Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: scaling up

  • Agile Self-Organization: Band-Aid for a Broken Leg

    One of the concepts that has been widely popularized by Agile movement is self-organization of teams. It lands very nicely in any Agile context, no matter the discussed method or even a general approach one might have to Agile implementations.

    It is, after all, an idea that appeals to line employees and managers alike. Let’s give atomic teams power to decide how they would work within safe constraints. Safe here means safe for managers, of course. In one swift move we address, at least to some point, two issues. One, we increase empowerment across team members as they get more say over how they work. Two, we remove managerial burden of work organization at a the most detailed level, at which managers’ competence can frequently be challenged.

    All but the most micromanagerial types should be satisfied.

    Since how the work gets done is decided closer to where it actually gets done, we increase odds of good processes and policies. At the same time, through more autonomy we improve motivation and engagement.

    It’s not without a reason that self-organization at a team level got its way into common practice.

    History of Agile (Oversimplified)

    The starting point for self-organization as a technique or a practice is not unlike other agile practices. Early Agile methods were focused on a team. The perspective might have differed, but the atomic entity in consideration was always a team. Be it Scrum, XP, Kanban or anything else, in their early forms there was little mention on interoperability across teams either horizontally or vertically.

    Obviously, once Agile got traction there was a need for scaling the approach up. Initially, some makeshift approaches were being made to do that (anyone remembers Scrum of Scrums?). Eventually, whole methods were built to enable large scale Agile implementations—SAFes and LeSSes of this world.

    These approaches were built around a core method, typically Scrum, and took good parts of other methods whenever authors saw fit. Fundamentally, the value added of these methods was in a description how to roll everything out in a big organization. The desired outcome would be to see the core method implemented in multiple teams while ensuring some level of alignment across an organization.

    It was about scaling up the method and not scaling up the principles behind. It was about getting more Scrum / Kanban / whatever teams in an organization and not figuring out how the basic values and principles would have to work if they were applied on different levels of an organization.

    That’s exactly when we petrified self-organization as a technique relevant to a team and a team only.

    The Broken Leg

    Let’s look at the problem we are solving with self-organization. We give people autonomy and they organize work better as they are most knowledgeable how the work can be done optimally. At the same time, since we distribute autonomy, we increase motivation and engagement.

    So far, so good. I can’t help but ask: are these problems exclusive to the lowest levels of organizations, i.e. atomic teams, or are they more endemic?

    There’s no reason to think that the disease isn’t wide-spread. After all, for a century we are perpetuating Taylor’s and Ford’s ideas of separating the workforce from workflow design. It doesn’t happen on the factory floor only but throughout the whole hierarchy. A higher rank designs how lower rank works and what is expected of them. It is, in fact, the hierarchy itself that discourages us to distribute autonomy more than absolutely necessary.

    What we are looking at is not just a marginal problem of line employees going shallow into the higher ranks. The injury is not a scratch but a broken leg.

    The Band-Aid

    Despite how widespread the disease is the solution we have is far from enough: self-organization… but just at a team level. It is exactly the proverbial band-aid for a broken leg. It does the work, i.e. stop the bleeding, but only as long as the injury is skin-deep.

    We know it’s not the case.

    And yet we keep curing our broken organizational leg with just more band-aids of atomic teams embracing more autonomy. At the same time, we don’t address the structural problem of lack of autonomy throughout the hierarchy.

    There lies the root cause of the problem. Working only on the lowest possible level, i.e. teams, we already have hard constraints of how far we can go with autonomy (and it’s not far really). Unless we start working on self-organization systematically, we won’t get much long-term effect in an organization. It would be just one more band-aid.

    The Cure

    We got principles missing when we were figuring out how to scale Agile up. Interestingly enough, it had long been figured out in the military. Even more curious, the problem had been solved with tangible practices and not with some vague aspirations. The difference is that the military practices were designed as scalable from the very beginning.

    Take briefing and debriefing as an example. It is a pair of activities of sharing the goals and the context (the orders) by an officer to a unit and having the unit brief back to the officer what they understood. The goal of briefing and debriefing is for any rank to make sure that: a) a lower rank unit understands the goal (the purpose) of a higher rank officer and one rank above, and b) a lower rank unit understood correctly what was briefed.

    Such a practice is rank-agnostic. It can be applied at any level of a hierarchy without any specific adjustments. It is entirely not so with Agile self-organization practices that were immersed in 7 plus or minus 2 people as a definition of a team.

    If we aspire to see organizational transformations that would be an equivalent of turnaround of some of our teams, we need to reinvent self-organization. Autonomy distribution must become either a rank-agnostic practice or it has to have dedicated solutions for each organizational level.

    The former, while much harder to design and implement, is potentially much more applicable. It is the domain where tools such as decision making process, open salaries, or inclusive hiring process reside. The meta pattern here is that by default any decision is made after collective advisory process and at a lower level that it would have been made otherwise.

    I acknowledge that these examples may sound radical. They are, indeed. And yet adjusting them to a softer form is straightforward. It doesn’t have to be that anyone can decide about anyone else’s salary. It can be that anyone can decide about anyone else’s salary within their team and in accordance with budget constraints. What matters is that the decision is made at a lower level (a team mate and not a manager) and the whole team is invited to take part in the process.

