Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
Arthur Ashe
“Start where you are” doesn’t have to be about process! Try this exercise:
Disregarding organisational boundaries, and in relation to the work you are already committed to (your “organising commitments”), who do you interact with? Then reflexively: who interacts with you regarding their organising commitments? And transitively: who do they interact with, who interacts with them, and so on outwards?
Again disregarding organisational boundaries, and whether as an act of planning or of response to something unexpected, who do you consult with when your organising commitments need to change? And again reflexively and transitively: Who consults with you, who do they consult with, and so on outwards?
Now reflect on the relationships you have identified in those two networks. Whose relationships don’t you understand as well as you might? To the extent that it affects your own work, what context do you lack that others might be able to provide? Who else might be struggling for lack of context that you or someone closer to you might be able to provide? Is it time then for some trust-building conversations?
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Upcoming events
With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated.
Happy New Year! For me it’s a big anniversary: this time in 2013 I had spent the New Year’s break taking the principles and practices of the Kanban Method, and from them abstracting a system of nine values. Then on January 3rd, I published Introducing Kanban through its values. Kanban’s values model was born.
Nine values are quite a lot to hold in one’s head at once, so I soon learned to present them in groups:
An initial six, or two groups of three: transparency, balance, and collaboration, then customer focus, flow, and leadership
Then understanding, agreement, and respect, which for reasons of brevity are often subsumed under leadership
In most of the decade since, it has been my most-read post each year. And it led to my first book, Kanban from the Inside (2014), which remains a Lean-Agile classic. Great! Now what?
I had no interest in making Kanban any more technical than it already was; if anything, the values model would always draw me in the opposite direction. Neither was I drawn to the emerging Kanban Maturity Model (or any other such model). What I did instead was to allow a common problem to bother me: why do so many people arrive at the training class not knowing why they are there? Tempting as it might have been to see that as a failure of administration or marketing, I saw it instead as a symptom that there were important organisational conversations that simply weren’t happening.
I realised quickly that this problem was far from unique to Kanban. To those that resent having had Scrum or (later) SAFe thrust upon them, the Agile manifesto’s “People and interactions over processes and tools” must ring rather hollow.
That took me away from Kanban into the realms of organisation, leadership, and strategy, to the development of Agendashift, and then sort of full circle, not back to Kanban and Lean-Agile specifically, but to business agility. Ten years on, as practice gets refined through use, as its message gets refined through the telling, and as we dig ever-deeper roots into the available theory, three main topic areas co-evolve together:
As described now in two editions of the Agendashift book (2nd ed 2021), Agendashift the engagement model (thank you Daniel Mezick for describing Agendashift as such) and dialogic/generative organisation development approach (thank you Gervase Bushe & Bob Marshak), a way for practitioners to approach organisations without prejudging what solutions they will employ(/impose/inflict) and instead to help them have those missing conversations – engaging in participatory strategy, as it turns out
The wholehearted organisation, a deliberately minimalistic values-based model of organisation and leadership, a spinoff from my third book, Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020) that unexpectedly gained a life of its own
The leadership development curriculum Leading with Outcomes, which compared to Agendashift minimises detail relevant mainly to practitioners, and instead distils some easily-learned patterns, strategies, and organisational models relevant to leaders at all levels, leaders in transforming organisations most especially
Explicitly in both Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes and implicitly in wholehearted, we have doubled down on the eighth value of that initial nine-value model, namely agreement. What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? One way or another, I’ve been asking that question for most of the past ten years, and I have no doubt that it will keep me going for a good while yet.
I no longer identify as a Kanban guy. That separation was necessary to what followed, but all these years later I remain proud of the work I did there, of that first book, and of the blog post that started it all. Not that I’m planning on retiring anytime soon, but I have long seen it as marking the beginning of the rest of my career.
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Upcoming events
With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated.
