Here is a short article to start saying more about my perception of large-scale organization according to the current fashionable expression. Today the key questions around agility are of two kinds (in my humble opinion): a) the sustainability and integrity of agility, b) scaling. I had already begun to discuss this point in this article: large-scale agile is as clear as crystal, and I will return to it below.

Part 1: introduction to my thinking

Agility is much more a way of being, a culture, than simple practices, so it is not so easy to acquire. And today you must be “agile” like the Shadoks had to pump, it’s the fashion effect with all its flaws. So we observe many disappointments. For this reason the first of the questions around agility is how to adopt it well and succeed in a sustainable way with transitions. To this question it seems to me that Dan Mezick responds very adequately and I encourage you to read his culture game and his information on open agile adoption. I was able to mention it in this article (with many links).

So the first question is temporal in nature: sustainability, durability of the agile approach. This will not be the subject of this short series of articles, because, as I just told you, it seems to me that Dan Mezick answers it very well.

Second order of questions: it works and it’s growing. How to manage it? Very often we start with one or two teams and with success, we need to apprehend a more global transition. The real questions arrive: should we switch the entire structure to an agile culture and organization, and if so how?

Thus the second question is spatial in nature: how to extend the agile approach and culture to a large organization. This will be the subject of a short series of articles I’m thinking about.

Theory and experience

To answer this problem, two axes: theory and experience. Theory always seems essential to me, especially when we’re exploring new subjects. Experience is moreover nourished by theory. Even if intuitions can be dazzling, experience seems equally important to me. The word is to be conceived in two senses: lived experience, and experience to be carried out, to be tried, that of empiricism.

On the theory side I will try to give you all the sources that have nourished my thinking, perhaps misguided moreover on the subject… Concerning experience on large-scale questions, I would say that I was able to follow at a certain point (following an agile transition) about fifteen – or even more – so-called agile teams, within the same organization. I could only follow, because at a certain point one cannot seriously support more than a certain number of teams. Being in this context the agile reference I had however a fairly general, and interesting, view. About fifteen teams, and all the people who gravitated around them, that is one hundred and fifty people. The right number in a way to project even further in my eyes (I will explain this point later but the readers of this mini book on the agile horde already have the answer).

For empiricism, I encourage you to try.

Two schools

Today in response to this problem we have two schools that confront each other.

Those, of which I am not part, who think that at a certain scale the old ways of thinking reclaim their rights. That is to say that agile aspects are granted at the team level, at operational field actions, in tight groups, but that at the organizational level, at large scale, agile has no intrinsic value. So they copy matrix models, rationalist, Cartesian, onto their organizations, at worst with a silo approach by competency, and not a vertical business approach.

In fact it’s just that it’s very reassuring for classical management to operate this way. No need to question oneself, the old habits will start working again (against a backdrop of preserved hierarchy, blame, illusion of control and effort). So it’s very sellable, that’s what for example – in my opinion – the famous SAFe Scaled Agile Framework is based on (no link, it’s useless, it doesn’t work). Unfortunately I have never seen it work, on the other hand I have seen it fail. When I say that it doesn’t work it’s not – unfortunately – that the companies collapse and disappear. No they are just non-performing, slow, moribund, even devoured from within by internal struggles. They will disappear, don’t doubt it, but slowly, during a slow agony. That’s the whole problem with monopolistic organizations: they can wander for a long time as long as their monopoly holds, when it collapses, they collapse with it. It’s also the whole problem of organizations that are too rich, without financial worries, nothing pushes them to be performing and therefore to make the right choices (to those who say: “but they are rich so they make the right choices”, I answer: “no I don’t think so”). When the windfall disappears, they must quickly adapt, they’re not used to it.

Others, of which I am part, think that there is no rupture between managing a team and/or a large organization since we base our functioning on a culture; it can thus apply at all levels: the reasoning, the behaviors that result from it are the same. What the organization develops locally, it must develop globally. Think of an organic approach instead of a mechanistic approach, way of thinking, culture, rather than harmonization or rationalization.

First leads

Crystal

To describe this organic way of thinking about the organization I will rely on an image that I found interesting: that of the crystal. I still need to validate this intuition. Because the crystal is ultimately not necessarily the right material. The termite mound?

Complexity, disorder, learning

Necessity of disorder to generate new patterns of learning, value, creativity, life: not fossil companies that no longer breathe. These patterns take the form of stories (storytelling). For a first draft on these reflections this text, or the chapter “storytelling and self-organization” of this mini book on the agile horde. It is necessary to have disorder to move forward, create, generate. Disorder is anyway present in our complex world. Let the natural self-organization of which we are capable apprehend this novelty. Patterns through storytelling for learning (storage). I thus describe open, learning systems.

Look at the images, do you seriously think that a well-ordered universe is rich? That a clean sandbox is fun and creative? (I stole these images from the twitter account:

@organizedthings)

René Thom’s catastrophe theory

Another intuition through my readings, René Thom’s catastrophe theory: this would not propose predefined schemas for our organizations, but models. Thus we could think of a topology of companies and understand their movements and forms, in other words, a lead to apprehend the discontinuity of forms of organizations with the help of a known model. Think of the word catastrophe as an event. An event occurs that generates a change, positive or negative. I follow up this preamble quickly with a first attempt to appropriate this theory in the context of business organizations (agile or not, it doesn’t matter). That’s what interests me the most, today, Sunday January 19, 2014.

Many of my friends know that I hate the term Sociocracy, not what it hides. There is good and less good, it’s a packaging, a synthesis of quite a few things already seen elsewhere. But like any synthesis it crystallizes a new story, and is interesting as a toolkit that makes sense. Among these tools, one proves very inspired by the thermodynamics of open systems (many thinkers mention it when talking about organization): the double link. In thermodynamics a system is open when there is exchange of matter (of information!) and energy between the system and the external environment, as living beings do for example, like the organic approach mentioned above. This double link of Sociocracy does nothing other than say that and it is perhaps easier to grasp than the idea of open systems in thermodynamics. I will return to it (special dedication Grég.L).

There you go, a first perspective that I will try to dig into. These intuitions and reflections may prove false. Perhaps another subject will seize me in the meantime, but well it has been several months that this has been running through my head and I find in it a link with my agile horde, a continuity, so a priori, I will stick to it.

Series on organizations

0 - premises: Large-scale agile: it’s as clear as crystal

1 - thinking about your organization: introduction

2 - thinking about your organization: catastrophe theory

3 - thinking about your organization: in the field