Definitely, Maybe Agile
Definitely, Maybe Agile
Organizational Design for Agile
In this podcast episode, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the concept of designing an organization for continuous learning and improvement. They explore the leadership mindset and behaviors required to foster an environment that values and prioritizes continuous learning, as well as the need for leaders to relinquish control and empower data-driven decision-making. They emphasize the importance of creating capacity for learning by prioritizing work and saying no to non-essential tasks, as well as the role of leadership in modeling the desired behaviors.
This week´s takeaways:
- Leadership must prioritize and role model continuous learning through expectations and behaviors
- Create capacity by prioritizing work, saying no to non-essentials, and reducing overload
- Align organizational design (teams, feedback loops, tech) and strategy to enable learning
We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic please contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.
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:Peter, how are you doing?
Peter:I'm doing great, yeah, me too, me too. And so what's on the cards for today's conversation?
Dave:So, we've been kind of hunting around to see topics around organizational design and change and so on. We spend a lot of time talking about that. And I really like this question, that kind of we uncovered, which is how to design your organization around continuous learning or continuous improvement.
Peter:Makes me go down the path of, when you say it like that, accountability authority, autonomous units, all of these types of things like fractals and organizations.
Dave:I mean, I think there's something we spend a lot of time talking about continuous improvement and continuous learning and then we tend to focus on all these, you know, these building blocks around it. What's interesting about this is you're only going to create an organization that values continuous learning, continuous improvement, if the leadership needs expect drives, continuous learning and continuous improvement in the expectations that they set and how decisions are made and where that goes, so it really does start with the leadership side.
Peter:Yes, you've got to have leadership that is driving that, that is looking for opportunities to encourage it in the organization, is building out those capabilities for learning, is thinking about that organizational design and influence and the culture within the organization. Because it's a mindset shift, it's a different way of thinking about work and you've got to have the right pieces in place to understand that and measure it and think about what is my organization going to be and why am I doing this? What does it look like? What am I trying to achieve here?
Dave:Well, there's a sort of personal change as well, or at least an individual change you want to see in the leaders because they're going to have to give up influence or at least or decision making rights. Because if you really go into a continuous learning organization then, you're using data to make decisions, which means leadership. One of the things that they're going to let go is I need you to do this, because I think this is the way we should do this.
Peter:Right, and so this is the interesting part where I've seen organizations run into trouble. Here is where the leadership not only gives up that, but they give up all of the agency and direction as well. So it's like okay, so I love this, this agile thing, I'm going to create continuous learning organization. Okay, it's all on you to go work out how to do everything. Here's the goal. Go make this amount of money for me, bye. And that, by the way, is the entire strategy. Are in touch?
Dave:that's, yeah, that's and then, 18 months later, see, we told you it wouldn't work and they take back control of the you know reins.
Dave:Take back the reins right so so I think there is um, uh, that that leadership decision, but also a some sort of reflection on what that means from a leadership perspective, because they're going to have to lead from the front. From that one, I still remember I had a great conversation with a good friend that we've been working with their organization. They've gone through some workshops and discussions and they were really bought into decisions based on data and they were in the product management role.
Dave:They would bring a whole bunch of data to the table very excited about what that data was telling them where they needed to go. But then leaders were overruling that and driving from that sort of hippo's mentality highest paid person's opinion making a decision saying just go and do this.
Peter:And that's a conflict.
Dave:It's incongruent with the message of data-driven decision-making, continuous learning and the actual implementation. It happens really fast, so leaders have to kind of lead from the front. Very much so in this context.
Peter:Yeah, well, and some of that comes from the. Well, I know what the data says, but my gut tells me this, so I think we should go this way instead. And that's not uncommon, right? There's a lot of reasons. That starts to come into play, and then this is a-. I'm sorry to jump in, but I'm just reminding.
Dave:There's a great little. I have no idea if it's TikTok or Instagram. Wherever it is, come on, dig it out.
Dave:But of Jeff Bezos talking about this exactly to do with the data showing one thing, but the experience being a different one. So there is. I mean, this is where great leaders really excel. They're able to bring together and it's not an authoritative. You need to do this because I tell Ubitica, it's that how do you bring intuition, how do you bring some of the anecdotal evidence to the table? Because it's not just quantifiable data, there's also that sort of the art of sensing what's going on, as well as data mining.
