I came across a webinar hosted by Peter Green in March about the 8 Shifts in Agile Organizations. He studied not only the a handful of excellent books and resources on teams (Leading Teams, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, re: Work) but also one of my personal favorite books on organizations, Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations.
From the case studies in this book and his many years of agile coaching experience, Green identified eight shifts that organizations must undergo in order to be truly agile.
- From focusing on shareholder value to customer delight & shared purpose.
- From predicting and controlling to embracing complexity.
- From efficiency to engagement & adaptability.
- From directed groups to autonomous teams.
- From rigid hierarchies to human systems.
- From structured communications to radical transparency.
- From complicated processes to simple rules.
- From heroic leadership to transformational leadership.
I wanted to share my thoughts on this model, which I think is a fantastic approach to understanding what business agility means and provides some great focus areas for enterprise coaching.
To shift from focusing on shareholder value to customer delight & shared purpose, an agile organization has to embrace customer centrism. They have to put the customer at the center of their purpose. Certainly, a non-profit or community-based organization will find a shared purpose and putting the customer (end user, beneficiary) easier to grasp, but even for-profit organizations must embrace this idea for business agility. While shareholders have a controlling interest in the company, organizations have to realize the intangible benefits of putting customers first or else the inward spiral of concern with only shareholder value will eventually collapse.
To shift from predicting and controlling to embracing complexity, organizations have to recognize that you cannot possibly plan for and anticipate every outcome. The world is too complex and chaotic. The need to learn to build robustness, fortitude, and agility into the organizational culture in order to adapt and respond to change. To be like the Wave Rider that Harrison Owen talks about, companies need to recognize that
high Performance is the productive interplay of diverse, complex forces, including chaos, confusion, and conflict, and characterized by wholeness, health, and harmony.
To shift from efficiency to engagement & adaptability requires organizations to concern less with metrics and more on morale. The ideas of efficiency and attempting to get every drop of productivity out of workers (like getting blood from a stone) harkens back to scientific management championed by Frederick Taylor. This idea that everything can be measured and that the organization is a machine, with all its workers merely cogs, does not fit in the in the third industrial revolution of the digital age nor does it prepare us for the fourth industrial revolution. The modern workplace is filled with knowledge workers who need to be engaged in order to be effective. Organizations should focus on autonomy, mastery, and purpose as Daniel Pink discusses in Drive.
To shift from directed groups to autonomous teams, organizations need to create a more team-centric cultural operating system. A collection of people working on the same things is not a team, it is merely a group of people. To be truly effective at solving complex problems, dealing with the unknown challenges of the future, and engendering creative solutions from diverse and talented employees, organizations need to build great teams.
To shift from rigid hierarchies to human systems, organizations need to recognize that they are not merely a machine that can be designed and structured for maximum productivity. An organization of people is a human system that is self-organizing and will demonstrate emergent behavior. An understanding human systems and a systems thinking approach will build better teams and create a more adaptive organization.
To shift from structured communications to radical transparency, organizations should again allow for emergent behavior from fully dedicated, cross-functional agile teams. Rather than a culture that cherishes status meetings (staff meetings, reports, or another other tactical level meeting where participants have to do extra work just to prepare for a meeting), organizes should move to a culture where work is transparent. Teams are collaborating daily on visible work, and discussing issues in the open as they arise. This requires a new model of communication where trust and openness are expected.
To shift from complicated processes to simple rules, organizations must stop trying to command and control the chaos and complexity that is a human system. Organizations should have a sound economic rules that are simple and allow for emergent behavior from the self-organizing system.
To shift from heroic leadership to transformational leadership, companies need to celebrate successes of teams. Too often, organizations recognize heroic efforts of one person (through bonuses and other rewards), particularly when they pull something out at the last minute. While these acts of heroism may have save the day once, they are not sustainable and do not provide the adaptability to solve the next problem that arises. Instead, organizations need transformational leadership that can serve teams and prepare them for the challenges of the future.
This was an excellent webinar, and I love thinking about the organizational shifts that our agile teams experience.
Until the next iteration . . . .
Jason