Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
June 19, 2019
Failure is inevitable; it’s a natural part of running a business. An agile organization is therefore not designed to prevent failure—this is both impossible and dangerous. Instead, its objective is to identify what amplifies failure, keep these factors from creating harmful outcomes, and continuously learn from the experience. Agile organizations that practice this are highly fault-tolerant and designed to generate frequent “safe-to-fail” experiments, rather than optimized toward a flawless environment. That is, practice informs theory—not the other way around.
...an organization of engaged people”: Agile enterprises recognize that individuals who care about the work they do and have meaningful interactions with their fellow colleagues will outperform any process, tool, or workflow any day of the week. Although tools, methods, and techniques can be extremely useful, they are merely a complement to, not a replacement for, people collaborating toward creating value.
Value creation in an agile workplace has two aspects: execution and exploration.
Only by designing the organization for both exploitation and exploration can we take advantage of the opportunities inherent in proven, mature markets while actively searching for new disruptive technologies, products, and business models.
proven, low-risk business efforts, while a significant, yet smaller part of the total portfolio is allocated to riskier, more innovative endeavors.4
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Part of what makes Scrum so popular is that it is elegantly simple. But don’t let the simplicity fool you—simple does not equal easy.
there tends to be a relatively high level of autonomy and
employee engagement in matrix structures.
The main drawback of the matrix organizational structure is that employees are supervised by multiple managers at once.
Having a single manager would help in terms of gaining clarity. With two managers—each coming from different perspectives—you may be faced with delivering two work items, both being number one on the priority list.
the matrix structure brings with it significant complexity and overhead, requiring excessive coordination and dependency management.
The term Sociocracy comes from the Latin and Greek words socius (companion) and kratein (to govern). Sociocracy aims to put people first and considers all employees to be equals. In contrast to the more traditional organizational structures we discussed earlier where there is a single decider at the top, decision-making in Sociocracy is based on consensus—the notion that a group of individuals can get behind a decision together without objections.
A central idea in Holacracy is the focus on roles. A role is not a job description in the traditional sense; it is a definition of the purpose, span of control, and accountabilities involved in getting work done. This means a person in an organization can take on multiple
An end-to-end perspective with the customer in mind:
Self-organization toward a common purpose:
A dedication to continuous improvement and technical excellence: Software craftsmanship and a culture of engineering
Empowering people to make and meet commitments:
What made Spotify’s model work for the company then is not what it looks like today. Since 2012, Spotify has grown tremendously. Although some of the same structures still remain (tribes, chapters, and so on), there are now additional layers, roles, and more structure added to accommodate a different context. And it’s still evolving.
“If nobody wants to quit when you’re going through a significant transformation, you’re clearly not doing it right!”2
psychological safety,
Embracing Diversity Fostering a growth mind-set is an excellent way to encourage more adaptability and innovation in the organization, but it is not enough. The range and variability of ideas inherent in your organization will be constrained by the relative homogeneity of your employees. To embrace change, it is also necessary to ensure your organization consists of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. In the sections that follow, we describe some of the kinds of diversity you should consider as part of your hiring and retention strategy. We also outline some of the benefits of diversity
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intelligence, such as abstract thinking, pattern recognition, and working memory (“fluid intelligence”) may decline over time, other characteristics,
