For any CxO or company seeking to adopt or scale Agile for their software development groups – get ready for some organizational soul searching! The mindset and processes of Agile reflect back your culture, your enacted (not espoused) Theory of Management, and the structural inefficiencies of your org chart…and these are just the beginning!

Culture Clash

Culture is the oxygen of your organization. You are swimming in it, nurtured by it, yet it remains invisible. Ask any new employee to describe Culture and you will get a sense of the constraints it places on the organizations ability to change and adapt. Adopting Agile methods to “upgrade” your product development process, speed up cycle time, and generate flow and suddenly that squishy, amorphous mist (Culture) condenses into a brick wall. What is going on here?

Culture is the container that holds all the dilemmas of your organization in dynamic tension. It is the fairy dust that allows your to be:

BOTH Competitive AND Collaborative

BOTH Controlling AND Creative

BOTH Focused AND Flexible

BOTH Simple AND Complex

BOTH Relational AND Actionable

BOTH Results-oriented AND People-oriented

The contours and interactions between these dynamic polarities make up your Culture, and to a large part your organization. When Agilists come to stay the Culture dynamics shift and the whole system groans…audibly.

Suddenly “red flags” show up everywhere. Your “Greatest Fear,” which normally lurks in the basement, begins walking the halls in broad daylight. As soon as these new methods begin producing change, the promise of Agile, the downside extremes of the polarities become visible, providing fodder for resisters and those being forced out of their comfort zone.

Theory X or Theory Y

This squeeze is most obvious in your management team, many of whom have been promoted due to their functional/engineering expertise or excellence. Do you know how they view the developers they manage – widget or creative genius? How do they define their role – benign dictator or all-star coach? Are they ready – willing and able – to look in the mirror of their leadership and confront their weaknesses and leadership skill level? Are they able to consider their obsolescence? And if you’re planning on scaling Agile, how high up does this personal reflection need to go? All the way to the top?

This becomes a real bear trap when the consultants troop in and begin training everyone in the development organization to self-organize, manage their own work, decide how much they can do each sprint, and even how to do it. Cross-functional teams!?! There goes my turf, but not without a fight! Changing priorities every two weeks, who is in charge here – I set the priorities around here! Your greatest risk of “sand in the gas tank” or a “stick in the gears” comes from the managers who used to have authority, respect, power, control, and a reason to exist.

As Agile squeezes managers of people and project aside, a new dilemma arises – Flatten the organization or Lead with new skills and actions. At this point you may want to re-read the previous section on Culture. Perhaps the biggest challenge of scaling Agile comes with the shifting roles of those managing product development. To be successful they must adopt the Servant Leadership required to support the sprinting development teams. As they speed up and new processes reduce the “friction” created by waterfall and project management the previous value of management can become waste and be wrung out of the system. The new Theory of Management that Agile requires is only now being written. In fact, the ink isn’t even dry.

Structure Follows Function

If you are not dizzy yet, contemplate this last piece of the puzzle. When organizational culture shifts and management is reorganized what happens to structure? Think PMO, Portfolio Management, Centralized Strategy, design and business analytics, functional silos! Is this the time to call McKinsey, PWC, BCG…do you need to spend the money on the big guns of the consulting industry? Agile doesn’t work like this…remember, that is why you wanted it in the first place.

Agile is fundamentally about learning your way forward, minimal structure, and Just in Time planning. This is not a structure that can be designed by external draftsmen, posted on the wall of the CxO’s office, and “rolled out” to an unsuspecting organization. The biggest process change in adopting Agile is the process of organizational development. It becomes downright biological, you have to grow into this new way of working. Even more distracting is that it follows the rules of quantum physics (emergent and self-organizing) and networks (Hubs and connections determine information flow). How on earth can you “manage” something so organic, so alive??

Hear we look to the leaders in operating in unpredictable environments – the US Army War College. In environments that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) you need everyone to be confident in their ability to assess the situation, set up some really smart experiments to test the water, and take small steps forward to see what works. This is not the time for a gigantic change initiative because you cant predict what kind of change you need.

How ironic that the only way to adopt Agile is using Agile!!

So, Dear CxO, are you ready for the roller-coaster ride? Are you prepared to explain this to the functional heads of your executive team and your peers (because they will get sucked into the vortex as well)? Are you ready to herd [cat]tle with only a few sheep dogs (who are the ones doing the on-the-ground thinking and reacting)? That is what you’ll see when you look in the Agile Mirror on your wall.

 

Dr. Carol Mase is an executive coach who challenges leaders and their organizations to think differently about the world and how they can achieve their fullest potential. Her unique background applies the principles of business, biology, psychology, and physics, to all levels of the organization. She has worked as an entrepreneur, consultant and pharmaceutical executive introducing fresh ideas that produce innovation and adaptive change. She can be reached at Carol.Mase@CairnConsultants.com or 215-262-6666.

 

I admit, this took some research! Let’s start by defining what we are trying to do, Wikipedia to the rescue.

Ethos: Greek, meaning character, used to describe guiding beliefs, ideals, and the spirit which motivates them.

Community: a group whose intention, beliefs, resources preferences, needs and risks affect and shape its identity. This captures how organizational culture emerges from our work together and our ethos.

The leadership challenge is to understand how to embed these so that we can use them to influence our company’s success (sustained competitiveness and customer satisfaction). Peter Block provides a good starting point. He notes that community is a structure of belonging. Getting the structure right allows trust, connection, security, and feeling valued to emerge (Etienne Wenger). When these describe the organizational identity it is a small step to self-organizing teams, collaboration, continuous improvement, quality, fast development times, and a customer-centric focus. Whether emphasized or assumed, community and ethos are core to all five domains in our intersection.

To embed the Ethos of Community two concepts emerge at the intersection to create a structure of belonging: Communities of Practice and Leader/Teachers.