A strategy that ignores the obstacles is liable to fall at the first hurdle. That’s if it even gets that far – who will take seriously a strategy that ignores the issues? Turn those obstacles into outcomes Agendashift-style, and organise them so that you can establish a sense of direction, identify places to focus your efforts, and measure progress and success, well you’re in much better shape.
Most things Agendashift-related come with leadership lessons too, hence Leading with Outcomes. Here, in a psychologically safe environment, it must be ok to talk about obstacles. As a leader, you have a responsibility to encourage that to happen. But we can take that basic lesson further: how we talk about obstacles matters too.
Ever since a workshop in Berlin in 2019*, we’ve paid closer attention to how obstacles are framed. What started out as an effort to debug one breakout group’s frustrating experience turned into a new exercise, Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle (yes there’s a nod to Rumelt in the name there).
Ostensibly, the exercise’s job is to frame obstacles such that the conversations to turn them into outcomes will be productive and satisfying, even enjoyable. What we repeatedly find though is that it helps us get to deeper issues and at the same time puts a spotlight on the organisation’s discourse. A bugfix becomes a key feature!
The exercise’s goal is to produce obstacles that are real, relevant, and representative – describing things that colleagues would quickly recognise, that affect their everyday work, and worded as they might word them. As per the title of this post, the trick (if “trick” is the right word – it can take real effort) is to sell the pain, not the solution, the theory, or the blame.
Some examples of “bad” obstacles:
Lack of a knowledge management system
Lack of people, money, or time
Lack of WIP limits
Lack of the Agile mindset
Lack of leadership
Lack of quality
The problem isn’t the “lack of” language (or “scarcity language”, as I sometimes call it), though that’s a strong smell. The problem is what those obstacles are selling: solutions, theories, or blame (or a combination), all of which get in the way of agreement. They’re easily dismissed (they may exclude better solutions or theories, for example), they call for things that everyone knows are unlikely to be forthcoming, or people feel judged by them.
Instead of those “lack ofs”, tell the more interesting side of the story. Sell the pain. Identify the real issue. That way lies the path to agreement on outcomes, a more coherent and robust strategy, and a more purposeful innovation process. And if you want your organisation’s discourse to improve, try paying attention to how obstacles are articulated. The conversation to turn a bad obstacle into a good one (in your next retro, perhaps) might be more important than you might think.
*See Events below – I’ll be back in Berlin in February, my first trip outside the UK since Covid!
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes Mike Burrows, part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Network #1: Your reporting network. This is just your formal structure – typically a hierarchy, perhaps with the occasional bit of dual reporting thrown in – seen here as lines of communication. Because sideways communication has to be implemented indirectly via upward and downward communication, it can be highly inefficient.
Network #2: Your delivery operations network. I am referring not to material flows or to the knowledge work equivalent, but to the interactions between people that make those flows what they are, performing as they do. In siloed organisations, the delivery operations network cuts across the reporting network, sometimes uncomfortably.
Network #3: Your strategy network. Typically richer than the reporting network, this connects everyone involved in anybody else’s strategic decision-making – any decision-making at any level of organisation that impacts on things like identity, purpose, objectives, learning, and adaptation. A more abstract and less messy version of this network connects not people but domains of responsibility at varying levels of granularity (see circular organisation).
Network #4: Your trust-building network. This is the network of all connections that are enhanced by meaningful efforts to build or maintain mutual trust. In a high-trust organisation, this can be expected to overlap significantly with the preceding three networks.
Network #5: Your social network: All the above and more – the totality of your organisation’s network of interaction and influence, covering all the conversations that contribute to making your organisation what it is and what it is becoming.
And two hypotheses (with caveats):
Hypothesis 1. The more that networks 2, 3, and 4 are healthy, the more that networks 1 and 5 look after themselves.
Hypothesis 2. The richer you can make them, the more likely is the serendipitous conversation, increasing the rate of innovation.
