Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Simon Powers
Read between
October 24 - November 11, 2023
After many months, I finally realised where the problem lay. It was in the organisations’ cultures. The organisations were so dysfunctional, so sterile, and so authoritarian that I simply could not be me. I brought half myself to work and left the rest behind. No wonder I felt incomplete.
Growth and profit come from focusing on customer value and staff happiness.
Neither customers nor staff will be motivated around a company profit agenda.
Agility taken to its logical conclusion leads to the most exceptional companies reorganising to become a set of entrepreneur-led, partially autonomous, customer-focused teams that are able to deliver the right value to customers right when they need it most.
Move to networked teams. Entrepreneurial product owners are enabled to make commercial decisions, and the teams are able to deliver real value quickly with much lower work in progress and risk.
An organisation that is designed with specialist teams will never be agile. They will not achieve any measure of predictability in terms of delivery, and then they will need two, three, or even four times the number of staff to deliver anything. This is vitally important to understand: to achieve agility, you have to remove the specialist teams.
For those of you who are familiar with the application of spiral dynamics made popular in the book Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux[7], it is partly learning how to adjust ourselves so that Teal and more advanced organisational consciousness can arise.
The best people to work out how they should work are the people doing the work.
Rolling out change programs is a nice simple solution that doesn’t work. Organisational change, like climate change, requires an interdependent consciousness and a shift in identity.
To compete in this advanced marketplace with its increased flow and complexity requires a business optimised to do so.
Agile has been distorted into huge process-led changes that are never going to allow the organisation to succeed in complex environments.
many leaders are not yet ready to lead an agile organisation
We are not seeking agility for its own sake; instead, we are seeking to create better organisations that are able to adapt and thrive in their markets with engaged staff who are motivated to make a difference.
A single instance of the Enterprise Change Pattern is best suited to: Teams of people up to 150 (we explore larger numbers later); and Groups of people who need to solve complex adaptive problems.
The beliefs that leaders hold shape the entire organisation. You can see this need for certainty and predictability in the yearly financial forecasts, budgets, market promises, silo teams, lengthy planning cycles, and adoption of large ‘agile’ scaling frameworks such as SAFe. The result of these structures is that they lock in huge amounts of work in progress, loss of quality, and lack of ownership that make it impossible for organisations to change direction without huge loss of work and money.
Organisational duality dynamics: Centralised coordination vs decentralised or self-organising Keeping the lights on vs new product innovation Short-term vs long-term strategy Getting work done quickly vs getting the right work done Working for a purpose vs making money Working from home vs all being together Sometimes these dualities align, and sometimes they do not. There is no right answer, and often tenuous and temporary balances can be formed that need constant care and revision to maintain a financially and emotionally stable business.
When looking to implement agility across an organisation, it seems to be the norm to start with software development teams and make them all do scrum or SAFe. This is a beginner’s mistake. I can understand why this happens; it is the same sort of rookie behaviour that makes me wince when I still find development teams who do not test first.
According to five different sources, around 70 percent of agile transformations fail. (Gartner Group, McKinsey, Bain, IBM, and HBR). The top three reasons for this failure are incorrect leadership style, lack of agile mindset, and organisational silos (Business Agility Institute). I would argue that organisational silos are a historical effect of the first two: incorrect leadership styles and lack of the agile mindset beliefs.
The Enterprise Change Pattern specifically starts with the customer (pressure from market) and then leadership. Do not start including other people until leaders are fully aligned on the business problem, the agile mindset, and a people-first approach. This is my biggest warning and takeaway of the book!
You are ready to include others when your leadership team has already adjusted their behaviours and not just their understanding. Understanding people and agility is easy; living it requires more work.
Instead of trying to defy the laws of human capability and asking people to work closely with more than 150 people, we must reduce the team size to less than about 150 people. My personal favourite size of a team is about 80 people. This is what descaling the organisation means. It is reducing the number of people that are required to deliver something useful and getting them to work together in the same team.
A team is a building block in an organisation’s design. Each team is an entrepreneurial unit.
Teams should not be larger than 150 and preferably a maximum of 80. The team has a common purpose and business outcome. A team has one and only one product backlog and one entrepreneurial product owner. A team always speaks directly to the stakeholders/customers. They rely on each other to succeed. They work on items together, rather than each person having an item each. They are able to collaborate, sense, sense-make, and innovate together. They iteratively deliver value to and receive feedback from customers, so that they are able to take feedback into consideration when prioritising the
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A hidden phenomenon of the real team is that it creates a shift in the identity of members from the small mini-team, silo team, or individual to the scope of the real team working on the whole solution.
I am not going to go deeper into cross-functional teams and T-shaped people because this has been covered in so many agile books and materials.
Volunteers create more ownership than those who are drafted As a general rule, if people choose to be a part of the team, they tend to have a more positive attitude and deeper ownership of improving the team’s ways of working.
Removing gateways and combining teams can actually deliver work four times faster[3]
FaST!
don’t try and do agility from the bottom up—follow the Enterprise Change Pattern.
Real teams are the main building block of an agile organisation. A real team is able to deliver real value to stakeholders and customers without any dependencies on other parts of the organisation. Real teams do not face off to other parts of the organisation as their customer. Customers are people who consume or pay money for the organisation’s services. A real team increases flow, decreases time to customers, and is the primary method of achieving agility. Real teams are formed by breaking apart silo or specialist teams and reforming with all the skills needed to deliver products.
FaST!
if an organisation starts with team-based agile approaches, they start with single-loop retrospectives, and this often leads to a shallow gain. This is another reason why we must start with leaders and not delivery teams when we are looking to shift an organisation’s way of working so that they can thrive in uncertain and complex times.
Autonomy doesn’t work unless there is psychological safety, which means: The power to speak up without fear of retribution The courage to speak up in front of your peers
Given that our environment is constantly changing, our organisations must constantly change. The more rapid the pace of change, the more adaptable or agile we must be. However, change comes at a cost. If we do not build into our processes the ability to adapt, then the gap between the organisation’s operations and outputs and the environment will grow bigger.
Personally, the most I can handle is about 120 people for complex decision-making that will change the way people work. My favourite size is about 80 people. This is easily managed with the techniques I know and the time span that most organisations allow for decisions.
In the complex problem domain, we are looking to iterate rapidly and gain feedback so that we can change direction with low cost. You can’t do this with more than about 80–120 people. Descaling the organisation into smaller ‘real teams’ not only improves flow of value and agility and lowers cost, but it also improves ownership, innovation, and the ability to create sensible autonomy. Autonomy is the practice of deciding how you will carry out the work. Once the organisation has embraced the fact that we can descale into small ‘real teams’, then emergent collective decision-making becomes much
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If we want people to optimise to the product level and customer value flow, then the team members must feel that is the organisational unit and job role that they ‘belong’ to and identify with. This is simple to do. If the whole product team has meetings together and is actively engaged with problem-solving, they will develop a whole product identity. Renaming job roles to product developers regardless of their skillset is an additional step. However, having everyone problem solve together is the most effective. Creating ownership and making product-level decisions requires a small enough team
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Knowledge workers know their work much better than leaders, managers, and agile coaches. Knowledge workers are also problem solvers. Problem-solving is what they have been hired for.