Communities of Practice (COP). If teams are the fractal unit from which all other organizational units arise, COP are the fractal unit at all levels of shared enterprise over time. The primary assumption from Wenger’s research is that: engaging in the social practice of forming COP is the foundational process by which we learn (knowledge creation) and become who we are (organizational culture). Joint enterprise (supported by mutual engagement and shared repertoire) generates accountability, coherence, productive disagreement, collaboration, and the effective use of resources to meet constraints. This produces a pragmatic resourcefulness that is innovative at the local level and results in continuous improvement, self-organization, and “individuals and interactions” as a driving force for change. As Wenger points out, “Even though [the COP] does not transcend or transform its institutional conditions in any dramatic fashion, it nonetheless responds to [organizational] conditions in ways that are not determined by the institution. To do what they are expected to do [they] produce a practice with an inventiveness that is all theirs.” (1)

Network analysis can illuminate COP and uncover the connectivity between them, mapping these networks like we map value and process. Leaders can then seek out Communities of Practice and convert their collective thinking into organizational action. Mapping community relationships and identifying key COP members allows managers to respond to opportunities and challenges quickly, using existing connections and dependencies. “We call this a latent network view because it discloses a group that could be leveraged in the future.” (2) This provides a means of overcoming organizational fragmentation and taking advantage of built-in resiliency. From a management perspective, then, we have a new means of recognizing, and taking advantage of, structured localness that goes far beyond co-location.

Leader/Teachers: When a new process is adopted, “train everyone” makes sense. Thereafter, the work itself provides a platform for personal and personnel development. This weaves together competency, responsibility, accountability, and contribution. Toyota places this at the center of continuous improvement, achieved through the interactions of Mentors and Mentees. The Toyota Leader/Teacher is a way of managing that has its roots in ethos and can be traced back to GE’s Crotonville Leadership Development Center and the work of Noel Tichy. (3)

When embedding an ethos of community, job assignments, team composition, and even meetings become a forum for action learning. Two assumptions are core to this idea: that learning is a social event and that teaching is the most effective means of leadership. Tichy pioneered the idea of “leaders at every level” built on the practice of leadership as a “Teachable Point of View (TPOV)” rather than subject matter expertise. Becoming a great Leader/Learner requires some new management activities: time for personal reflection, creation of a TPOV, the ability to connect to others and engage when the teachable moment presents itself, inquiry and substantive exchanges that seek to discover problems and how people are thinking about solving them, and openness and listening as a learner (often called “beginners mind”).

Teachable moments form a structure of belonging. They allow leader/teachers to pull from their TPOV, a personal backlog of learning experiences and ways of “seeing”, and engage with their learning partner(s) to create a transformational idea and new responses and behaviors. Recall Satir’s change cycle and now view it as a learning cycle. As leader/teachers, and as learners ourselves, we are watching for transformational ideas to emerge from the intersection of the situation, previous experience and knowledge, the current learning conversation, insight, and understanding. When that happens we have a teachable moment, all participants are learners and teachers, and actionable change is the outcome.

 

Leader as Social Architect

 

No matter how broad or limited your scope of leadership, everyone has the potential to engage in Communities of Practice and be a Leader/Teacher. To close let me quote a management great, Robert Greenleaf, that summarizes the structure of belonging we can all achieve every day:

 

“Everyone who aspires to strength should consciously practice listening, regularly. Every week, set aside an hour to listen to somebody who might have something to say that will be of interest. It should be conscious practice in which all of the impulses to argue, inform, judge, and “straighten out” the other person are denied. Every response should be calculated to reflect interest, understanding, [and] seeking for more knowledge. Practice listening for brief periods, too. Just thirty seconds of concentrated listening may make the difference between understanding and not understanding something important.” (4)

 

 

 

¹ Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

² Cross, Rob and Parker, Andrew. The Hidden Power of Social Networks. Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

³ Tichy, Noel. The Cycle of Leadership. Harper Business, 2002.

⁴ Greenleaf, Robert. On Becoming A Servant Leader. Jossey-Bass, 1996.

Dr. Carol Mase is an executive coach who challenges leaders and their organizations to think differently about the world and how they can achieve their fullest potential. Her unique background applies the principles of business, biology, psychology, and physics, to all levels of the organization. She has worked as an entrepreneur, consultant and pharmaceutical executive introducing fresh ideas that produce innovation and adaptive change.

 

Moonshot #1: Management That Serves a Higher Purpose (1)

As more companies embrace and begin adopting the frameworks of our intersection (see January 7, 2013 blog post), the role of managers, supervisors, and bosses is changing. With the rise of self-organizing and self-managing teams, one could ask: What is the Purpose of Management, period? To look for the higher purpose of management, let’s examine it from each perspective in the intersection.

Systems Thinking: All frameworks in the intersection recognize the individual as the source of organizational knowledge and learning. Peter Drucker links the worker to the system in a direct way, “Productivity of the knowledge worker will almost always require that the work itself be restructured and be made part of a system.” (2)

Drucker views productivity as measured by the output of the system, not the individual, and results as the outcome of developing people and the system concurrently.

The higher purpose of management begins with seeing the system as more than the sum of the parts. Take Southwest Airlines for example (they show up everywhere these days), an airline whose main competitor is the car and whose stated purpose is to make flying affordable for those who wouldn’t otherwise fly. The higher purpose of Southwest managers (concurrently optimizing people and the system to produce results) would include: employee turnover rate, number of customers served per employee, flexibility to manage variability in demand, and a culture of cooperation across departments.

The message to managers is: If you don’t like the results you are currently getting you have to change the way the work is done. By understanding the interdependencies between people and the system you can change how results are produced.

Agile Framework: Teams are “the fractal unit of agile, …from which all other units can be created.” (3)

Sounds good, we all like teams. But, what is a fractal unit?

A fractal is a pattern within a complex system, ie business and organizations. Fractals have two key features: self-similarity, which allows for infinite scaling, and a detailed pattern or set of defining elements that repeat themselves at every level. Least you think this esoteric, urban growth, market trends, and human physiology are full of fractals. So the fractal unit of agile, the pattern that repeats at all levels of the enterprise, is the team.

