The major criteria standing in the way of agile adoption or improvement are in the hands of managers, not the teams themselves. But many managers have been trained to think in ways that are a century old.
Agile organisations require a new mode of management and a new style of leadership. This talk discusses why this is and what this new paradigm might be like for your organisation.
6. “Scientific” Management
The Machine model – 3 premises:
1. It is possible to know all you need to in order to plan what
to do
2. Planners and doers should be separated
3. There is but one right way
5
7. The Problem with Power
6
The
Powerful
The
Powerless
Ambition
Politics
Mistrust
Fear
Greed
Resentment
Resignation
12. The Usual Reactions
11
Outcomes
PlansActions
Ref: Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action,
Knowledge Gap:
More detailed
information
Alignment Gap:
More detailed instructions
Effects Gap:
More detailed controls
13. Helmuth Von Moltke , 1869
12
Outcomes
PlansActions
Knowledge Gap:
“Do not command more
than is necessary or plan
beyond the
circumstances you can
foresee”
Alignment Gap:
“Communicate to every unit as much
of the higher intent as is necessary to
achieve the purpose”
Effects Gap:
“Everyone retains
freedom of decision
and action within
bounds
Ref: Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action,
14. Directed Opportunism
13
Outcomes
PlansActions
Knowledge Gap:
Limit direction to
defining and
communicating the
INTENT
Alignment Gap:
Allow each level to define how they
will achieve the intent of the next
level up and ‘backbrief’
Effects Gap:
Give individuals
freedom to adjust their
actions in line with
intent
Ref: Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action,
15. 14
Alignment
Autonomy
Intent: what and why
Actions: how
Adapted from: Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action
Confusion
Clarity
Inaction
Effective
Targeted
action
Misdirected action
16. Alignment needs to be achieved
around intent, and autonomy
granted around actions
High alignment enables high
autonomy
15
20. The importance of employee engagement
• Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in
employee engagement scores across business units
–Gallup poll
• Only 35% of people feel engaged in their work. 43%
feel “detached” or “actively disengaged”. 22% feel
“unsupported”
–Towers Watson, 2012 (32,000 people worldwide)
19
22. A word on Structure
“Any organisation that designs a
system will produce a design whose
structure is a copy of the
organisation’s communication
structure”
- Conway’s Law
21
23. Management is a key factor in
organisational agility –
either constraining or enabling it
22
31. Teams over Individuals
• Work is accomplished by
groups, not individuals
• Individual performance is a
myth
• High performers distinguished
by diverse groups
30Source : Harvard Business School 2004, Betacodex
32. Empower Teams
• Control through bosses
• Information flows up,
commands flow down
• Top-down decision-making
• Rules for containment
• Control through
Transparency, peer pressure
• Principles, shared
responsibility
31Source : Harvard Business School 2004, Betacodex
33. Cross-functional Teams
• Groups aligned by function
• Work requires handoffs
between groups
• Co-ordination via managers
• Cross-functional teams
• Co-ordination among peers
• Faster delivery
32Source : Betacodex
38. Valve
• ‘Flat’ Structure. No bosses.
• People choose their own projects
• Desks with wheels
• Temporary roles within team
• Peer reviews and stack ranking
• “Like high school”
37
40. Evolutionary Purpose
• Living entity
• Strategy emerges organically
• Competition is irrelevant, “competitors” are embraced
• Profits come naturally when focussing on purpose
• Radically simplified budgeting, no variance tracking
• Workable solutions, fast iterations
• Sense what’s needed. No targets
• Change programs irrelevant
39
41. Wholeness
• Self-decorated spaces, no status markers
• Clear values, ground rules
• Meditation, silence, reflection, storytelling practices
• Shape roles according to own need
• Time commitments
• Training in conflict resolution, relational skills, culture-building
• Interviews by future colleagues
• Everyone’s voice is heard in meetings
40
42. Self-management
• No hierarchy. Self-organising teams
• Staff functions performed by teams themselves, esp. hiring,
salaries
• No job titles or job descriptions
• Fully decentralised decision making based on advice process
• Radical transparency of information sharing
• Simplified or no policies for expenses, holidays, working hours
• Formal multi-step conflict resolution process
• Team performance over individual. Peer-based appraisals
41
44. ‘Integral’ model
46
Interior Perspective Exterior Perspective
Individual
Perspective
Collective
Perspective
People’s
beliefs and
mindsets
People’s
behaviour
Organisational
Culture
Organisational
Systems
(structures,
Processes,
Practices)
Source: Ken Wilbur & Frederic Lalouxi
45. ‘Integral’ model
47
Interior Perspective Exterior Perspective
Individual
Perspective
Collective
Perspective
People are
motivated by
money and
recognition
Individualistic
behaviour, cut
corners to
make the
numbers
Internal
competition,
individual
achievers
Top-down target-
setting,
individual
incentives
Source: Ken Wilbur & Frederic Lalouxi
46. ‘Integral’ model
48
Interior Perspective Exterior Perspective
Individual
Perspective
Collective
Perspective
Explore and
challenge
personal beliefs
Role-modelling
from people
with moral
authority
Organisational
Culture
Put in place
supporting
structures,
processes,
practices
Source: Ken Wilbur & Frederic Lalouxi
47. A few pioneering organisations are
showing us the way to
Organisations inspired by the next
stage of human consciousness
49
Notas do Editor
Start with the conclusion:
The way managers do their job today has its roots in practices from over 100 years ago. They have been trained to manage people and/or projects, but that is no longer appropriate. Managers need to manage the environment and the system and empower the people. But how? OR Do we really need managers at all?
