Switching perspectives between big picture and operational thinking

Navigating through the murky waters of system bottlenecks and feedback loops can be daunting. In this episode, we scrutinize how these bottlenecks can strangle a system's potential and discuss methods for their identification and alleviation. We also highlight the importance of acknowledging long-cycle feedback and confronting resistance to change, underscored by the vital role of those who adeptly bridge the gap between systemic understanding and practical application. Join us as we provide strategies to transform challenges into opportunities for triumph, crucial for anyone invested in organizational optimization.

This week's takeaways:

• Bridging the perspective gap
• Behavioral Influences on Organizational Dynamics
• Beware of Resistance and Long-Term Challenges
• Non-believers in change or the system

 Subscribe and tune in for an enlightening journey that extends beyond theories, equipping you with the tools necessary to steer your organization through the transformative tides of digital, agile, and DevOps methodologies. If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

Chapters

• 0:05 Understanding the Bigger Picture Challenges
• 7:15 Understanding Bottlenecks, Feedback Loops, and Non-Believers
• 11:57 Challenges in Belief and System Change
• 15:16 Change Implementation Challenges in Agile DevOps

Transcript

Peter: 0:05

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, dave, how are you today?

Dave: 0:14

I'm doing excellent, so we're following on that little theme that we started.

Peter: 0:20

Yes, so we were just chatting about a system. I was thinking it was getting people to look at the whole system, and people can often get trapped into their little worlds so they can see all the moving parts, the part that they're doing. They can build the strategies or look at what they're doing within their own little world. But then looking beyond that and getting them to see the bigger picture, like to see how does this influence everything, how is what I'm doing interrelated to everything around me, and looking at that bigger system and how those different pieces interact. And I found that in some of my recent conversations that people have struggled with that. They've got a deep understanding of what they can see right in front of them, but it can be a struggle sometimes to get them to take a step back and look at them.

Dave: 1:09

I think there is a difference between tactically looking, operationally, looking at what I have to do in front of me and dealing with that, and taking a step back and seeing the broader system, and I know exactly what you mean. I just I've got a conversation going on in a number of areas right now where we're looking for system wide strategic input and discussion and so on, and we're not getting it. And I've come to the couple of conclusions as I go through. I think one of them is that there are people who always struggle to see the system. They're geniuses in many other ways, but they're not big picture people. They're. You know there's I'm pretty sure there's some personality test that will draw out the fact that some people are better at this than others in terms of that ability to see connections across the system.

Peter: 2:06

It can go the other way.

Dave: 2:08

Well, exactly, yes. So what you mean by going the other way is the opposite is all they can see is the system, and they can't actually see what's involved in getting something done.

Peter: 2:17

Yeah, and the the, that's, the lack ability to execute. I guess it comes into. You see a lot of this and I'm like, looking at the big picture, you got that. You've talked about ideas, people versus the executors, right, that type of thing. So there's a piece there where you need to marry these two things up to be effective. That's where you've got somebody in position where and sometimes I think it can simply be because they're so embroiled in the day to day that they're busy that they don't feel even have the time to take that step back, or they've tried it before and they haven't. They haven't been able to see the benefits of it, like it hasn't been able to turn. Actually, I'm interested by that not being able to turn into action because they're immediately click. I don't want to see the big picture so I can take action.

Dave: 3:07

Is that a yeah? Well, I mean, is that not a yes? It could be that people don't see the bridge, and I think I mean this is in many cases, what we do in a lot of organizations. But there is. If you think of the big picture, I can see, you know, I can, I'm the innovative, I can see the big picture. There's an operational, I can get things done, and the person in the middle of that bridge between the two is often the one who's in demand. And this is I know. I've talked to you many times and I know you very squarely in that being able to bridge those two different perspectives, which are hugely power like it's an incredibly rewarding and influential role. If that's where you make your living, I guess, but but it's also not a given that people can get their way to there. It's a particular sort of experience, maybe, or mindset, I'm not sure.

Peter: 4:02

I think it's an experience of mindset that there is an advantage when you're coming in new to an organization as well, like that objectivity that you you get because you don't have the cultural rules holding you back and the like, the cultural norms that are basically say, well, I couldn't possibly say that that's, that's that way because this person 10 years ago did this to this, to this and, as a consequence, that like there's certain, I think, aspects that you come in, when you're coming in externally and looking at an organization for the first time, it's like, well, huh, what's that look like? Like, what's that thing?