Peter:Yeah Well, I think we've talked about this previously, but I like to always use the ITSM type examples, where it's the hey, the service desk is being measured on how quickly they close off tickets. Hey look, they've beaten their targets. I mean, their tickets are always being closed in under five minutes and that's fantastic. Metrics look amazing. And then you go and talk to people and they're so pissed off because the service just keeps closing tickets and my problem hasn't been solved. And this is just life right. This has got nothing to do with even IT or technology or any part of your business. It's the same regardless. We have this experience as human beings when we go and interact with any kind of service provided by the government or organizations or others. It's not uncommon, it's like well and and so.
Dave:So we've spent quite a bit of time talking about that. What about other things? Like you're going to create, design an organization for continuous learning. What else do you do?
Peter:well, some of the some of the key elements are creating space and the capacity for that learning, and this goes for anything within a strategy. So I mean you've got to be doing this for a reason. So why do we want to create an organization lens? Well, because there must be some problem that you're looking to solve. You want that organization.
Peter:You're seeing problems that if the organization was able to operate in a more autonomous problem you're operating in a complex environment if they could start to address problems at the call face more easily, then that would help the organization accelerate and help it grow. So you're looking for that for those reasons. So you're looking to how do I build that? But if you've got a organization that's been around for some time and you've got set systems in place and people understand what the processes and practices that they do are, and as a leader you go well, we're going to build a continuous learning organization, and you just say it, put it up on a slide at the town hall and then just walk away oh look, I've done my job and then expect the whole organization to change. Well, you'll come back, as you said, 18 months later and you'll find that absolutely nothing changed.
Dave:I think of this as the on your side of the desk fallacy. Right If the change, if the organizational design you're coming up with involves all of the work that you're doing until now and additional work that happens on the side of the desk which, by the way, happens when you're going through staff reductions as well.
Dave:There's this tendency of overloading instead of reducing, and part of the headache that we've certainly encountered is our fight and flight response is triggered when we're overloaded and stressed and so on. So the exact point at which we're really wanting people to innovate and learn and take that, that requires us not to be in that sort of blinkered state where all we can think about is effectively survival, career survival in that position. So we're going to have to create some space for that, and that has to be prioritization. It has to be reducing expectations. It sounds like we're taking the workload off, but it's a trade-off. You've got a certain amount of capacity. You can't add infinitely to that You've got to. You know your organization will already be close to capacity by definition. So if you bring in new things, you're going to have to stop doing or remove other things.
Peter:Yes, if you're not saying no to something, then you're likely not to be creating the capacity that you need, and if your strategy is such that it doesn't allow you or give you any direction or guidance as to what you should be saying no to, then it's not really a strategy. So there's some bits like that that need to be understood and, to my earlier point around, and that needs to come from leadership, where, and of course, strategy exists at lots of different layers of the organization. You're going to have it throughout, but the overall strategy of the direction that you're going to go in and where are we going to place our bets, because you can't do everything and there are a million levers to pull.
Dave:Well and I think this is I really like the way you kind of point out that there's it's not just a case of leadership calling out what the priority is, but putting frameworks in place so that decisions and tradeoffs can be made throughout the organization rather than just at the top of that, and I think that's a great piece. The other bit is the role modeling of that, and there's some great stories out there about leaders, for example role modeling vacations like companies that have very, very open vacation policies.
Dave:The take-up is driven directly, kind of related to how much the leaders take advantage of those vacation policies. The take up is driven directly, kind of related to how much the leaders take advantage of those vacation policies. We take our cues from what our leaders do, and if our leaders don't take those, you know, extensive vacations. Then the rest of the organization kind of reads between the lines and says, well, we're not going to either.
Dave:So even though you have a very generous vacation policy, nobody takes you up on it because they can see what the leaders are doing, and so I think in the same way, if you're going to reduce workload, drive priorities, your leaders have to be doing the same thing.
Peter:They have to be role modeling exactly that in order for them. In order for the organization to follow suit.
Peter:The one that the example I come across very commonly is, and there was an executive telling me the other day. It was like, yeah, we haven't spent our training budget this year. Again, this should be familiar to everybody who's ever been in the position where training budgets exist and you know, getting to the end, all those training budgets get clawed back because nobody spent them. But they were there and it was exactly the same thing. The first question back was well, when was the last time you stood on stage in front of all of your people and you said well, this is what I learned this month, this is the learning that I went through, this is what I went and did.