In agile the defining elements of the team are also those attributes that allow teams to be self-organizing and self-managing. Simplified, these are: (4)

• Establish long-lived teams that build trust and commitment between members
• Ensure cross-functional capability so that the team can collectively deliver results
• Add customer value by adapting to their changing requirements
• Learn to be “generalizing specialists” ie a multidisciplinary knowledge worker with a technical speciality
• Communicate and collaborate and co-locate (when possible)

Scaling teams also requires self-similarity in operating practices across the organization. Managers need to ensure the right people are on the team and remain there, that decision-making is participatory in nature, and that the team and its members make commitments, take responsibility, and assume accountability for their work in an open and transparent way. Whew! That’s a lot. It certainly qualifies as a higher purpose.

The message to managers from the agile perspective: There is “no upper limit to how many agile teams an enterprise can create” (5) when healthy teams are the fractal unit.

Lean Processes: “…it is unfair and ineffective to ask operators on their own to simultaneously make parts, struggle with problems, and improve the process, which is why Toyota calls autonomous operator-team concepts, “Disrespectful of People.” (6)

Huh? Did I read that right?

If continuous improvement is the goal of each employee then increasing the capability of people to see problems, learn how to solve them, and change their behavior is the purpose of managers. The higher purpose of management achieves this by providing the organization with teacher-coaches whose activities include:

• Observing a persons learning capacity and process and to use this to understand what they are thinking so you can assist them in learning by doing
• Creating situations for learning: present a challenge using dialogue, inquiry, and analysis, then give people space to figure things out and make small failures
• Go and See, use first hand understanding of the situation to create learning not just results

The message to managers from the lean perspective: For socio-technical organizations (7) the role of managers is to balance the social side and the technological side to create an integrated system – people and process.

Design Thinking: To understand this Moonshot from the perspective of Design Thinking, I turned to Roger Martin’s The Design of Business (2009). In the first chapter he frames the higher purpose of management nicely – To recognize, embrace, and then simplify the uncertainty, ambiguity, possibility and variability in the marketplace and the organization so that actions add value to services and products. It’s a mouthful, here is his summary:

“The path…from pinpointing a market opportunity to devising an offering for that market to codifying its operations – is not just a study in entrepreneurism. It’s a model for how businesses of all sorts can advance knowledge and capture value.” (8)

Martin calls this “intuitive thinking” and he advocates using this to balance the analytic thinking that predominates in business. Intuition is a form of abductive reasoning, which generates a series of experiments or rapid prototypes to achieve a future goal one step at a time, learning as you go. Abduction uses hypothesis generation and testing, and fast feedback cycles to navigate complex situations, e.g. entering a new market or introducing new processes into an organization. For example, identify the next step (often obvious), take it (a means of testing our “hunches”), and incorporate the feedback we get into the next, next step we take. With each step, we gain deeper understanding of our situation by removing extraneous information and interacting with the larger system (learning). Although this sounds obvious, a budget, operating plan, and marketing strategy are predictive while a Sprint, iterative release plan, and prototype are abductive.

The message to managers from design thinking: Balance analytics (proof from the past) with abductive reasoning (validation by experimentation) in order to see features and opportunities that others may miss.

Leadership: The last component of our intersection comes from a case study, Morning Star (9), that examines how spontaneous order (structure) emerges from commitments between people whose work is reliant upon each other.

How do you know who relies on you? First you have to see yourself as part of the whole system, then you construct a personal mission statement that links your work to the organizational mission. To do this every employee in Morning Star identifies colleagues who are affected by their work (in their network) and negotiates with them to determine how they will interact over the next year. The goal of their contract is to achieve their individual mission and the corporate mission simultaneously. This creates a socially dense network organization and promotes information flow across boundaries.

The benefits identified by Morning Star employees include:

• Initiative – driven by reputational capital
• Expertise – individual responsibility for quality
• Flexibility – responsiveness to changing conditions
• Collegiality – networks replace titles
• Local decision-making – pushing expertise down into the organization
• Loyalty – ownership and engagement
• Less overhead – savings fund growth and employee benefits

Morning Star founder Chris Rufer, “A true leader can understand a situation, think through the complexities, come up with a solution, advocate a strategy, and recruit followers.” I would add, and be confident that the organization is committed to supporting them in these actions.

Hamel offers this message to managers: “You have to decide: is it going to be boss-management or self-management. (emphasis his)

The Intersection: I’m not going to pre-digest this for you…there is much to contemplate here and I trust that you can find something that applies to your situation today, and in the future.

¹ I use the following hierarchy in my work: Purpose, Vision, Mission, Goals, Objectives.

² Drucker, Peter. Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999. Italics in the original.

³ Leffingwell, Dean. Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises. 2007. Italics mine.

⁴ Larman, Craig and Vodde, Bas. Scaling Lean and Agile Development. 2009.

⁵ Leffingwell. Ibid.

⁶ Rother, Mike. Toyota Kata.

⁷ concept from John Shook, The Lean Enterprise Institute and an ex-Toyota manager

⁸ Martin, Roger. The Design of Business. 2009

⁹ Hamel, Gary. What Matters Now. 2012. Chapter 5.3

For those of you with questions, comments, or needing help feel free to contact me directly.

Dr. Carol Mase, carol.mase@cairnconsultants.com, 215-262-6666

If an Agile Enterprise is an intersection of five big ideas that can, and will, change the way we experience work (see January 7, 2013 blog on this topic), how do we begin the process?

Many accomplished thinkers are addressing this question. For an ongoing review see The Drucker Society European Blog or Steve Denning. To join the conversation, the Stoos Network is having a global online event this week. If you are still on the sidelines and want to see how things unfold, consider this.

What is required, is a change in mindset for most leaders, managers, and employees. This is not insignificant and it is key to understand your current mindset if you want to participate in the evolution of business. So let’s start there.