Dave: 4:40

oh, and it's interesting because I think that the the point that I'm thinking as you bring these ideas to the table is there's a huge amount of this is to do with experience, and I think that's one of the areas, and this is why you bring consultants who've been in the field for 10 years into your organization, for two things one is they can come in brand new and they can kind of call out the emperor's new clothes for what they see. But then the other side is I've done this 100 times, this is the hundred and first time, and now that experience allows them to immediately see the system and how it's behaving in a way that comes with experience.

Peter: 5:20

Yeah, and there's. There was an engagement towards the end of last year where literally was just flicking through a slide deck from a from a client they were working with that they were asking me to provide some consultants on and After. They just going through it really quickly and so well, there's your problem. I can tell from the fact that these guys are set up in parts, that they're operating in multiple different teams. There's clearly breaks and handoffs between those different parts of it. So, yeah, they're saying that this is happening, but I can guarantee you it isn't. It's really really unlikely under that organizational structure, the way that they're describing it in that slide deck, that they have the kind of continuous delivery or alignment across product that they claim to. And I think when you get dig down and start to ask questions, especially if the teams themselves, you'll find that the teams are struggling to get things done because they have to go out and reach out into other parts of the organization.

Dave: 6:15

Now, if I can, I just wanted to kind of wrap that little piece that you the nugget that you've just shared there up with a bit of string and tie it off, which is we've talked a little bit about experience, about kind of perspective and outlook in terms of how we might see things. But I think one of the interesting things that you've just described is, if you only look at the system, you can't know what's happening operationally. If you only look operationally, you can't know what is, know what the system looks like and the way you are describing it. Where you can see the system, it's described, we think it's behaving in one way, but when you go down and deal with the teams who are operationally implementing that system, that's when you find out other things are happening which aren't documented in the system, and I think that interesting view of.

Dave: 6:59

I need to see the system and I need to go in and understand what's happening at the ground level so that we can see where the disconnects are.

Peter: 7:07

Exactly, and there's a set of conversations with I've been having recently where it's the well, everything works great, we've got all of this organized and I'm going. Well, you're only going to go as fast as the slowest part and you can't deliver anything without every single part of the system delivering. And that means you're going to go as fast as the slowest part and your slowest part has a lot of commitments to a lot of different areas. So that's your bottleneck. This is what this is going to slow you down. So you got to dig into that and work out well, what can I do to alleviate that? And then you can start to think about how do we take the bits of that and make it possible for others to live on, how do we remove those friction points to enable the teams? And then we can start to look at the bigger picture of it.

Dave: 7:52

Yeah, and I think that that sort of speaks to the experience piece, because even if I'm new to the operational side and I can see what's going on, what we tend to do is we influence what's just around us. So we look upstream one step, downstream one step or, you know, to the right and the left and see who's doing what around us. But you may miss, if you're not right next to the bottleneck. You may miss the consequences of that.

Peter: 8:15

It may not be immediately visible. Actually it almost, and it may be One of the interesting pieces here, of course, because it depends on where the problems lie in the system. It may not be visible even in the data. You've got to go and look for the anecdotes. We were talking about this recently. It's the, because if you don't, the data may show that. Okay, overall, given that there's a larger delay because of the like, the, what the targets are, we, the system's kind of structured already to support that. So. So there's an expectation which is built into the system, which means the system is already understands that, so there isn't the mindset shift that needs to go on there around. Well, what if we sort of turn this on its head and started to think about this entirely different, about what might that do for our ability to learn from our customers and to learn and to get some of these other pieces delivered faster? And that that shift is can be very difficult to achieve because you've got to get a lot of moving pieces aligned.

Dave: 9:13

Well, I you know, as you're describing that, the one of the, there's a whole chunk of information which is lost, which is anything that takes too long to come back to you.

Dave: 9:22

So any you know, of course we work in. We work in systems and environments where there are short feedback cycles. They come back and really, really quick, and we tend to be inundated with those. This is our phones and are inundated with these notifications, so we're responding to those all the time and that, anything that takes longer and longer and longer, we forget about. Of course we know we ignore those. So in that conversation around a system, anything that has a long cycle time coming back in, whatever it is, is not something that we're taking any account of.

Peter: 9:56

And this is this is, of course. We see this in a lot of instances. Human beings are really really bad with things that have long feedback times, and for the simplest example of that, of course, is that you keep eating after you're full because it takes a while for your body to tell you that you're full, and so you end up eating too much.

Dave: 10:15

So well, and you, and even worse, you keep doing it day after day, week after week, even though you're standing on a scale and seeing that this is. I'm getting heavier.

Peter: 10:23

Not going the way I should. I'll look out why.

Dave: 10:25

Yeah, no, that's very true. I mean there's, there's that side of it, yeah.