As rightly observed in some of the questions and comments on the first version of this post, these hypotheses are slightly in tension. Rich is good, richer would be better for many if not most organisations, and leaders within them would do well to pay attention to those networks. You can however have too much of a good thing, not to mention that some innovation happens in the darker corners, so to speak. In my use of the word “healthy” in hypothesis 1 I did intend a sense of balance, and I should have worked that sense into hypothesis 2 also. Instead though, this paragraph’s caveats 🙂
Some questions for you:
In your organisation, which network or networks dominate?
At what cost?
Given where you sit in each of these networks and the reach that they afford you, what might you do?
Your answers, questions, or feedback can go on the original post (linkedin.com).
You can also take them to one of the upcoming webinars – the first three (December 8th, January 12th, February 2nd) finish with an AMA (Ask Mike Anything) session. Including that webinar series, The questions that drive us (eventbrite.co.uk), all our upcoming events:
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
PS The slide below is adapted from the talk I gave last week at SEACON (the Studies in Enterprise Agility Conference). Video to follow.
Recap: Somewhat in the style of my 2013 breakthrough post Introducing Kanban through its values, here is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (“business agility at every scale”) introduced through a set of six commitments.
Co-creation – To keep finding better options, together
Sensemaking – To make the best sense we can of every new challenge
Trust Building – To build trust in every direction
Those first three commitments correspond respectively to the three top-level components of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation [1, 2]. These are the overlapping and deeply-connected “supersystems” of Adaptive Strategy, Production (Delivery, Discovery, and Renewal), and Mutual Trust Building.
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation’s three “supersystems”
For this concluding part, a second group of commitments that apply right across the model:
Curiosity: To ask better questions
Generativity: To create more ideas than we consume
Consent: To celebrate the agency and ingenuity of others
As with the first three, they apply at every scale – teams, teams of teams, bigger structures, smaller structures, structures outside of any hierarchy, whole organisations. As commitments, they’re made by people, leaders taking the lead.
Commitment 4. Curiosity: To ask better questions
Much of Agendashift [3] could be described bottom-up as follows:
Questions to ask
How to recognise a good question when you see one, learning to develop your repertoire, finding and integrating relevant bodies of knowledge (Clean Language and Solutions Focus, to name two)
Patterns to organise those questions – Agendashift’s two most important being the IdOO (“I do”) pattern [4] –Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes – and Right to Left [5], working backwards from key moments of impact and learning
The (meta-)strategies / leadership principles [6] that motivate those questions
It could also be described as the product of a question, one that has served it well over the years:
What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?
That takes us to the role of curiosity and questioning in Adaptive Strategy. Barely scratching the surface, just a few examples:
What’s it like to be an employee of ours?
What’s it like to be a customer of ours?
What’s it like not being a customer of ours?
What’s happening when we’re reaching the right customers, meeting their strategic needs1?
Whose needs would we be meeting? What new stories could they tell?
1Strategic needs: their needs, our strategy
In Delivery too it pays to explore needs [7]. Far from being redundant, it establishes the context necessary to do a good job and sets the scene for later learning. Stepping back from individual pieces of work to the current workload as a whole, there is a whole new set of questions that apply (here’s where Right to Left really shines). And feeding back into strategy, there’s curiosity into how the work is done, the experience of doing it, and the level of capability demonstrated.
And then there’s Mutual Trust Building. Being careful with one’s assumptions is a great lesson from Clean Language (see [8]). Especially for leaders, it’s also important to remember that there are at least two sides to every conversation, and that every participant has the right to be curious. Respect for that that might be the difference between a conversation fruitful to all sides and one that generates more anxiety than insight [9].
Commitment 5. Generativity – To create more ideas than we consume
This commitment is perhaps the Why to the previous commitment’s How. We ask more and better questions because we need more and better answers – answers we didn’t already know. More and better answers means more and better intelligence, more and better insights, more and better ideas for innovation.
In a forthcoming book [10] for the BMI series on dialogic organisation development I suggest that a good working definition of generative process is one that creates more ideas than it consumes. And it’s not only about dialogic styles of strategy development – what I had in mind were the improvement cycles that so quickly run out of steam or the Lean Startup cycles that serve only to optimise the life out of once-great products.