Taylorism, and the form of management it generated, is based on a linear, mechanistic mindset. That means, a world that can be accurately analyzed and predicted, a strong predilection for the left brain cognitive operators (if-then duality, causality, and reductionism), and an objective reality that is (technically) completely knowable. Today this world exists primarily in the finance department and on the manufacturing floor (although Toyota Production Systems challenges even this idea).

While we may believe that we can operate in a world of complexity, non-linearity, and emergence from our linear mindset this is not only false, it is downright dangerous. To really understand the world today requires us to step across the divide and into a non-Newtonian world. From a complex mindset we are still able to use the tools of linearity (finance, SOPs, and planning) when they are applicable AND we can “Surf the Edge of Chaos” at the same time. This shift in mindset is not insignificant.

“…around 1475, the legacy of Prince Henry [of Portugal] inspired an expedition to cross the equator, and instead of falling off the end of the Earth, everyone came back to tell their tale. The breaking of this emotional barrier was similar in what it unleashed to breaking the sound barrier, the four-minute-mile, [etc]…” Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve

“Once something is, we can’t work backward to change it. [Myron Rogers and I] were out walking and I remember we both stopped dead in our tracks, taking in the implications of this for our work …We can’t see what is coming until it arrives, and once something has emerged, we have to work with what is.” Margaret Wheatley, So Far From Home

“The shift is as fundamental and as necessary as the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the universe. You can’t “mend” the geocentric viewpoint that the sun revolves around the earth: you have to rethink fundamentally how the universe works.” Steve Denning, Forbes Blog, 11/27/2012

Why is this so hard? What is the problem?

To understand the dynamics of the situation we face when we consider the complexity of organizations, take a close look at the organizational map the Stoos21 participants came up with.

I defy anyone to explain this from a linear mindset! If the group got even 80% of the Root Causes, Intermediate Causes, External Causes, Symptoms and Consequences, and interdependencies on the map it is easy to see the complex mess we are faced with. So is the problem what is captured by the map or is it the mindset we are using to try to understand and change what we are seeing?

Can we view this map as “what has emerged,” understanding that “we have to work with what is?” Can we begin to “rethink fundamentally how the [organization] works?” Can we explore the edges and not fall off the Earth?

The intersection we are envisioning for organizations and business (Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, Lean Processes, Agile Framework, Leader/Manager as Coach) is not an innovation – i.e. a new answer or solution to an old question or problem – but rather a paradigm shift (see below). It reframes the world, changes the information that is relevant and important, and requires a new mindset from which we can act to create change. A paradigm shift begins the process of emergence anew, from different initial conditions, with curiosity and boldness.

With these thoughts in mind, and to further reflect on your mindset, let me leave you with the words of Gary Hamel (What Matters Now) and his 25 Moonshots for Management.

“I’m a management professor [read manager or leader], and I spend most of my time talking to business folks about nit-picky sorts of problems: How do you improve your planning process? How do you get more teamwork? How do you get products to market faster? …But what if we aimed higher? What if we dreamed bigger?

…management is the technology of human accomplishment. Solving the world’s toughest problems or, more modestly, creating organizations that are deeply human will require more than scientific breakthroughs; it will require new ways of planning, organizing, collaborating, allocating, motivating, and yes, controlling.

Mending the Soul

• Moonshot # 1: Ensuring That Management Serves a Higher Purpose
• Moonshot # 2: Embedding the Ethos of Community and Citizenship
• Moonshot # 3: Humanizing the Language and Practice of Business

Unleashing Capabilities

• Moonshot # 4: Increasing Trust, Reducing Fear
• Moonshot # 5: Reinventing the Means of Control
• Moonshot # 6: Inspiring Leaps of Imagination
• Moonshot # 7: Expanding and Exploiting Diversity
• Moonshot # 8: Enabling Communities of Passion
• Moonshot # 9: Taking the Work out of Work

Fostering Renewal

• Moonshot # 10: Sharing the Work of Setting Direction
• Moonshot # 11: Harnessing the Power of Evolution
• Moonshot # 12: Destructuring and Disaggregating Organizations
• Moonshot # 13: Creating Internal Markets for Ideas, Talent, and Resources
• Moonshot # 14: Depoliticizing Decision Making

Distributing Power

• Moonshot # 15: Building Natural, Flexible Hierarchies
• Moonshot # 16: Expanding the Scope of Autonomy
• Moonshot # 17: Refocusing the Work of Leadership on Mobilizing and Mentoring
• Moonshot # 18: Creating a Democracy of Information
• Moonshot # 19: Encouraging the Dissenters

Seeking Harmony

• Moonshot # 20: Developing Holistic Performance Measures
• Moonshot # 21: Transcending Traditional Trade-offs
• Moonshot # 22: Stretching Management Time Frames and Perspectives

Reshaping Minds

• Moonshot # 23: Strengthening the Right Hemisphere
• Moonshot # 24: Retooling Management for an Open World
• Moonshot # 25: Reconstructing the Philosophical Foundations of Management

These 25 Moonshots help define the intersection we are creating and inform our journey.

For those of you with questions, comments, or needing help contact me directly or send me a note on LinkedIn (carolmase)

Dr. Carol Mase, carol.mase@cairnconsultants.com, 215-262-6666

Welcome to 2013! It’s not only a new year, it is a new age. Although the Mayans started it, I think it is only fitting that the rest of us join in. In business, I declare that we are entering the age of Intersectionalism! No longer will one discipline or idea have the scope to move business, society, civilization, and individuals forward. Nor can we simply be generalists. We must activity bring together different ideas, disciplines, knowledge domains and let them impact each other to create something new, bigger, more robust and responsive to the needs of the situation.

I began the practice of Intersectionalism in 2005, totally unaware of its potential, and find that intersections of five are the perfect size. So let me begin the new year describing the business intersection that I am most passionate about – the intersection that creates the Agile Enterprise. Lets take a look.

