July 2010
1 post
3 tags
Disintegration without Fragmentation →
On Gary Hamel’s WSJ Management blog he recently asked:
So, dear reader, what advice would you give to Drew? What have you learned about turning followers into leaders—and then leading the leaders? And is it possible to dis-integrate an organization without fragmenting it?
I provide an answer worth sharing here:
The best framework I’ve seen for turning “followers into leaders” and...
June 2010
3 posts
How chaotic is your environment, really?
I made a recent comment on David Anderson’s blog regarding the underlying assumptions of two software development practices. The point of my reply is useful outside of the domain of software development and I’d like to include some of it here.
In his blog David made the claim that one development process, named Scrum, has an underlying assumption: ”that trying to map the...
More about architecture and organizations →
Listen to David Bryne talk about how the vessel that receives our creative passion will shape the form that our will passion will take.
Listen to the bird songs at different heights of the forest.
Consider our organizations as the vessels for our passions. They constrain, limit and mold the way our creative genius takes shape.
Open our eyes to the context of our organizations. What does a...
Organizational Architecture
Ideally, I believe that organizational designers are the ones responsible for crafting an environment where the three motivational factors identified by Daniel Pink, purpose, autonomy and mastery, can flourish.
Organizational design is more about cultivation and “gardening” the organization, than it is about controlling it. It is more about creating opportunities for interaction,...
April 2010
2 posts
Corporate conscience and the Lucifer Effect
To understand what a corporate conscience might look like, it will be worth exploring first the opposite: What mades good people do evil things. The book The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo, explores just this thing.
The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students...
Shareholder ownership? Think again. →
Good things come in small articles. In this article from Harvard Business Review the authors reveal their research findings of a “century’s worth of legal theory and precedent”.
Shareholders do not own the corporation, which is an autonomous legal person. What’s more, when directors go against shareholder wishes—even when a loss in value is documented—courts side with directors...
March 2010
5 posts
Interactive Governance: The middle way
I find it very interesting that so many companies seek “business agility” but when it comes to actually making a change to basic operating procedures very few have anything resembling a consistent process for rolling out change. The apparent choice seems to be between stagnation via consensus based analysis paralysis or hack and slash via executive mandates. Finding the middle-way...
3 tags
Culture and Conflict in Organizations, Part 1
Usually when we think of inter-cultural conflict national and ethnic divisions come to mind. However, within every organization there are significant cultural differences that impede communication and stir conflict. I can name three such divides. They are: temperament, interaction style, and placement within the organizational structure.
Each of these lenses reveal subgroups in an organization...
3 tags
"Leader", no longer. →
Yes. This post articulates the discomfort I’ve had with the word “Leader”. The word “Leader” made sense in old 20th century organizations where there were followers. In an enlightened organization where “co-creation” has taken hold, followers don’t exists any more. Consequently, leaders don’t need to exist anymore.
But — fear not...
2 tags
Book Review: Rework by 37 Signals
While there are many one line wonders in this little gem, overall I found there to be one unspoken assumption underlying the entire book:
“All companies should be small”
The authors never came out and said it, but statements like these say it all:
“[Big companies] talk instead of act. They meet instead of do.”
“You can afford to teach, and that’s something...
4 tags
Improv and Organization →
I found the seven principles for effortless-looking improv out lined in this article particularly attention grabbing. When teams are working well, the exhibit these same traits, and their results are effortless-looking!
1. Yes and.
2. Make everyone else look good.
3. Be changed by what is said and what happens.
4. Co-create a shared [emerging] “agenda.”
5. Mistakes are...
October 2009
1 post
Its like Scrum for your Mind →
For anyone looking to boost your individual productivity in a way that complements Team practices like Scrum/Agile, have a look at the Pomodoro Technique.
The Pomodoro Technique (PT) basically lays out a framework of iterations and feedback for an indivudal’s daily workflow. Great stuff.
I view this technique as a compliment to the Getting Things Done (GTD) practices as well. Again, using...
August 2009
2 posts
“At the BAWB Global Forum, we were asked to imagine and design a new theory of...”
– Alison Conte, Holacracy — an agile organizational practice for thrivability
Enabling Self-Organization using Holacracy™
I spoke at this month’s Agile Denver meeting about using Holacracy in an Agile Team to power-up the Team’s self-organization. I also explained how Holacracy can be used to remove the communication gap between Agile Teams and their surrounding tradition organizations.
As is often the case with an introductory Holacracy talk, there were a lot of scrunched up faces and questioning looks...
July 2009
1 post
"The Disturbed", Holacracy & Self-Organization
Have a quick watch of this 2:30 minute video from Atlassian. It is a great example of a self-organizing team discovering and applying a useful organizational pattern to their context.
“The Disturbed” is an instantiation of the Sacrifice One Person (4.1.22) [1][2] pattern with a unique spin from the specific team that (re)discovered it.
How was this team able reorganize itself and...
May 2009
4 posts
Basic Agile Vocabulary
I wrote this up as a pre-amble to a backlog document to help level-set the readers’ understanding of the language used through the document. I thought it might be useful to share:
Work item - an arbitrary unit of work.
Epic - a large work item that cannot possibly be estimated accurately due to its shear size.
User story - a work item small enough to be estimated. Usually articulated in...
4 tags
Standing for something →
“there’s a world of difference between truly standing for something and having a mission statement that says you stand for something.” - 37 Signals.
How I would say state this is, what is the aim of your organization - what is its purpose for existence?
Answers like “Making money”, “Providing super service”, and “superior products” do not count....
Impediments in the backlog?
I just answered this question via Aardvark:
Aardvark User: In scrum, when does an impediment (with tasks) become a story?
Evan: An impediment usually would never become a story, unless there is engineering work required by the team. The impediment list is owned by the ScrumMaster and is work on by the ScrumMaster and anyone else the ScrumMaster solicits help from. Any time that impediments take to work on should not be counted in the team's velocity. That time is simply part of the "drag" on the system. When the impediment is removed its drag can be measures by the increase in the teams velocity.
Aardvark User: Good info, thanks. This impediment required several hours of engineering work. Would you recommend this become a story if it's already been worked on and resolved?
Evan: There's two schools of thought on this. My take is that it depends on what you are trying to measure. Are you trying to measure the capability of your organization to deliver end-user functionality? Or are you trying to justify the existence of your team to higher level management? In the first situation you might add an item to the backlog but assign it zero value. In the later situation you might add it to the backlog with a positive value.
Aardvark User: We are probably somewhere in the middle. We want to establish an accurate average velocity and prove to management we are doing the work. I will probably go with creating the story and having the team determine the size. Thanks for the help!
Evan: You're welcome!