There are technical reasons why the Delivery supersystem has a Discovery aspect to it (Adaptive Strategy relies on it for real-world intelligence), but that aside, the best delivery processes I’ve seen generated new ideas at every stage of the process. Two things enable that: they are designed for it, and their respective strategy activities make room for it, producing not plans and specifications but vision, outcomes, and the kind of challenges that people are well motivated to overcome.
Commitment 6. Consent – To celebrate the agency and ingenuity of others
It’s time to mention the two more models that the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation uses to flesh out the skeleton that the Viable System Model (VSM) provides. In the intersection between Mutual Trust Building and Delivery, Discovery, and Renewal (bottom middle in the diagram), is where the magic of production (and if you like, reproduction) happens.
Whether it’s the product of a strategy process or self-organised, if the organisation is large enough, it will have some structure. One highly flexible model – well capable of modelling dynamic, ad-hoc, and non-hierarchical structures – is given by Sociocracy [11] (aka Dynamic Governance, known also to Ackoff fans as Circular Hierarchy). It is purposeful collaboration and self-governance at every scale, and it is based on principles of consent. Each circle has its domain of responsibility over which it has authority; people join circles by mutual consent; circles make decisions by consent. People can join multiple circles; alignment across what could be called a strategy network is achieved through a combination of consent and participation, and it’s a dynamic process.
Things get interesting when there are multiple people in the intersections between circles. Having two people there gives you double linking – not only a mechanism for coordination, trust building, and resilience, but often a developmental (eg mentoring) opportunity also. As numbers there increase, so increases the possibility of a new circle, and with it a new, mini-scale Deliberately Adaptive Organisation with an identity, strategy, and purpose of its own.
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is also a Deliberately Developmental Organisation [12] (the naming is no coincidence), and it’s a very elegant combination. People have their own aspirations, plans, and strategies, and they’re adaptable! They’re capable of trusting and being trusted. Not only are they productive, most are interested in both their own self-development and in the renewal of the organisation. That symmetry is thanks to VSM again, and the Deliberately Developmental Organisation’s holistic and dare I say wholehearted [13] integration of personal and organisation development helps us make the most of it.
What next?
The Agendashift Academy’s self-paced training module on Adaptive Organisation [1] is in development and comes out over the autumn (probably in instalments), and after that I want to produce the next iteration of the first module, Leading with Outcomes: Foundation [14], whose slideware exists already in good time for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator [15] next month. This year should also see the publication of my aforementioned fourth book, working title Patterns of generative conversations [10].
With all of that going on I’m having to restrain myself from starting my fifth book, working title Wholehearted: Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, business agility at every scale. It lives rent-free in my head meanwhile, but never mind! My hopes for it are threefold:
It will help leaders at all levels better understand the relationship between organisation and business agility, and help them to identify organisational dysfunctions and impediments to business agility that they will want to address
It will give practitioners the knowledge and skills to approach the challenges of scale in ways that are both more humane and more effective than the process rollout
And for both audiences, it will be the most relevant and accessible introduction to VSM they are ever likely to read
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes – Part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
Somewhat in the style of what is easily my most popular post of all time – Introducing Kanban through its values (2013) – here is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (“business agility at every scale”) [1, 2] introduced through a set of six commitments. If this post turns out to be half as successful (and career-changing) as that one, I’d be a happy man indeed 🙂
The six commitments come in two groups. The first group is covered in this post:
Co-creation – To keep finding better options, together
Sensemaking – To make the best sense we can of every new challenge
Trust Building – To build trust in every direction
The second group will be covered in a later post:
Curiosity: To ask better questions
Generativity: To create more ideas than we consume
Consent: To celebrate the agency and ingenuity of others
What separates the two groups is that the first three commitments correspond respectively to the three top-level components of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. These are the overlapping and deeply-connected “supersystems” of Adaptive Strategy, Production (Delivery, Discovery, and Renewal), and Mutual Trust Building. Commitments in the second group apply everywhere. Together, the six quickly convey some of the model’s true character.