First let me admit that I have been behind the curve on this one. I was so wrapped up in trying to create adaptive organizations that I missed the whole agile movement. There now exists an extensive body of literature that I am loving and leaders, we need to get up to speed fast.

Why? Because this movement is replacing Fredrick Taylor’s “Scientific Management.” To be clear, it’s not dead yet! But the Agile Manifesto started an alternative way of working collectively and in true collaboration that is as right for today’s environment as Taylorism was at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

More importantly, Agile conceptually creates an intersection that has room for the key management theories of the day (Figure above).

The Agile Enterprise

This intersection brings together five big ideas to create a workplace environment that really rocks!! It has the capacity to address, and maybe even solve, the enormous challenges humankind (and by default the planet) faces. But capacity is not capability…that still has to be taught, learned, implemented, embedded, and enacted. No small task for our Scientific Management mindset!

Systems Thinking: Systems are the dynamic interactions that produce what we “see” as cause-and-effect events. Without a systems mindset we believe the obvious and miss the root causes (subtle feedback loops, unintended consequences, and mental models) that actually create reality. From a systems perspective we can attain value on the global level, but it comes at the price of optimization at the local level. This is a tough concept for leaders and managers who have been taught that the whole equals the sum of the parts, and have been optimizing parts their whole career. It means a whole new way of decision-making, resource allocation, portfolio management, and strategic planning. For ways to do this contact Pegasus Communications, malpert@pegasuscom.com, 781-398-9701. Recommended reading includes: Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, Russell Ackoff et al, Idealized Design, and Nonaka and Takeuchi, The Knowledge-Creating Company.

Agile Framework: This framework reorients what we do and how we do it. It is a way of working that engages employees, builds trust between people as well as on the organizational level, and it thrives in complex environments – there, that takes care of the top three challenges of management today! The best way to introduce this framework is the Agile Manifesto:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

One key outcome of the Agile Framework is the process of Scrum, both have much to contribute to organizations, leaders, and business at all levels. For now, let me admonish you to “BE agile rather than do agile.” To learn how 1) read the full manifesto, www.AgileManifesto.org, 2) visit the Agile Alliance, www.agilealliance.org, and 3) and take a course from the Scrum Alliance, www.scrumalliance.org. Both alliances have national meetings, so leaders you can learn by submersion if you are courageous.

Lean Processes: This discipline took on new meaning for me when I read Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata. Lean is based on two pillars, Respect for People and Continuous Improvement, which create a system of lean processes. Starting to see the intersection? Lean and systems combine to create thinking tools that allow you to map your business and discover where you are adding value and where you are allowing waste (time and effort) to dominate. Lean establishes what I think of as “the working surface” within organizations, the place where the saw meets the wood, the mind meets the challenge, the process meets the target condition. There is so much written about lean that I will only reference Rother’s book and send you to his presentations (http://www.slideshare.net/mike734).

Design Thinking: I could wax eloquent about this domain and how it defines the intersection. Design Thinking contributes significantly to how the other domains are performed. Let me also point out that this domain challenges the leadership techniques that have been engrained in leaders today. Readers, pick up Roger Martin’s The Design of Business, Stickdorn and Schneider (eds.) This is Service Design, and IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Tool Kit (online free at http://www.hcdconnect.org/toolkit/en). For courses, Human Centered and Service Design is popping up everywhere and watch for leaders like Tim and David Kelley and Thomas Lockwood speaking at OD and leadership conferences.

Leadership and Management: The last component of this intersection is the one that has to adopt the other four to make a real difference. Yikes! That means you dear reader. As we look at this intersection we see that how and who are tightly coupled. Rother covers this in his book in the section on Toyota’s Coaching Kata which is integral to the achievement of continuous improvement. Agile and Scrum have a defined role for coaches and mentors. And no where is this better described than Dan Pinks book, Drive. But the leader of the pack is Gary Hamel, see his book What Matters Now, and more importantly spend time on the Management Innovation eXchange, http://www.managementexchange.com/.

This is a lot to take in, and it is the topic of my contribution to this blog for the forseeable future. For those of you with questions, comments, or needing help contact me directly.

Dr. Carol Mase, carol.mase@cairnconsultants.com, 215-262-6666

PS: my website is completely out of date due to this new Age

I just returned from a conference at which Meg Wheatley spoke about her new book: So Far From Home. Some would say the picture she paints of our global situation is bleak, dark even. I feel that it is accurate, even if it is difficult to face. But her book is not really about what we, civilization, faces but more about how we can face it. The word warrior requires a note at the beginning. Its use comes from the Tibetan word for warrior – “pawo, [which] means one who is brave, one who vows never to use aggression.” I find this an interesting paradox for leaders in today’s organizations!

Spirit Warriors

“[Spirit] warriors would not succumb to aggression or be paralyzed by fear. They would know where best to use their skillful means of compassion and insight.”

The two core aspects of Spirit Warriorship, if this is a word, are compassion and insight.

• Compassion is the capacity to live in the collective. The means for achieving compassion in our complex times include: a loss of fear when faced with challenge, the energy to “carry on” (which makes me recall the song “Wooden Ships” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash), and the ability to chose action when overwhelm threatens. I like this definition of compassion better than the commonly held version, it recognizes the need for choice and localizes compassion to the lived moment.
• Insight is the capacity to see clearly into the interdependence of “all phenomena.” For those leaders who are not systems thinkers, this is the time to learn. If compassion leads us to action (and there are neurological studies that show compassion lights up the motor cortex of our brain), insight allows us to discern right action by seeing the interrelatedness that surrounds us.