Peter: 10:29

And that's. But that's exactly where this comes from. We're as creatures, we're very, very bad at this, and so anything where there's a delay between the action and the results of the action, we have a tendency not to respond in the right way, and because we'll go looking for the next one, we will.

Dave: 10:51

Well, we, we, we wait the quick feedback much, much higher than we do, the longer term and often more more fundamental or critical feedback.

Dave: 11:00

I just wanted to pick up, like summarizing where we've got to, and there's one topic I wanted to follow up, peter, with you on because you mentioned it.

Dave: 11:07

I made a note of it and it's a cracking comment, but we've we've been talking about this sort of system view and operational view and we summarized it as there's a this perspective there's, there's our own rose-tinted glasses or system view glasses versus operational view that we may have, and there's definitely a role that sits in between them, which is quite rare. The people who do that are often very critical in that sort of piece. There was the other one around experience, about how well you know something that you're able to see, and we've just summarized a few things there and to do with feedback loops and time. But you also mentioned a comment around non-believers, about people who don't believe either in the system or that it will work, and I'm intrigued to dig deeper because that's like a really interesting thing to say. We don't normally think we have to deal with believers in that change or system and non-believers in that change or system and yet definitely I can see what you're trying to identify there.

Peter: 12:08

So well, yeah, I mean, there's always going to be people who don't. Well, there's a couple of sides to it, right. There's the people who don't believe in the change that you want to do in the system, and there's people who don't believe that they're in a system, they don't realize the implications of what's happening right, or that they are a part of the system itself and the problem right. And that second one is actually one that often causes the issues. If the leader at the top believes they're doing everything right and there's nothing about their behavior that influences the system, so there's nothing they need to do to change. Just, actually, john Smart put something I've linked in about this is the boss calls in the consultant to implement agile and the consultant comes in and implements agile and there's a bar that says 20%, 80%, and he says okay, I've implemented agile. Now all you need to do is abandon your 20th century industrial complex mindset, and then you're there. Yes, and then you're there. That's the other 80%.

Dave: 13:09

It is fascinating here because it's also we've all seen this right which is we do loads of great work in a workshop or something, and then there's a sentence it's like four words said at the end. That leaves you reeling because it's the not non-rec Failing to recognize the influence and leaders are often the ones because they have outsized influence.

Dave: 13:31

But failing to recognize the influence we have in our own interactions with those teams, right, whatever that might be, yeah, or the behaviors, the sort of innate, you know, the behaviors we all rely on in a subconscious and we?

Peter: 13:45

Peter Senghi's mental models, I think. An example last week that came up somebody I was working with asked me about training and it's like well, but how come the people we have in the teams don't take training? There's a budget there and they don't take training. And so well, that's because from their mental model they are rewarded for being busy and taking on work and doing the work. They're not rewarded for going on training and learning. So if their incentive is to work hard, be the hero, show that you're the best, because it says that in their as they might have a KPI that says you've gone on training, but that's a checkbox. Even though that's what it says, it isn't what organizational behavior is.

Peter: 14:26

Organizational behavior is the people who are the heroes get rewarded. So the people put more value on that than they do on the checkbox for the year of end. That might eventually, if it's back to that delayed gratification type, they're not going to put that much. So it's like well, I can get that checkmark, get any part of it, I'll just go on a half day course or thing like that. So people don't use the training budgets and invariably in all the organizers know they get clawed back about part way through the year and I bur it off to something else because nobody's using them and so it's interesting, isn't it? Yes, it is very definitely yeah. Anything else for you to add? I don't think so.

Dave: 15:00

I think I've rabbit it on enough for today. It's been an interesting conversation just trying to understand that difference between systems view systems perspective and that operational, tactical and I one thing I wanted to just draw attention to, because it's a great way of closing it out, which is all of the conversation that we've had. Assuming you can view it, you can't view it. What's there, how you use, how you solve things from a bottleneck's perspective, goes out of the window the moment you stress the system and people have their blinkers on and they have no time I know you mentioned that no time to be able to raise their head and look around.

Peter: 15:33

Yes, yeah, at which point humans will go back to what they know best, what they're comfortable with, what they know is safe and what is I mean? That's a whole other conversation around why change fails like actually change. Actual change takes a very, very long time to implement, because even when it appears that somebody is working new way, then they will still go back to their old way, under stress, if there's, if the circumstances seem to fit the need. Well, with that, I think we should wrap up for today and thank all of our listeners. a s h t t t t toundefined hit subscribe and I look forward to the next one. Maybe Agile podcast listening e at scale.