Tag: ooda

Prescriptive vs descriptive

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Previously: OODA loop takeaways | Next: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

[This post was first published on LinkedIn here – your reactions and comments there welcome!]

What is the Toyota Production System (TPS)? Is it a long list of tools, many with Japanese names – kanban cards, heijunka, andon cords, hoshin kanri, and so on? Or is it an expression of Toyota’s epic, multi-generational pursuit of customer-focused flow, whose practices change as the world changes and as the organisation learns? It’s an important question: the early years of Lean were so entranced by TPS’s surface detail that it failed to grasp not only what produced and sustained it but what would drive its continued evolution.

We can ask a similar question about Scrum. Is it going through the motions of backlogs, planning meetings, daily meetings, reviews, retrospectives, and so on? Or does it seek to paint a picture of a high-performing team iterating its way to product success, goal by goal? [1]

Describe Scrum “left to right”, backlog first, and an Agile fairy dies. Sorry about that! And Scrum is to a significant degree prescriptive. Without the artefacts, events, and roles laid out in the Scrum Guide you’re not doing Scrum. But if, as I have, you have enjoyed the privilege of working on that kind of high-performing, customer-focused team, whether or not you are doing things by the book matters little. And to put Scrum into historical context, for the teams that first inspired the model, there was no book!

Why put yourself through all that pain when you could address scale-related dysfunctions so very much more directly?

Prescriptive models have their place; the better ones capture (without too much distortion, one hopes) what has worked for someone, somewhere. The problem of course is that they tell you to do certain things regardless of whether they actually address whatever problems are most pressing in your context. The larger the model and the more expensive, time-consuming, disrupting, and (above all) distracting it is to implement, the bigger this problem becomes. I’m not against the models so much as their rollout; in the case of the scaled Agile process frameworks, for example, why put yourself through all that pain when you could address scale-related dysfunctions so very much more directly?

That’s an issue for Chapters 4 and 5 of Wholehearted; here I want to say some more about descriptive models – models that describe what’s there, useful not for what they prescribe but for the insights they bring and those they trigger. One such model is the OODA loop, the subject of my previous article and referenced in Chapter 2, but the book’s main model is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a reconstruction of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), scoped to the digital-age organisation.

It really isn’t something you roll out. It has no prescribed process, organisation structure, roles, or practices. It is descriptive of organisations because it identifies aspects that every organisation must inevitably have to at least some degree, likewise pretty much any organisational scope at any organisational scale that you might identify with. To say that it is useful is an understatement; its undoubted power lies in the relationships between aspects, relationships at and between every scale of organisation that lead to dysfunction if they are out of balance. Working in the other direction, many if not most of the dysfunctions that your organisation currently manifests can be understood relationally.

It might sound abstract to understand a dysfunction in terms of relationships between aspects, but it really helps. You are much less likely to point the finger at some person or group if you can point to a relationship between things you can easily depersonalise. Working at the problem from both ends and from the middle, your solution options are doubled and tripled.

For example, you might follow best practices in the conduct of your delivery-related work and have what you believe to be a world-class system for coordinating that work. But best-practice and world-class or otherwise, if their relationship is not healthy and productive, that’s a real problem. What is the nature of that conflict? That is worth digging into. More than that, it’s worth getting multiple perspectives on it – from those who do the work, those who administer and/or champion the coordination system, and others impacted by the problem. If they can articulate a shared understanding what “good” feels like for that relationship and identify what seems to be getting in the way of that, testable solution ideas can’t be far behind.

The model has enough aspects to be interesting – six “systems” organised into three overlapping “spaces” – and not so many that the model overwhelms, especially if it is taken one space and three systems at a time. Its richness is in its relationships: each system or space has at least two, and that’s considering only one level of organisation. Relationships between scales of organisation (and in practice there are typically many more of those than the org chart shows) are multi-stranded, and untangling those is key to understanding scale-related dysfunction. Understand the problem and you’re already making real progress. Can the same truly be said about the rollout alternative?

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation hit Amazon last month. You can find both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books.

[1] ‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too (July 2018)

Previously: OODA loop takeaways | Next: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

OODA loop takeaways

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Previously: Engage with the organisation *as it actually is*

[This post was first published on LinkedIn here – comments there welcome!]

I’m old enough to have grown up with the original BBC Radio version of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, and this was one of my favourite scenes (one of the several that as teenagers we would recite at school):

MARVIN: I’ve just worked out an answer to the square root of minus one.

FORD: Go and get Zaphod.

MARVIN: It’s never been worked out before. It’s always been thought impossible.

FORD: Go and get –

MARVIN: I’m going. Pausing only to reconstruct the whole infrastructure of integral mathematics in his head, he went about his humble task. Never thinking to ask for reward, recognition, or even a moment’s ease from the terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side. “Fetch Beeblebrox,” they say, and forth he goes.

“Pausing only to reconstruct the whole infrastructure of integral mathematics in his head, he went about his humble task”. That line comes to me when I think about how I first responded to John Boyd’s OODA loop, which I introduce in Chapter 2 of Wholehearted, the chapter titled “Adaptive Strategising”:

OODA loop image by Patrick Edwin Moran, after John Boyd. CC-BY 3.0. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

To understand my initial reaction, you need to know that before John Boyd became known as a military strategist, he was a fighter pilot. Looking at the Orient part of that picture, did he – mid combat, and before executing his next move – pause only to reconstruct the entire infrastructure of cultural traditions, genetic heritage, etc on which his performance was founded? Doing that faster than his adversary – “getting inside their OODA loop”, as the popular takeaway goes – is that what was key to his survival?

To some extent perhaps, but that is, I think, to miss the point. Acting in the moment, a highly trained pilot draws on what they know. Flashes of insight may occur, but most of the learning comes afterwards, reflecting on what happened, integrating the experience and the new information that it generated. That’s a much longer loop than the moment-to-moment decision-making of combat.

There is no adversary whose OODA loop you need to get inside!

Mercifully (and I don’t say this lightly), most of us will never experience combat. Our situations are not even best understood as adversarial. There is no adversary whose OODA loop you need to get inside! But, and paraphrasing if not directly quoting Boyd himself, we do need to “develop our capacity for independent action”. We need somehow to stay in the game when the game itself may be changing, and that Orient box – the only one that connects to all the others – is crucial.

Boyd was right: it is important to bear in mind that the understanding and the intelligence on which our strategies depend are very much products of the past – of our “tradition” and “heritage”, if you like. For your organisation, how it thinks depends very much on the path it has travelled. Moreover, its current structure and its priorities speak to how it now understands the world and its challenges. And therein lies another challenge: let it not be forgotten that they are significant constraints on what new intelligence and insights it will be capable of gathering and generating.

Effective strategising must therefore be conscious of the fact that everything that it thinks it knows is not only very incomplete, it has passed through perceptual filters that are both narrow and path-dependent. You can’t escape that, but you can act accordingly. Not as catchy as the popular takeaway, but that, for me, is the one to remember.

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation hit Amazon earlier this month. You can find both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books.

Previously: Engage with the organisation *as it actually is*