unless you are given permission.
Evolutionary Organizations ensure that everyone has the freedom and autonomy to serve the organization’s purpose.
Who can make a decision and how it should be made are critical components of your OS, and can’t be left to chance.
more freedom leads to more learning, and more learning leads to better performance.
our addiction to control masquerading as “risk management.” What firms like this fail to recognize is that the true risk they face is that bureaucratic immobilization will make them irrelevant.
Maximizing freedom means minimizing policy.
“Policies are organizational scar tissue.
Leaders are elected, and team members move fluidly across teams as the business and their skills evolve.
Fluid - as in Fluid Scaling Technology (FAST Agile)
Haier is the world’s largest and fastest-growing home appliance company, leveraging its unconventional structure to thrive amid uncertainty.
it’s easy to end up with massive functional silos if you’re not careful.
What most massive organizations seem to forget is that we can operate as a marketplace of tribes, serving the customer and one another independently and responsively.
FAST Agile - a marketplace of tribes!
S-L-A-M stands for self-managed, lean, audacious, and multidisciplinary.
Dynamic Teaming.
FAST Agile!
Find a part of your business where teams change regularly and turn it into a dynamic two-way marketplace.
FAST Agile!
Members have the ability to join or leave teams
FAST Agile!
members can manage their own bandwidth (i.e., hold more than one role).
Allow teams to reorganize continuously rather than in grand gestures every few years.
FAST Agile!!!
in an Evolutionary Organization it can be hard to tell the difference between doing something because it’s strategic and doing something because it’s the right thing to do.
When purpose is paramount, anything that serves the purpose is strategic, even if it’s not overtly commercial.
many organizations forget how potent the connection between purpose and strategy really is. If you don’t have a compelling vision—a dent in the universe beyond shareholder value—your strategies will fall flat.
There are two things to watch out for here. The first is, again, Goodhart’s law. Once people set their OKRs, they’re going to do everything they can to hit them, including things that aren’t good for the business.
The second is that many firms try to use OKRs as a form of top-down control, ensuring that each subordinate’s OKRs fit with the OKRs of their superior. While this feels like alignment, it all but eliminates any chance of divergence or serendipity.
A healthy system is not going to cascade in a perfect hierarchy of intent. We want outliers. We want wild swings. Not a lot, but enough.
The problem with priorities is that we have too many.
when you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing.
One of the processes that stands in the way of reinventing our way of working is the annual planning process.
Create shared consciousness through forums and tools that integrate different perspectives, and question the logic of your strategy regularly.
Accept that in areas of rapid change, your strategy is only as good as your ability to learn and adjust course.
Budgets also suffer from being too rigid and unresponsive. In a complex world, circumstances change quickly, but traditional budgets don’t.
budgets can actually work against performance. Dr. Steve Morlidge offers a simple explanation for this in The Little Book of Beyond Budgeting.
The Beyond Budgeting community plays host to a treasure trove of stories and practices that defy convention.
Where a Legacy Organization might commit to a specific revenue-growth target for the year, Beyond Budgeting would recommend beating the average performance of their competitors.
In an uncertain world, relative performance is the only true benchmark.
The Beyond Budgeting folks believe that individual performance doesn’t really exist. Performance is a team sport.
successful communities leverage something she calls polycentric governance.
Zero-based budgeting originated in the 1970s as a way of challenging the inertia of bloated budgets that persist year after year.
How does our approach enable us to respond to emergent events?
Accept that you cannot predict the future. Choosing how and where to spend your money a year in advance is folly.
Because of our obsession with efficiency, most organizations like to keep innovation and operations separate.
people are inherently creative given the right conditions. Trust them to sense opportunity and pursue it fluidly. A true culture of innovation is one where we can’t tell the difference between operations and invention.
Spotify’s workflow is how it ensures that teams are “loosely coupled but tightly aligned.”
FAST is better than Spotify. Just sayin'
How do we handle projects that are too big for one team?
FAST Agile!!!
