his talk will present the core concepts of Exponential Business Agility, or XBA. XBA is a set of patterns for organising value streams around self-organising, autonomous teams, and is part of the XSCALE approach to scaling agile. XBA combines the Spotify model with practice patterns drawn from the Iroquois Confederacy, the most successful and longest-lived holarchy in history. Learn how Throughput Accounting optimises the contribution of each business function to top line throughput rather than blindly attempting to minimise operating expense. And discover how Self-Propagating Transformation avoids pushing change into pre-existing teams, programs or silos, but generates agile capability by grafting the kernel of a new culture onto the trunk of the old. Be a pod of dolphins, not a dancing elephant. Don’t try to scale agile. De-scale your organisation instead.

1. eXponential
Simple
Continuous
Autonomous
Learning
Ecosystem
A L L I A N C E
Be a pod of dolphins
Not a dancing elephant

2. Scaling Agile. It’s all the rage.

3. How can we really turn all the dials to 10

4. XSCALE

5. What’s the holdup?

6. “The problem is that we don’t
understand the problem.”
- Paul MacCready

7. Learning is the bottleneck

8. Scaling is an anti-pattern

9. The ideal team size is six

10. Getflow.com & Cyrus Molavi 2015
Workflow data says the most effective team size is 6.

11. The limiting factor in team
productivity is not the number
of bodies, but the number of
relationships to maintain

13. Collaboration Loop Limit
“The maximum number of conversations that have to happen
for any two people in an organization to collaborate.”

14. Managed Team
Team Size: 7
Collaboration Loop Limit: 4

15. Managed Program
Team Size: 43
Collaboration Loop Limit: 8

16. Program/Portfolio Management Office (“PMO”)
Team Size: 259
Collaboration Loop Limit: 12

17. Enterprise Project Management Office (“EPMO”)
Team Size: 1,555
Collaboration Loop Limit: 16

20. “Putting an agile team into a non-agile organization
is like giving a Ferrari to a bus driver.”

21. The people of the
longhouse had a
different solution
What if there was another way. An older, more human way.

22. What if there was another way. An older,
more human way.

26. A longhouse of tribes made a nation.
The five nations as a longhouse: The Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

27. Each bead is a
village of 500 –
1,000. Each
chain is a tribe
of 10 – 20,000
Haudenosaunee
Confederacy
Circa 1600

28. No centralized
decision-making.
Governance by
peer to peer treaties
Clans pick
representatives at
all levels.

29. Small meetings and Directly Responsible Individuals

30. Feature Squads
Split management into three parts:
Coach, Leader and Team.
Coach maintains timeframe and
ceremonies for making decisions.
If and only if the Team isn’t
unanimous, the Leader decides.
Motivating trade-offs to achieve
consensus without politics.
The Leader role ensures decisions
are always made in good time.
BUILDLEARN
MEASURE
TESTS
DATA CODE
REFACTOR
Leadership as a Service
REFACTOR
N
P
Designate different leaders for
different responsibilities: DRIs

31. REFACTOR
N
P
Squad: 4 - 8 people
Chapter: 2 - 10 people
Portfolio: 10 – 80 peopleArchitects/CXD
Analysts
Production Support
Quality Automation
Service Automation
Product Leaders & Coaches
Systems Squads
Product Squads
Feature Squads
Testers
Designers/UXD
Developers
Portfolio Leader
Portfolio Coach
PortfolioSquad
DevOps SMEs
Chapters
Stakeholders
Customer Reps
Systems Leaders & Coaches
© Peter Merel, 2016
Value Streams Chapter Leaders
Maximum

32. Leadership Guild
Coaching Guild
Business & Technology Guilds
Portfolio 2 Portfolio 3 …
Architects/CXD
Analysts
Production Support
Quality Automation
Service AutomationSystems Squads
Testers
Designers/UXD
Developers
Portfolio Leader
Portfolio Coach
DevOps SMEs
Stakeholders
Customer Reps
Systems Owners & Admins
Organization Leader & Coach
© Peter Merel, 2016
Portfolio Collaboration Loop Limit: 4
Autonomous
Product Leaders & Coaches
Product Squads
Feature Squads
Chapters
Chapter Leaders
PortfolioSquad
Value Streams
Squad: 4 - 8 people
Chapter: 2 - 10 people
Portfolio: 10 – 80 people

33. Leadership Guild
Coaching Guild
Business & Technology Guilds
Portfolio 2 Portfolio 3 …
Architects / CXD
Analysts
Production Support
Quality Automation
Service AutomationSystems Squads
Testers
Designers / UXD
Developers
Portfolio Leader
Portfolio Coach
PortfolioSquad
DevOps Reps
Stakeholders
Customer Reps
Systems Owners & Admins
Organization Leader & Coach
© Peter Merel, 2016
Value Streams
Autonomous
Product Leaders & Coaches
Product Squads
Feature Squads
Chapters
Chapter Leaders
InnovationStream
All streams prioritize features to lift bottlenecks.
A stream in innovation mode prioritizes new markets.
Squad: 4 - 8 people
Chapter: 2 - 10 people
Portfolio: 10 – 80 people

34. XSCALE doesn’t try to scale agile.
It de-scales organization.
But de-scaling doesn’t mean down-sizing. It means
Self-directing portfolios of
Self-managing streams of
Self-organizing teams.

35. But
how?

36. Does your agile transformation look like this?

37. Like a steel thread

38. Thank you!
reachme@johnfergusonsmart.com @wakaleo
eXponential
Simple
Continuous
Autonomous
Learning
Ecosystem
A L L I A N C E
http://xscalealliance.org