The experience of using compassion and insight create what Dugu Choegyal calls our “radical interconnectedness with all life.” (adapted by Joanna Macy)

Lessons for Leaders

This book has much to offer and I recommend it to those who want to better understand how the elements of quantum physics are informing business. For this blog I am focusing only on the last three chapters. Here are some behaviors Wheatley describes that allow you to contemplate your leadership and personal well-being:

• Can you resist using negative emotions to motivate and instead rely on a positive belief in yourself and others?
• Watch your own reactions to events and be mindful (a practice that is never mastered) of the impact they have on you and those around you.
• Be aware of your inner dialogue and the lived story line that it creates. Our personal narrative becomes the mindset with which we perceive the world and react to it. When our inner dialogue includes compassion and insight we can pause before acting out.
• Leaders today need to work with different maps because the terrain is not what it was when management and leadership were defined. The biggest challenge is letting go of where we are and understanding how we are.
• These new maps have different signposts, which show up as questions rather than directions.
  • What are you learning?
  • What triggers you? How do you react when triggered?
  • What aspirations guide you in your daily work and interactions?
  • How are you refraining from adding to the fear, anxiety, and confusion of the times?
  • How did you apply your skills of compassion and insight today?
  • What are the ways you rejuvenate yourself and care for those around you?
  • What have you accomplished today that you can be quietly proud of, that will nurture your own well-being?
  • How did curiosity guide your actions today? Conversation? Connectedness?

Leading wholeheartedly

When I was writing my thesis I was a wreck. Every day I faced down a pile of blank pages, reams of data, and a backlog of information that hadn’t yet morphed into knowledge. Every afternoon my advisor, Cecil Doige, would suddenly show up, leaning against the door jam with a cookie in his hand. As he calmly ate his cookie he listened to my latest rant, disappointment, celebration, or challenge. I don’t recall that he ever gave me advice or provided solutions to my anguish; he just listened and asked questions. When I finally ran out of gas he would push off the door jam and say, “Glad you’re making progress.” Progress?? In the moment of my stunned pause, a piece of the puzzle invariably fell into place and progress was actually achieved. Cec was a Spirit Warrior.

Meg’s admonitions to Spirit Warriors are simple and few:

• Pick up the phone and call
• Visit someone, stop by to listen
• Offer your availability

These were the things I needed and the things my Spirit Warrior offered.

One of the most business applicable concepts from the science of complex adaptive systems is that of emergence – the way a chaordic system produces order from apparent chaos. An example of this is the movement of a flock of birds or a school of fish. For a dramatic view of starlings flocking, watch www.vimeo.com/31158841. Notice how new members join seamlessly, how the flock divides, explores the sky, and comes crashing back together only to set of in a new direction without loss of momentum or injury!

Flocking results when a few simple rules are applied to a large number of independent, moving individuals producing coordinated behavior. Moviegoers have seen the results of computer programmers’ use of three flocking rules to create the coordinated movement of bats and penguins:

• Keep up with your neighbors
• Don’t bump into another
• Don’t stray too far from the group

The key to flocking is that each individual is free to choose their own course of action based on a few simple rules, hence their application to business. These rules must be designed to allow individuals to navigate the local dynamic environment and yet maintain their connection to the group as a whole.

Synchronizing Organizational Activities using Flocking

To make this real, let’s examine continuous improvement and create simple rules that capture its essence using Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata as a guide.

Rule #1: Improve today in order to improve tomorrow.

Flocking rules are based on the interactions between the behaviors of individuals, or at least those behaviors that allow individuals to be part of the flock. Rother points out early in the book (p.38) that the Toyota Continuous Improvement Kata is fundamentally a philosophical stance – an infinite game (see James Carse) one that seeks to continue the game (improving) rather than win (solve a problem). This rule provides direction and vision without defining or determining what is happening “on the floor.” It sets up the key managerial action that Toyota employs for Continuous Improvement, go and see (p.135). The rule also creates a bounded space in which employees and managers can determine “how to do” something rather than try to define “what to do” (p.51).

Rule #2: Let the target condition, not the desired outcome, define the problem.

This replaces the concept that problems define the improvement. “[The] target condition is a description of a process operating in a way – in a pattern – required to achieve the desired outcome [a target].” (p. 103) The context that this rule creates help managers and employees find and use real obstacles that emerge from the process as a means of achieving the ideal state described by the target condition. (See p. 82-84 for a good example of this.) “It is the striving for target conditions via the routine of the improvement kata that characterizes what we have been calling ‘lean manufacturing’.” (p. 101) This rule focuses behavior without defining it.

Rule #3: Only work on what you need to work on.

This rule is complex and applied to diverse situations because it captures human activities (teamwork) as well as activities of work. For example, if a team cannot move forward in deciding how to design an integrated assembly line, the first target condition may be the team’s ability to think collectively rather than the design of the line (p. 108-111). A second example of using this rule asks: who needs to know? When posting work standards (p. 114) who is actually using this information – the manager or the line. Toyota believes it is the manager, so that they can “see what the true problems are and where improvement is needed.” The final example of this rule is its application to creating the target condition (p. 117-121). Rother emphasizes the need to accept a target condition that is vague when you don’t fully understand the current situation that is producing the obstacles you’re facing. By working on understanding the situation first the details of the target condition become clearer and options remain open even while specificity emerges.

Rule #4: Notice what does not go as planned.

Try as I might, continuous improvement needed four rules! As each step in continuous improvement is taken the “system responds” allowing learning and future steps to emerge. To make the most of this, managers need to see small problems or inconsistencies early and constantly experiment with production. These weak signals are moments of surprise that trigger a go and see inquiry as well as a rapid prototyping experiment. Key to this rule is to attend to the signal immediately while the experience is fresh and a quick experiment can be constructed to test your hypothesis.

Test these four rules of flocking and write your own. See what they teach you about how to lead by instilling new behaviors on your organization.

Rother, Mike. Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness, and Superior Results. McGraw Hill, New York, 2010.

Reynolds, Craig. Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model. Published in Computer Graphics, 21(4), July 1987, pp. 25-34.

Carse, James. Infinite Games. The Free Press, New York, 1986.

I am currently reading The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner, I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in how life adapts and changes.