    Such a change won’t happen overnight. Even in a small organization it likely requires years and not months to implement. However, unless there is a motion toward that direction, we are just paying lip service to self-organization and apply more band aid to broken legs.

  • Scaling Up Is Not the Only Option

    There is one thing that seems to be present in pretty much every company strategy these days. Given the opportunity, they want to grow. Obviously not every organization is successful at that but scaling up is treated as a default option and a universally desired goal.

    In fact, it is sometimes assumed so obvious that it doesn’t even gets discussed. One example was a recent discussion on preserving culture (see comments too). The post that initiated the whole thing seems to assume that the growth is a fixed part of the equation.

    An interesting thing happens when I mention scaling up strategy that we have at Lunar Logic, which is: don’t. All those blank stares and questions like “why would you pass an opportunity to grow?” Interestingly enough ceasing to grow means that we have to pass on some potential projects. This makes the whole discussion even more interesting.

    An issue we forget is that scaling up doesn’t come for free and the biggest cost of growth is how it affects organizational culture. Given that the current culture is something one values, preserving the important parts of it during growth is extremely difficult. If we are talking about rapid growth it’s basically impossible.

    If you happen to be in a place where the culture is a cornerstone of your success, which is exactly our case at Lunar, you may want to rethink whether scaling up is an obvious, or even desired, choice.

    Nevertheless a story I keep hearing over and over again about different organizations is “we’ve been doing so great so far that we decided that we want to grow by 100% in a year.” The trick is that when they succeed they will likely be a very different organization. Different values will be shared across the group. Different behaviors will be treated as a norm. Different way of work will be considered a standard. It will be a different culture altogether.

    It is likely that the very things that made them successful in the first place will be gone by then lost in rush to get bigger.

    Obviously there’s only that many things one can do with couple dozen people but then decision about growth is typically made without considering all side effects.

    And by the way, while I keep focusing on culture, as it is most vulnerable, there’s much more than that. One of the catchy themes these days is scaling Agile. Obviously part of the story is rolling out Agile in the context of big organizations. Another part though is maintaining all the value that we get thanks to using agile approach once we grow. While this is doable it adds to complexity of all the processes and the whole system.

    It’s not without a reason that smallest organizations tend to be the most efficient and as they grow they tend to spend more and more effort trying to comply with their internal and artificial processes.

    So why not dodge the bullet and keep an organization small? While I don’t say it has to be a default option it’s definitely an option to consider.

    It changes the whole equation as suddenly you are incentivized to say no. No, we won’t take this project as we are fully booked. No, we won’t jump on that candidate even though she seems to be pretty good. Suddenly, we have higher standards for work we do and people we hire.

    The focus is not on “more and more” but on “better and better.” Wouldn’t that be a nice option to consider?

  • Unscaling Agile

    A theme of scaling Agile, or Lean for that matter, is all hot these days. You will hear it all sorts of contexts: as broad as Agile and as specific as one of the methods we use. No wonder. It sells.

    You can tell that looking at tracks at Agile or Lean conferences. You can tell that looking at a rise of approaches that specifically aim at the big scale as their main target (SAFe, anyone?)

    The interesting part of the whole dispute is how rarely we question scaling up strategy. I mean it seems to be some sort of unquestionable paradigm and when you decide to go against that everyone looks at you as you were an alien. I sometimes feel like rolling out a huge program to introduce Agile or Lean in the whole organization was the only thing there was for big companies.

    How does it work for us so far? Not so well. We don’t have lots of success stories and those few that are available seem to be share at pretty much every Agile or Lean event there is. This tells a story about our success rates with scaling agile too.

    Unscaling strategies are almost never mentioned in the dispute. It is so despite the fact that we actually know at least a couple of different approaches we can use there.

    One is skunk works. The basic idea is to create a group within a company that operates pretty independently on the rest of the organization. This creates an opportunity to try out a lot of stuff that would be hard to implement in a broader context. At the same it creates an environment of much smaller scale.

    Applying Lean Startup within a big organization goes along the same lines. On the top of a product development strategy we create a context of work that is autonomous and that operates in small scale.

    Quite a different approach is when an organization decides to find a partner to outsource some of their work to. With such a situation one thing that is easily done is scaling the context down. A difficult part is to find a partner that would live be the right values and employ the right practices. But then again, it may be used as a viable unscaling strategy too.

    Interestingly enough, such approaches are rare. One exception may be outsourcing. However, outsourcing done in a common way has nothing to do with scaling down and very frequently criteria used to choose an outsourcing partner only make the whole situation worse. Believe me, I’m actually in this business on a receiving end so I’ve heard all the motivations for sending the work near-shore or off-shore.

    If you wonder why unscaling is so unpopular you aren’t going to be surprised with the answers. Either of these scenarios means losing control and that is something that management is generally allergic to. Also to make it work you need trust as high autonomy is one of key parts of the setup. Finally, there’s a risk of doing something not exactly in a standardized way which may produce unpredictable outcomes.

    Have I just said between the lines that one of the main drivers of scaling up Agile and Lean is complacency? Oh well…

    Anyway, unscaling strategy not only makes it much easier to adopt Lean or Agile but at the same time it enables fresh ideas as many constraints are typically relieved. Not to mention that it goes along the lines of autonomy, mastery and purpose which drives individual motivation.

    So the next time you hear about scaling Agile why not consider unscaling it?