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation’s three “supersystems”
The model works at every scale – teams, teams of teams, bigger structures, smaller structures, structures outside of any hierarchy, whole organisations. Mapping it to some part of the actual organisation, its power lies not only in what each supersystem represents, but also in the relationships between supersystems and between scales.
So to the first three commitments, co-creation, sensemaking, and trust building…
Commitment 1. Co-creation – To keep finding better options, together
This might easily have been called the participation commitment. Its inspiration comes directly from Agendashift [3]; indirectly it draws in the Generative Change Model [4] and Dialogic Organisation Development [5] more generally.
Co-creation starts with making sure you have the right people in the room when you’re doing any of the following:
Generating and organising options (outcomes primarily, solutions later)
Evaluating and re-evaluating options in the light of progress, intelligence, and insights
Updating the group’s shared understanding more broadly
Expressing intent
Making commitments
Revisiting its shared sense of identity and purpose or engaging with any challenges to those
Relative to the organisational scope in question, “the right people in the room” means people highly if not maximally representative of the following:
Those with direct, first-hand knowledge
Those with strategic context
Those best positioned to hold the detail and the whole together
Those impacted by whatever decisions might be made
The commitment to co-creation is key to the authenticity of this participation; co-created options aren’t prescribed or otherwise prejudged.
Commitment 2. Sensemaking – To make the best sense we can of every new challenge
At whatever scale we’re considering, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation must be engaged in some kind of productive work. This includes the work of renewing the organisation; in terms of both mechanics and importance, there is enough in common between delivery and change for them to be treated the same – as “real work”. (Keeping the two in balance is an important responsibility of Adaptive Strategy.)
When we’re doing that work, let’s not underestimate the opportunity to expect the unexpected, to notice what we didn’t notice before, and to interpret what we notice in different ways. In an organisation that’s continuously transforming, those opportunities should be plentiful: often we’re doing new things or experimenting with doing old things in new ways. To miss those opportunities would be a tragic waste!
Adaptive Strategy on its own isn’t enough for the organisation to be learning. The progress, intelligence, and insights it requires all come from doing the work – engaging with the real world, not just the group’s model of it. The sensemaking [6, 7] commitment is a reminder to frame and conduct that work for maximum learning, doing that appropriately according to context and the task in hand. As any student of Cynefin [8] will tell you, there are category errors and other risks be avoided here.
Undoubtedly, to truly maximise learning over time, you need an effective process too. But this is not yet another Agile process framework! For the following reasons and more, I choose not to lead with process:
It’s table stakes. While there are enough organisations out there whose terrible processes and coordination systems compromise their viability (let alone their agility), there are multiple, complementary approaches to improving them whose effectiveness is well-proven. Moreover, the best of those aren’t prescriptive.
It’s implied. The model that underpins the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation – the Viable System Model [9] – has certain expectations about process but it too manages to avoid prescription
If you’re interested in what really scales, process is about the worst place to start
Commitment 3. Trust Building – To build trust in every direction
Organisations are built on trust. It might not always seem that way, but no organisation can afford for every task to be micro-managed, inspected, duplicated, and so on. Without at least some level of trust, very little would get done.
The trust-building commitment is however about more than reducing that delivery overhead. Even when relying heavily on participation, the Adaptive Strategy part simply does not have the cognitive or communication capacity to be into everything everywhere all the time. It has no choice but to be selective with its attention, and to use it effectively. It builds trust through a combination of where, where not, and how it chooses to direct its attention, what it communicates in those choices, and how it describes its underlying motives.
Trust-building works in other directions too. It’s a problem if commitments between peers can’t be relied upon, a problem that only gets worse if it’s hard to say no to additional commitments. It’s a problem if issues or risks aren’t shared, whether it’s because people don’t feel safe to do so, or that the need to share never occurred to them. It is wasteful to be constantly second-guessing the intentions of others. And it’s a problem if doing the right thing consumes more effort and attention than it should; trust isn’t only a question of psychology or economics – it’s an infrastructure question also.