As I contemplate the implications that Darwin’s work has on species, it occurs to me that leaders are a “species,” so to speak, and the future demands that leaders evolve, and fast.

To understand the evolutionary pressures that leaders face, I pulled out seven books I have on the future, not leadership, but the future. They are certainly not definitive, but they help us understand the evolutionary pressures on leaders today.

In response to the pressures of social and business evolution, leaders need to be able to:

– Identify and respond to new rules, patterns, dilemmas, paradox, unsolvable problems, and weak signals as they arise

– Operate with a beginners mind (intentional operational naiveté), be knowledgeable but not captured by the current business model, paradigm, or strategy

– Confidently make good, not great, decisions with incomplete data and course correct as quickly as possible by learning from your actions (“Decisions, once made, create a new environment with no opportunity to replay the old.” Peter Bernstein)

– Actively find ways to challenge your filters of reality and get the blinders off to see what is happening in the world

– Be someone who can go places no one else will and bring others along with you (perhaps there is something here about returning safely as well!!)

– Define what may happen in the future, choose among unproven alternatives, explore the consequences of each, and act fast

– Capitalize on differences; assume that everyone has a different set of “facts” and that choice and decision require you sample the perspective of as many different people as possible

– Understand that the conditions under which a “solution” worked cannot be generalized; nor can we extrapolate past trends into the future, but we can learn from them nevertheless

– Recognize that the whole is the product of interaction among its parts, organizational structure must be in the mind of the leader not on a chart

– Reinvent, reinvent, reinvent – imitation will not lead to success

– Figure out how to develop knowledge nomads, who are free to come and go as they like, into leaders that will take your company into the future

– Make sense of information, meaning out of knowledge, and convert tacit into explicit so it can be passed around and applied – “The unseen and the unknown do not have any competitors.” Karaoke Capitalism)

– Support individualism and create community – enable networks, tribes, and meet-ups

– Remember that wealth is created by wisdom, the few people (talent not titles) who are able, and willing, to make things happen…find them

– Become a master story-teller, translating information into emotion that produces action

– Operate at the working surface – where in-depth knowledge meets the need to make choices and act

– Hire attitude train skills – it can’t be done the other way around – mindset is what lets you see in new ways

– Replace brands and job descriptions with experiences, dreams, and emotion – combine transactional and relational

– Position yourself to be exposed to luck, change before you have to, and be ready for quantum leaps when they show up

– Embark on difficult journeys (strategy, re-organization, change) with no clear destination, take clues from the environment as you go to determine the path forward

– Acknowledge, explore, and understand VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) without giving in to denial or being overwhelmed by analysis

– Continuously challenge your personal mental models, deep assumptions, and unquestioned truths

– Resist the temptation to use fear and confusion to motivate people, maximize trust and minimize ego

– Admit mistakes of interpretation, judgment, and choice openly and seek council from others; and when you fail, fail in interesting ways, extract the learning, and move on

– Treat reputation, truth, and integrity as strategic resources to be protected – balance market wisdom with moral wisdom

– Be comfortable with doubt, tolerant of differences, and open to alternative interpretations of “reality”

– Understand that big, powerful systems have their weak spots and a small force can bring them crashing down – think global financial systems

– Operate in the “intangible” economy (services, experiences, and relationships)

– Filter signal from noise, scan, scout, and be nimble

– Recognize and accept the new role of business a global power acting on the world stage and responsible to stakeholders as much, more (?), than shareholders

– Embrace multiple truths and ask new questions rather than provide certain answers

– Openly question the traditional models of power, leadership, and business in order to creatively meet the challenges of a world that is interdependent, complex, unpredictable, and diverse

– Identify and manage multiple, conflicting dilemmas without losing sight of the competitive marketplace

– Identify, tap, and amplify emerging abilities before the “job description” is needed

– Develop bio-empathy – understand, learn from, and respect nature’s patterns

– Act to calm situations (internally and in partnerships) when differences dominate and communication is strained

– Create constructive engagement and a collective stance

– Broaden everyone’s concept of self/US to include larger systems of which they are apart

– Give up control and seek to influence, connect, and collaborate

– Learn by doing, think future-back, rapid prototype ideas and products, and avoid over-standardizing

– Create common ground – link public and private sectors, co-create with customers, partner with competitors

– Successfully manage your own response (emotional, psychological, physical) to being challenged, surprised, or disappointed

– Imagine what you can make happen rather than speculate on what might happen

– Surface the dogmas, slay the dragons, expose the elephants

– Understand the gap between what you want/need to achieve and what your organization has the competency to deliver, and then close the competency gap

– Invest in business performance using leadership strategy and development

I promised myself I would stop at 1000 words!

References available on request, carol@cairnconsultants.com

Every year thousands of change initiatives are undertaken globally in the form of reorganization, structural and procedural change, new product and service launches, and the setting of strategy, goals, and objectives. Yet, according to Harvard Business Review, and the experience of many of us, 70% of all change initiatives fail. The financial cost of failed change to organizations, the economy, and society is enormous. The human cost – measured by employee lack of trust, disengagement, apathy, turnover, sick days, depression, and burnout – is even higher. Why is change so hard to successfully implement?

Change has a dynamic and logic all its own – the more you try to control it, mandate the timeline, or predict the outcomes the sooner you become part of the 70% failure rate. Success lies in implementing a new model of change, rather than repeating the same model better and faster, that embeds Adaptive Change into the organizational culture; creating resilience and agility in a world that is increasingly volatile and unpredictable.

As we traverse the second half of 2012, a year that has significant change elements geopolitically, spiritually, and perhaps even cosmically, it makes sense to review change from a fresh perspective. This perspective is not “new”, like most innovation its components have been around for years, what is new is their combination and the insight they produce. I have written before about Adaptive Change (see previous posts), but as Kevin Kelly points out: change changes change. I am constantly learning more about the dynamics of change. The next few blogs are recent learnings…just in time for an adaptive year.