Agile has become mainstream with more companies using agile than not. But to be successful, agility must run through the entire organisation. And this is where a lot of companies fall short; why agile transformations are so hard. Decades of ingrained culture and practices take both commitment and perseverance to change. But what needs changing?...
Version One publishes an annual “State of Agile” survey. This is the 2015 one.
Notice any patterns?
6 of the top 8 causes are related to “management”
How about here?
It is clear from this that 6 of the top 8 causes are related to “management”. These are things that team members themselves have recognised but are unable to do anything about. Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches are particularly adept at spotting this type of problem, but again, they usually cannot resolve them.
Agile fails because organisations ‘bolt on’ agile practices at team level without addressing the underlying organisational operating system.
Examples: predictive plans, progress reports, individual measures, annual budgets, org silos, etc
This is where management must be able to step in. But…The problem a lot of organisations face is that their management have little understanding of agile, the problem the teams are facing and their implications, and/or have no relevant training and experience in how to fix them
How do you fix “company philosophy or culture”, “management support (of course I support you!)”? What do you mean “ineffective management collaboration?”. A lot of managers today are ill-equipped to understand these things, let alone deal with them.
But why? What is at the root of these problems? Let’s look at how managers are trained to think
In 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced his concept of “Scientific Management”. He espoused simplifying jobs and optimising them, training workers for maximum efficiency, with managers monitoring performance, incentivising, rewarding and optimising worker efficiency.
He deliberately separated the roles of Thinkers and Doers, the idea being that only the thinkers had sufficient knowledge to plan all the work, and the doers were paid to just do the work, and were not required to think.
This thinking grew from the fact that a lot of the labour force were poorly-educated and most jobs were menial. People were treated just like machines.
“Managers were programmers of robot workers” – Stephen Bungay
This led to a generation of managers, tools and techniques for managing and planning that are still in use today.
Think about the hierarchy at your company – how many layers of management are there? Managers managing managers? Who or what are they managing exactly?
The problem with Theory X thinking :
Reinventing Organisations Case Study https://www.dropbox.com/sh/w5r7138w074bihw/AAAH-VvMyCpZKouDlxXHGy2na/Readings/Reinventing%20Organizations%20Case%20Studies.pdf?dl=0
Tell story of my 300-line Gantt chart
People are not resources, swapping people around is counter-productive
How effective are date-based milestones?
An ‘alternate universe’
This creates competition that mitigates teamwork. Explain
Tell story of project stopped temporarily for lack of budget
Explain delays caused by silos with no clear communication mechanism
Working hours as important as results?
Today, we instinctively realise this thinking is inappropriate in a modern workplace, where so many people are paid to think, to apply their own expertise, so why do we still apply all the old thinking?
Fortunately there are a lot of ideas out there to hep us
Discuss what SJ is advocating? That employees are free to tell management what to do? Complete autonomy?
We need smart people to tell us what needs doing in order to reach the organisation’s strategic objectives
We have strategies, we make plans and we hire smart people… so why is it that the outcomes we want so often don’t materialise
So why is it that managers still feel the need to micro-manage? To control at the detail level?
Knowledge Gap: The difference between what we would like to know, and what we actually know
Alignment Gap: The difference between what we want people to do and what they actually do
Effects Gap: The difference between what we expect our actions to achieve and what they actually achieve
Explain von Moltke’s philosophy of ‘independent obedience’
Walk through bridging each gap
Tracy’s dilemma:
20 minutes before the flight’s departure, a passenger arrives, hot, sweaty and flushed. Passport, ticket, Frequent Flyer Gold Card.
“Sorry, Flight is closed” Passenger insistent.
No reply from supervisor, no customer service agent available.
Ask the audience: What does she do? It depends on how the organisation will react – praise or punish.
Walk through Jurgen’s “ Six Eyes “ monster
Note how similar these are to Leadership, i.e. Managers Lead.