Peter:And when did you last create the capacity or the space for people? Because if they are all overloaded for all the reasons we were discussing earlier, then if you haven't created the space for them, of course they haven't gone and done it, because their bonus is going to be based off whatever KPIs they're getting measured against, and it's not based on whether they took that training course or not, or even if it is, it's a checkbox, because that other thing is way more important. And so, yeah, there's. What is it that is actually most critical to you is often what you see through the behaviors of the organization versus what's said Brilliant.
Dave:Anything else. So we've talked a little bit about leaders. We talked about that change of recognition, that that change requires an investment and therefore it's going to be a trade-off between priorities what else do, actually doing necessary structural changes?
Peter:uh, to support what your strategy is like. If, if you really, if you really are looking to go in a particular direction, create the structure that supports that organizational design does go along with that. If you're um, because otherwise you're, you're it's whether you're really truly invested in what that potentially looks like, like I love the.
Dave:I love the fact that the question we started with is what's organizational design for continuous learning? What does that look like? And we've spent all of the conversation until now not talking about organizational design but talking about leadership and the influence of that they have on what's there, which is absolutely correct.
Dave:I think that's the right balance but you're right now is the time when you start looking at that, and I think the current, when I think of that, just with our experience this is where you start looking at things like feedback loops, making those short technology sort of if technology isn't a part of that conversation you're in there. There is so much that technology can do. If you think about digital transformations, but just even technology and where where code is being produced and things like that, that can really help you in terms of shorter feedback loops, rapid development and things like this um so there's, a whole bunch of things there that come together, which is not necessarily organizational structure, but it's now system structure, if you like, technology side.
Dave:And then I'm always going to work around building around self-organized team. I think small, effective teams are incredibly powerful at being able to get change. I think that's the secret sauce in many ways, yeah no, I would agree.
Peter:I think that sums it up quite nicely when we start to that. But if you were to take all of the bits we just talked about and put it in three bullet points, what would you? What would you go with?
Dave:I love that, I feel like. So the first bullet point is we probably need another conversation about how to actually design your organization yes, yes, because we didn't go as deep as we should.
Peter:We could probably just do this amount.
Dave:Yeah, exactly, but there's that conversation there about, yes, there are some optimal designs and it's around value streams and dedicated, small, dedicated cross-cultural teams and feedback loops and things like this. There's a whole bunch of things and we talk all the time whenever we have our chats about things like this.
Peter:There's a whole bunch of things and we talk all the time whenever we have chats about things like that.
Dave:What I really like, then, is there's, effectively, layers over and above that, so the first one being, you know, avoid that fallacy on the side of your desk. You've got to create space to allow people to learn, and part of that space is a clear mind that isn't caught up in the fight or flight response that we get to when we're overloaded.
Dave:So that means prioritizing work, trading off saying no to things so that teams are so individuals are not overloaded and actually have the sort of mental acuity to be able to take in learnings and adjust behaviors and things like that. And then the top layer is that leadership role modeling that we talked about.
Peter:Yes, yeah, top layer is that leadership role modeling that we talk? Yes, yeah, and, and that role consists of, as well, understanding who has accountability and authority within the organization and is assigned to the roles of understanding, like, like. What is it that we want to work on? How is it, how are we going to work on it and what are the underlying technical pieces that will support that, and not just technology in terms of technology, but the underlying systems of work and processes and practices that will support that and that needs to exist at every layer.
Dave:You've used the word strategy a few times and, I think, in a really very correct way, in the sense that there is that strategy of what is the organization going to say yes to, going to say no to, how are they going to prioritize, how are they going to build out the technology platform strategies that will support their business strategies and things like this. There's a whole sort of group there that you've grouped under strategy, which I think are really important, and that's exactly what we look to our leaders to do role model, the right behaviors and follow consistently and coherently a strategy towards a vision for the future.
Peter:Yeah, indeed.
Dave:Well, I think it was a good conversation. As you say, we can always revisit that and the different pieces of it, and maybe I'll run the nutshell of a conversation around some of those pieces so you can contact us at feedback@ definitelymaybeagilecom, and if you want to hit subscribe. We always like new subscribers and I look forward to next time. Thank, you. David and Peter, as always, a pleasure You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.
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