Overarching Drivers of Adaptive Change

I have been thinking more about the forces of Adaptive Change lately and how they drive our ability to embed the process of change during implementation. This is critical now more than ever, as pace of change in business is accelerating.

Organizational Purpose binds together Performance, Leadership, Culture and Values, aligning present and future goals.

Adaptive Forces, arising from the External Environment, Internal Response, and Organizational Knowledge and Learning, generate the energy that drives Adaptive Change to the cycle’s conclusion, a higher level of organizational performance and increased coherence with the external business environment.

Together these two generate the content and context of the six components of Adaptive Change that each organization works with during the process of achieving higher performance.

Six Components of Adaptive Change

Performance – Change is an Experience: Calling change a process to be managed ignores the emotional and psychological aspects of each individual’s experience of change. Adaptive Change provides individuals and groups with language and metaphor to bring them into conversation about change and to collectively manage their experience during the process. In this way, behavioral change drives improved performance.

Leaders – Enroll and Enable Others: The mandate from the top is directional – aligning change to the organization’s purpose. The positive energy of Adaptive Change comes from the functional sponsors’ creation of a collective vision that can be implemented across the organization. Individuals voluntarily emerge to create a group of “possibility seeking” change agents. In this way change changes change and the organization adapts based on the interplay of Organizational Purpose and Adaptive Forces.

Culture & Values – Embed the Process of Innovation: Adaptive Change is a long-term value proposition that impacts the organization’s function and structure. When the forces of change are no longer an Us-Them dilemma for people to resist, then product, process, and business innovation are unleashed. Additionally, when Adaptive Change becomes a cultural norm, it emerges when and where it is needed – naturally – creating a sustainable competitive advantage.

External Environment – Generation of Organizational Strain: Adaptive Change is a systemic evolution that occurs when organizations encounter destabilizing events in the environment causing the whole system to move away from the Status Quo. Discontinuities initiate the change cycle, however, unpredicted and uncontrollable VUCA elements arise quickly to shape both the experience of change and the transactional events that resolve it.

Internal Response – Engineering the Experience: Adaptive Change produces transformational opportunities that require leaders to “engineer the experience” in order to realize the full potential of the moment. Managing the internal response provides Vision (Where), Understanding (Why), Clarity (What), and Agility (How) – VUCA Prime. This work presents leaders with their own personal Adaptive Change journey as they learn to lead in a collaborative culture.

Knowledge and Learning – Convene the Adaptive Center: The process of Adaptive Change is the same as the process of organizational learning. It involves a repeating knowledge management cycle: generation of a vision and concepts for change, management of the human experience, making sense of the transactional journey (doing the work), and solving for contradictions and dilemmas.

Next we need a process for implementation, one that embeds Adaptive Change into the culture and daily activities of all employees. Until then, what is your experience of change? When has it worked? Why? When have you struggled? Can you identify one of the six components that was instrumental in your challenge with change? Let us know so we can all learn together about how to make change adaptive.

It’s that time of year again – time to create your Individual Development Plan or IDP. Staring down at the “official” corporate IDP form, one is reminded how limiting management theory has become (see Gary Hamel’s new book and website for more). So here’s a thought, for yourself and your key talent, do some management 3.0 pre-work before you fill in the blanks.

IDP 3.0 Structure

Before you get too SMART, get out your MAPS – Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose, and Strengths. Blending Dan Pink’s Motivation 3.0 with Gallup’s StrengthFinder gives you something to write corporate about.

Mastery – “Solving complex problems requires an inquiring mind and the willingness to experiment one’s way to a fresh solution. …Only engagement can produce Mastery [which is] essential in today’s economy.” Dan Pink

Autonomy – “…no one can plan effectively for someone else. It is better to plan for oneself, no matter how badly, than to be planned for by others, no matter how well.” Russell Ackhoff

Purpose – “Ultimately, each person has a significant degree of control over how many challenges she deals with. Even the simplest task, if carried out with care and attention [Purpose], can reveal layers and layers of opportunity to hone one’s skills.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Strength – “Building on your strengths isn’t necessarily about ego. It is about responsibility. …It is your opportunity to take your natural talents and transform them through focus and practice and learning into near perfect performance.” Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton

IDP – The Prequel

Start with Purpose. For the foreseeable future, and these days 12-months is a long time horizon, what is your calling? How do you fit into the organization’s “grand design”? In the position you currently occupy, what is the source of your power and how will you use that to accomplish something significant? Becoming aware of your Purpose, you can design an IDP that generates conscious competence.

Layer in Strengths. This ensures your performance plan is both excellent and personally fulfilling. To do this you have to, first, know your strengths. But don’t just read the results…really digest them, embed them into your leadership IDP. How can you naturally combine these five elements to create a synergism that supersedes what they accomplish singularly (conscious competence)? Is there a shift in emphasis that, combined with the context of your current role, can catapult you to a new level of performance? Can this year provide you the challenges to polish one (or more) themes to produce real growth – growth of Phoenix proportions? Looking at your profile what complimentary strengths are essential to your work and WHO in your network has them? How do you enroll these folks to your cause this year?

Mastery generates the Plan. Into this fertile ground ask:

• What available challenges excite me? Be curious.
• What work leaves me deeply satisfied? Be engaged.
• What performance goals led to learning? Be mindful.
• What fuels me and gives me energy? Be joyful.

Autonomy delivers the Plan. Every day for as long as the plan is relevant, autonomy adapts the plan to change over the course of the year. What choices do you make, daily or hourly, to keep your plan in play? How will you achieve both autonomy and interdependence – the reality of working in a network organization? What boundaries exist and must be worked within? Are they negotiable? Shifting focus from “what” you must do to “how” you can do it places you squarely in Intrinsic Motivation, a learning mindset, and a positive attitude.

So there you have it, the MAPS of you – today, in this job – that will produce a SMART IDP and a successful, fulfilling year of work.