Those first three commitments again:
Co-creation – To keep finding better options, together
Sensemaking – To make the best sense we can of every new challenge
Trust Building – To build trust in every direction
In a second post, I’ll expand on the second set of commitments, commitments that apply to every supersystem at every scale:
Curiosity: To ask better questions
Generativity: To create more ideas than we consume
Consent: To celebrate the agency and ingenuity of others
[1] Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale (academy.agendashift.com) [2] Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, business agility at every scale (deliberately-adaptive.org) [3] Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation, Mike Burrows (2nd ed 2021) [4] The Dynamics of Generative Change, Gervase R. Bushe (BMI Publishing, 2020) [5] Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change, Gervase R. Bushe & Robert J. Marshak (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015) [6] Sensemaking in Organizations, Karl E. Weick (1995, Sage Publications) [7] Sense, make-sense, decide, act,Tom Graves (2016, weblog.tetradian.com) [8] Cynefin (cynefin.io) [9] By Stafford Beer, all published by John Wiley & Sons: Brain of the Firm (2nd ed 1981, reprinted 1995), The Heart of Enterprise (1979, reprinted 1995), Diagnosing the System for Organisations (1985, reprinted 1995). I must confess that Diagnosing did not click for me until I made a second attempt after completing the longest of the three, Heart, which remains my favourite. A thousand or so pages in total (more if you count the re-reads) and well worth the effort. For a more modern and accessible treatment I highly recommend The Fractal Organization: Creating Sustainable Organizations with the Viable System Model, Patrick Hoverstadt (John Wiley & Sons, 2008)
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes – Part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
Just for the months of August and September I’m opening up the Academy’s AMA sessions to all. If you have any questions at all about Leading with Outcomes, the new Trainer & Facilitator programmes (see Upcoming events below for the first TTT/F training), or anything else for that matter, join us!
If you knew about these already, please note that this week’s is pushed back to next week due to an ongoing medical thing family-wise which means that I can’t be sure to be able to make it. I am however contactable and would be glad of a catch-up if you don’t mind the possibility of life intruding a bit!
Open AMA sessions
For the Zoom link, check the email version of this post if you’re on the mailing list, the #community channel on Slack, or Public events in Circle, or ping me.
Wednesday, August 17th, 10:00 BST, 11:00 CEST (not the 10th as previously advertised)
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes – Part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
In this edition: Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success; Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F); Two new interviews; Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series; Upcoming events; Top posts
Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success
The fifth and final chapter of Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success went live today. If you need a customer-first strategy or you have something to contribute to one, check out this unique self-paced training. With plenty of leadership-focussed content, it’s based on the outside-in strategy review found in my books Right to Left (where most of a chapter is devoted to it) and the Agendashift 2nd edition (where we ask the question “Who’s invited?“).
This is the third of four planned Leading with Outcomes modules, and like everything we do it’s applicable at every scale – team, team-of-teams, something bigger, something different even – and every level of experience. Come join us! Have your colleagues join us!
We have subscription plans for individuals and businesses, and do reach out if you’re in the government, non-profit, or educational spaces – we’d be glad to work something out for you.
Next April I’m doing a workshop for the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development – organised with the people responsible for some of Agendashift’s key references: Dialogic Organisation Development (Bushe & Marshak), The Dynamics of Generative Change (Bushe), and a curated series of books, including (fingers crossed) one of mine in the not-too-distant future. Needless to say, it is quite something to be invited, and more on that new book soon.
