ROCAgile: The Adaptive Organization
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The Adaptive Organization: A Leadership Guide to the System That Builds Business Agility
In many organizations, transformation efforts are constrained by rigid systems of control and outdated practices. As change agents, how can we safely challenge the status quo and establish healthy, sustainable ways to measure and track progress that truly support transformation?
For more than twenty years we've told leaders to "build the environment where teams can succeed." Always the right idea, and never enough, because no one ever said what the environment actually was.
The environment is your operating model — how strategy, product decisions, flow of work, org structure, and leadership behavior fit together. Most transformations change one of those five and leave the other four running the old playbook. The teams learn new practices, the layer above them doesn't, and two years later the ceremonies are different and nothing else is.
This session introduces the Adaptive Organization Operating Model, synthesized from fifty of the industry's most important thinkers into five interdependent parts. Each one answers a question every leader should be able to answer about their own organization:
- Strategy & Outcomes — Are we clear about what problems we're solving, and how we'll know we've solved them?
- Product Thinking & Discovery — Are we solving the right problem, at the right time, for a real customer?
- Flow of Work & Delivery — How much sooner can we turn learning into customer value?
- Team & Org Design — Is our structure serving the work, or fighting it?
- Leadership & Culture — Are leaders creating the conditions for ownership and learning to thrive?
We'll work through the five together, one at a time. You bring the dysfunction you're living with; I'll bring the thinkers, the specific stop/start/model behaviors that shift each layer, and the thing rooms almost always miss. Come ready to talk — the best material in a session like this comes from the people in it.
You'll leave able to name the layer most constraining your organization, and the one behavior to change first.
