Evolution Towards One Team Wholeness
A perspective on descaling organizations
Carl J. Rogers
Introduction
This is a perspective piece built upon my experience, observation, and learning of organizational evolution and the push and pull of scaling and de-scaling organizations. It is inspired from a talk Simon Powers gave in a recent Enterprise Agile Coach Boot Camp, which is in itself based on a talk from Craig Larman, the co-creator of Large Scale Scrum (LeSS).
I began to write this foremost to help concrete some concepts in my mind, to support further investigation. From my initial discussions the Evolution Towards One Team Wholeness has been a model that has resonated, that people can recognize where their company sits today, and that the narrative how of organizations might move forward is coherent. That being said no evidence or proof is presented today beyond what has been observed and articulated from these conversations. I am therefore incredibly interested in seeking the views and experiences of others to shape these ideas further. What do you see in this that you observe as true, what can be developed, and what doesn’t sit right?
Evolutionary Stages
The model shows six stages of evolution towards one team wholeness, beginning from enterprises that position people with deep specialists into narrow boundaries of focus and autonomy. I.e., hire chess masters and treat them like pawns. Then there is a progression through various stages of structure to enable truly collaborative, performing teams that have autonomy and real ownership of what they do. As leadership mindset shifts, more distributed structures are created to enable decentralized decision making.
The evolution presents the descaling of organizations, as tight dependency bonds between teams are progressively loosened and broken into smaller and smaller networks of interconnected teams. This is not about organizations becoming smaller, or reducing headcount, or doing less with more. This is a non-linear value amplifier, of teams becoming exponentially more effective at delivering value.
Intermediary states may exist that draw in elements of the next stage; or legacy structures and long lived impediments act as an anchor preventing forward momentum. That being said, it should not be a goal to move an organization up through these evolutionary stages of its own right, e.g. a transformation of specialist teams into a Whole Team. Similar to the Agile Fluency Model, there are many valid destinations. How agile do you need to be to meet your unique business challenges?
Crossing Boundaries
Structure follows business need, and the most significant limiting factor will remain leadership behavior and mindset. The green and teal structures cannot be achieved or sustained without leaders who can create the conditions for empowerment, cooperation, and give power of decision making to those closest to the work.
The boundaries therefore between one evolutionary stage to the next must be crossed with intent and supported by appropriate investment. Investment firstly in leadership behavior, through self development, coaching and strategic hiring to advance their collective Action Logic.
Secondly, in structuring appropriately to organize around value and to eliminate different forms of waste (muda).
Thirdly, investment in DevOps to shorten the systems development life cycle, to enable continuous integration and continuous deployment. This is essential in pushing dependencies from being managed by many dozens of people meeting daily or weekly; to managing dependencies in the code itself.
Throughout, sufficient (i.e. significant) training is needed to enable everyone working within this system to apply new thinking and ways of working such that a new culture can emerge.
It is vital to start where you are now, and to understand what is true about your current context. The good, the bad and most certainly the ugly. Which evolutionary stage represents where you truly are at? Does it serve your business needs? Can you optimize with incremental improvement for your current stage, or is radical change needed?
No Backwards Steps
Initial discussion on this model has consented that it would be harmful to deliberately move backwards on the evolutionary path. (The possible exception to this being a move from One Team to Whole Team, demonstrating this is the least developed area of understanding so far).
Moving down one stage or more may have happen as a consequence of other forces at play. For instance, The only leader with a transforming Action Logic is headhunted to a new company, and the remaining leaders cannot sustain the psychologically safe environment needed for the green or teal structures. Or high turnover, e.g. from the Mass Resignation, leaves a Whole Team full of new faces, and for a time people are once again needed to support integration as a dedicated role. Or the technical debt of a once ordered code base is left unchecked, code branches are left open for glacial epochs, and people are once again reduced to joining regular calls to crawl through integration issues.
Mapping to Scaling Frameworks
Throughout this article you may well have been considering how your companies, past and present, have mapped to this model. That may also then connect with the methodology or framework that these organizations have been using to coordinate and manage the generation of value.
I suspect the graphic below is the part of this article that is likely to draw contention. It is based almost entirely on what I intuitively believe to be correct based on my past experience and knowledge of these various frameworks, and validated only through short discussion of some 20+ agile coaches and practitioners. Although these individuals most certainly draw experience widely and deeply from many different companies, industries and contexts.
The Integration Team stage is almost entirely inspired by the Nexus Scrum framework, and the Whole Team on the work by Craig Larman with LeSS. That is not to say that these are the only frameworks or ways of working that will suit these evolutionary stages. Sociocracy 3.0 offers ways of working that seem very compatible with the Whole Team and One Team stages.
Summary
In summary here we have a model that helps frame where an organization is today, and in some ways it is sufficient in that regard by holding up a silver mirror. In understanding where are now it also offers views on what would need to be true in order to achieve the next stage of evolution.
If this model has legs it would be great to develop it further through support of secondary research and primary in the form of case studies. If this sounds like something you might like to contribute to, to a greater or lesser degree, please do get in touch!
Sources
- Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, ISBN 978–2960133509