Energize people – give them purpose, clarity
Empower teams – give them decision-making control
Align Constraints – strategy, purpose, objectives
Develop Competence we’ve talked about, but what about Structure?
Originally coined by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month
An HBR study found that the often co-located, focused product teams created software that tended more towards tightly-coupled, monolithic codebases. Whereas the open source projects resulted in more modular, decomposed code bases.
So, if leaders need to create and manage culture, what is that exactly? Well, there are some models we can look at…
Strategy: the plan devised to maintain and build competitive advantage over the competition.
Structure: the way the organization is structured and who reports to whom.
Systems: the daily activities and procedures that staff members engage in to get the job done.
Shared Values: called "superordinate goals" when the model was first developed, these are the core values of the company that are evidenced in the corporate culture and the general work ethic.
Style: the style of leadership adopted.
Staff: the employees and their general capabilities.
Skills: the actual skills and competencies of the employees working for the company.
An example of Leadership, Culture
His CO once empowered him, so he studied all he could and when he took command of USS Santa Fe, the worst ship in the fleet, he was determined to do the same. He realised, that his approach relied on three pillars:
divest control: “I intend to”
emphasise competence : specify goals, not methods
Provide clarity : begin with the end in mind, use guiding principles for decision criteria
Marquet created not followers, but leaders. In one year:
Re-enlistments – 3 to 36
Officer retention – 0% to 100%
Weeks to qualify in subs – 45 to 38
And the Santa Fe became the best sub in the fleet EVER!
Three people have produced very similar pillars to support Leadership.
Ask : what do empowered teams feel like?
Story : Teams re-structuring themselves at Spotify
Human consciousness has evolved hugely.
Each stage includes aspects and behaviours of earlier stages
In “Frontiers of Excellence” (Nicholas Brealey, 1994) Robert Waterman revealed that Theory Y had been a secret weapon in Procter & Gamble's competitive armoury for many years
A senior P&G executive had invited McGregor in the mid-1950s to set up a detergent plant in Augusta, Georgia, along the lines of Theory Y.
The Augusta plant was run in a non-hierarchical way with self-motivating teams along the lines of Theory Y, and by the mid-1960s it was 30% more productive than any other P&G plant. The principle was subsequently applied to other P&G plants, but the company kept the story secret for almost 40 years, regarding it as a competitive advantage.
Logic – Why constrain smart people? Google’s 20% time times 5
No time tracking, no holiday policy
Their model is to increase employee freedom as they grow, instead of adding process and rules
Top of market compensation, $10k benefits for everyone, no internal rankings
Their policy for expenses, entertainment, travel, etc : “Act in Netflix’s best interests”
Teal breakthroughs – Evolutionary Purpose, Wholeness, Self-Management
Tell stories :
- Buurtzorg – 7000 nurses in 600 teams, 30 support staff. Regional coaches, intranet. Hire an expert in labour law? FAQ, hired a freelancer.
FAVI – brass foundry (taps and gearbox forks). 50% market share, quality and on-time delivery. Decentralised planning, purchasing, scheduling etc
ESBZ – Pupils have full learning responsibility, teaching themselves and each other. Adults are mentors and coaches, providing curriculum, modules, exercises and tests. Students self-pace to annual expectations. Weekly 1:1.
In 1980, Ricardo Semler, who had played in a rock band in his youth, took over Semco from his father.
He couldn’t understand why companies had all these rules that told people how to behave, so he started democratising the business.
One-third of managers left in 2 years.
FAVI, based in Hallencourt, France, has been making gearbox forks for 25 years. Branched out into other parts and sub-assemblies for industry, including rotors for electric and hybrid vehicles.
No - Human resources, - Planning - Production launch - Scheduling – Methods, - Purchasing
Stories:
The quality trip to VW
See HBR
Background image
There are already a few models for self-organisation:
Which side is right? Do we focus on the tangible elements of structure and process, or the intangible substance of culture?
Ken Wilber’s Integral model shows how this manifests
People who have a more Orange / Theory X mindset (upper left), will create financial incentive schemes and ambitious targets (lower right). This will affect people’s behaviour (upper right), creating a culture that esteems great achievers above team players (lower left)
In a hierarchical (Orange) organisation, culture is set by the CEO and filters down through assumptions, norms and concerns
From a Teal perspective Organisations have a distinct culture of their own, but how can people consciously bring about that change?
To shape culture:
Put in place the structures, processes and practices that support that culture,
People with moral authority lead by role-modelling the desired behaviours
People are invited to explore how their personal belief system supports or undermines the new culture
Organisations have come a long way over the last few hundred years, and the way we look at them is still evolving.
Existing Managers need to look at these new paradigms, and see how their organisations should adapt to new ways of thinking about people, structures, decision-making and organisational culture.