Where we got to last time (and from there to what a healthy relationship with the process frameworks looks like):
A structure that makes sense – not just tidy on paper, but purposeful at every scale – allowing each unit at every scale to self-manage effectively (structuring itself to minimise dependencies, for example)
Each unit at every scale able to express its own strategy in its own words, in terms appropriate to its domain and its customers, aligning it with other units and other scales according to both structure and opportunity
Each unit at every scale able to identify what it must manage at that scale – no more and no less – with protocols to deal with what should be managed elsewhere
We reached those conclusions via a route that made it very obvious that each of them apply at every scale, and that the consequences can be serious if there’s a problem with any of them. But it doesn’t stop there. Whilst it’s possible for a scale to be badly designed in its own right – awkward structure, missing capabilities, or poor coordination to name but a few – it’s not hard to see that the relationships between scales are no less important. If anything, they’re more troubling.
Consider these:
One unit doing the coordination work of another – micromanaging, or interfering in other ways
One unit doing the strategy work of another – imposing it downwards (directly, via an overly-top-down or centralised plan), second-guessing upwards, etc
Units taking on responsibility for outcomes over which they have insufficient control
Units providing insufficient transparency about strategy, progress, or risks for related others to make good decisions
Units failing to share useful intelligence
Or conversely, units not listening (or worse, punishing unwelcome news)
These describe dysfunctional relationships even when they’re between peers, but when there’s any kind of power imbalance involved, those at the receiving end may feel powerless to fix them.
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
Let’s recast those challenging but still fixable problems more positively, as principles. These are table stakes I believe for any serious approach to scaling. With minor caveats they apply to every identifiable scope or scale:
Each responsible for its own strategy and accountable for its own performance
Respectful of the autonomy of others, each responsible for its next level of internal structure and its self-management across it
Each committed to building mutual trust in every direction
Choosing its models carefully to maintain that “at every scope or scale” vibe, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (deliberately-adaptive.org) integrates the following:
From Agendashift: rapid strategy development and alignment between scopes and scales through generative conversations, multi-level participation, and outcome-orientation
From Lean and Agile, patterns for collaboration and coordination, and the deep integration of delivery and learning
From Sociocracy (known to some as dynamic governance and to Akoff fans as circular hierarchy), consent and purpose as the basis for effective self-organisation and governance
From the Deliberately Developmental Organisation (as described in An Everyone Culture by developmental psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow-Lahey), attention to the human side of development
What holds it all together is one of the crowning achievements of Systems Thinking, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), perhaps the most powerfully “at every scale” organisational model in existence. We take the management consultant’s Swiss Army knife and give it some 21st-century attitude in an innovative and accessible presentation.
Given that most of the popular approaches to scaling focus mainly on process, it is important for me to stress that the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is not a process framework. Neither is it prescriptive. Instead, it is two kinds of model in one:
Diagnostic, but only in the everyday sense that it helps with the identification of dysfunctions and opportunities (building on strengths as well as mitigating weaknesses), not in the sense that those dysfunctions become the excuse for heavy-handed prescription
Generative in the sense that it helps organisations engage constructively with themselves, generate a wealth of ideas, and find their own way forward
If you know Agendashift (mostly generative, with the diagnostic part done generatively), you will recognise that winning combination. In fact, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is introduced in the closing chapters of the Agendashift 2nd edition (2021), my previous book Right to Left (2020) doing some of the setup.
As that roadmap indicates, the earliest access to the next iteration of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation will be via the Academy, and you can be part of it. Join one of our regular Ask Me Anything sessions and even before the content is released I’ll be only too happy to explore it with you. Subscribe now:
Let’s begin with teams, or more specifically with its members, people. Even allowing for diversity, there are a number of near-universal things you can say about the members of any well-established team:
They each know who they are; many will also have a sense of who they’d like to be
They each know what they want to contribute; many will also have identified capabilities they’d like to develop
They each have a sense of what they can manage on their own and what should be managed more collectively
There are some boundaries there. They may be fuzzy and there may be room for negotiation in the short term and for development in the longer term, but cross them – insist that people do things that “aren’t them”, aren’t what they signed up for, or take away their ability to self-manage to the level they expect – and you have unhappy people in an unhappy team. For example, most people don’t like to be micro-managed; neither do they want to see important things left unattended.
