Exiting the pandemic, what if nothing changes?

Org models, management techniques, and performance management suddenly came up for discussion due to the crisis. But does the pandemic really change things, or just expose what was there all along?

Join us to to explore in discussion;

You are your dogfood (wot you eat):

“Any organisation that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure” — Melvin E. Conway.

Your product reflects your org. You try to design products that are adaptable, highly available, efficient, maintainable, fault tolerant, and satisfying to use. In fact, your products meet requirements but are ordinary and uninspiring.

This is because your org is a monolith, resistant to change and as agile as concrete. Incremental improvements are self delusion. To transcend mediocrity, you must transform to become adaptable, highly available, efficient, maintainable, fault tolerant, and inspiring. If you lack courage, it’s ok; you're not alone.

Command & control vs mission control:

C&C is synchronous; you plan, allocate resources, delegate tasks and exert control so work stays on track. MC is asynchronous; you set an objective; the team plans, mobilises resources, establishes a timeline, and executes autonomously.

C&C focuses on controlling resources and cutting costs. MC focuses on exploiting opportunity. In C&C, the manager is 100% accountable, and the single point of failure; to improve results bolster or replace the manager. In MC, the team is accountable; to improve results empower the team to fail fast and adapt.

Perfectly fault tolerant:

“There are no mistakes in life, only lessons to be learned” - Mark Twain.

Some managers think mistakes are a waste. They pursue practices that prevent mistakes. On the contrary, enduring orgs do not attempt to be perfect, but to be fault tolerant, embracing the concept of failing fast.

Continuous improvement weaponised:

Continuous improvement is inherent to self-organisation. It's an excellent tool. It enables teams to inspect their own behavior, changing circumstances and performance, adapting to achieve objectives. Like most tools, it’s easily weaponised. It can be a naive manager’s excuse to legitimise ever-increasing demands. An excuse to measure people against imposed metrics. Wrong. It’s a way to build in practices that enable us to inspect our situation periodically and to adapt to change. It comes from within teams and cannot be imposed.

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Host: Robert Turnbull. Robert is currently 'Director of Agile Services', coaching distributed teams and driving the adoption of automated delivery pipelines. A pragmatist, he's interested in helping business leaders achieve agility above dogma. He can also draw upon his experiences from running nimble automated approaches to software engineering, DevOps and product delivery functions. https://www.linkedin.com/in/agilecoach247/