Now to the team itself. You’d be hard-pressed to find a high-performing team for which these aren’t true:
There are collective senses of identity, purpose, and of what it aspires to
It knows what it’s there to do, what it is capable of, and ways in which those capabilities might be developed
It knows what it can manage for itself as a team, and (conversely) what needs to be managed more collectively, ie with (and perhaps by) other teams – potentially even with others outside the organisation
Again, there are some boundaries there. Fuzzy and negotiable no doubt, but only a fool would think they could cross them without negative consequences.
Jump now to the organisation as a whole. I almost don’t need to write these points down, but I will:
It has a sense of identity, a sense of purpose, and a sense of what it aspires to
It knows what it’s there to do, what it is capable of, and ways in which those capabilities might be developed
It knows what it can manage for itself as an organisation, and (conversely) what needs to be managed with others – suppliers, customers, industry groups, and so on
You can be pretty sure that if there are significant issues with any of those points, you’re looking at an organisation that has problems – big problems. At the extreme: identity crises, or working catastrophically beyond its capabilities or its remit.
Starting again at the level of the individual, on the topic of what makes the work meaningful, the answers may vary hugely. Moreover, you never know until you ask, and perhaps not even then until you get to know them well enough. At higher levels, diversity of purpose and capability is essential to meeting the complexities of the business environment. The successful organisation has them distributed effectively whilst maintaining some coherence of its own, not an easy balance to maintain when the environment is changing.
What does all that mean for teams-of-teams? Does this repeating pattern – a pattern that already works at three levels – the levels of individuals, teams, and the whole organisation – apply at other scales? Pretty much!
If your team-of-teams doesn’t have its own sense of identity and purpose – meaningful to the people in it, not just its designers – it is unlikely to amount to anything more than an aggregation of its parts. What is it for? What is it capable of? What does it add, other than overhead? If this problem is widespread, you have a structure that is hard to navigate, a direct cost to the organisation and potentially a problem for customers too.
What if it has those senses of identity and purpose but not a sense of where it would like to get to, what it would like to become, and so on? In that case, what holds it all together as its component parts continue to develop?
And what does it manage? If it’s trying to manage what its constituent parts are capable of managing on their own – interfering, in other words – it does both them and itself a serious disservice.
All that said, what does good look like?
A structure that makes sense – not just tidy on paper, but purposeful at every scale – allowing each unit at every scale to self-manage effectively (structuring itself to minimise dependencies, for example)
Each unit at every scale able to express its own strategy in its own words, in terms appropriate to its domain and its customers, aligning it with other units and other scales according to both structure and opportunity
Each unit at every scale able to identify what it must manage at that scale – no more and no less – with protocols to deal with what should be managed elsewhere
Any problems here I would characterise as organisational problems first (the organisation getting in the way of doing the right thing), problems of the strategy process second, and problems of the delivery process third – a distant third if the first two are in any way significant. And as leadership problems? It is hard work for leaders when these problems aren’t dealt with, so let’s be careful not to personalise problems that may not be of their own making. Neither should we underestimate the power of participation, self-management, and self-organisation. But if as a leader you’re getting in the way of the organisation fixing its problems or are complacent about them, well that’s on you.
Neither should you expect your problems of organisation, strategy, and leadership to go away by rolling out a process framework. Why would they? I don’t know if we have got to “peak process framework” yet – I don’t suppose we can know until some time afterwards and I’m not ready to call it – but in the meantime let’s be realistic about what they can and can’t do. And while we’re at it, let’s not pretend that a framework rollout is an easy and risk-free thing.
Much as I detest the rollout, this is not an anti-framework rant. If you find the opportunity to borrow from a framework as you address those more fundamental problems, that’s totally sensible – there’s no point in reinventing the wheel. You are still are in control of your own destiny, free to pursue what really matters.
Before part 2, more on the topic of maintaining healthy relationships with frameworks in these two articles:
Watch those last two come together in the coming months. At the Agendashift Academy, the final Leading with Outcomes module, Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale is due in the autumn. You can get ready meanwhile with the first three modules:
Agendashift 