How Nimble organizations navigate through complexity using The Flow System and the Agile Analysis Horizons
In this article, I continue to dive into the concept of Nimble organizations. Inspired by the webinar series about Nimble from The Brazilian BA, (which you can find here), I started diving into the concept as well. I had my first take discussing the importance of experimentation and pivoting in organizations with a Nimble capability (which you can find here). Being Nimble requires tools for both sensing and responding, which is in fact how The Flow System™ addresses complexity. In this article, I introduce The Flow System within nimbleness. Also, we can combine it with the 3 Agile Analysis Horizons from the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®).
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term Nimble organizations, it’s a concept introduced by the IIBA®: an organization’s scalable capability to sense and respond to change with precision and speed. The IIBA published a research report about how organizations capable of being “Nimble” have a much higher performance than their peers, called “Being Nimble: The Scalable Capability for an Organization to Sense and Respond to Change” (you can find it here). As already said, The Flow System is designed to address sensemaking and response in complex environments.
To achieve true agility and nimbleness, the focus relies on sensing your environment and having a good structure for decision-making, instead of relying on adopting a specific method or framework is sufficient for such transformation. TFS co-author Nigel Thurlow discussed together with The Brazilian BA how it is needed much more than frameworks for achieving nimbleness. You can check the full vídeo here — right after going through the rest of this article, of course!
The Flow System
Definition of The Flow System™
The Flow System™ enables business growth by eliminating non-value-added activities by fostering an environment for innovation and the rapid delivery of value, and shortening the time to market.
TFS is a holistic flow approach to delivering customer-first value. It is built upon the Toyota Production System (TPS) and a triple helix approach (The Triple Helix of Flow™): complexity Thinking, Distributed Leadership and Team Science. Each helix must be interconnected, synchronized and embedded in an organization’s structure to achieve flow.
TFS provides an understanding of different methods, patterns, practices and techniques that enable organizations to achieve their desired outcomes.
The Triple Helix of Flow™ consists of 3 individual strands of organizational DNA; Complexity Thinking, Distributed Leadership, and Team Science.
Complexity thinking is a new form of thinking to aid in understanding uncertainty and complex adaptive systems. Operating in complex environments is an exploratory process where the whole is not understood completely. We need to understand that not everything is predictable because in these environments there are unknown-unknowns.
Complexity Thinking in the TFS
Complexity involves making sense of uncertainty. When working on complex problems, there is a common agreement that the problem exists but not in How to solve that problem.
For complex problems, more is unknown than known. If we use the Cynefin framework, we will decide how to approach the problem by sensemaking and responding. This is different if we were facing other problems as described in the framework, such as clear or complicated problems, where “Lean” methods and tools allow us to face those problems due to their predictable nature.
Complexity thinking involves two primary steps:
Step 1: Understanding the characteristics of complex systems.
Step 2: Have a worldview or perspective that systems, entities, and events are complex adaptive systems.
The methods, techniques, and tools for the helix of complexity thinking include: Complex Adaptive Systems; The Cynefin® Framework; Sensemaking; Weak Signal Detection; Network Analysis; Storytelling and Narratives; Empirical Process Control; Constraint Management; Prototypes; Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) Loop ; and Scrum the Toyota Way (STW). As there are many techniques, let’s look at just a few of them.
Sensemaking is a technique designed to help understanding of complex problems by developing stories around one’s environment in which individuals and groups can begin developing shared mental models to understand the problem better. It is about making connections for better understanding before acting.
Weak signal detection is a method that can detect the signs of future changes at an early stage and involves identifying opportunities and threats that exist in the environment. Weak signal detection is essential to identifying early signs of problems before they become unmanageable. Weak signal detection could be associated with the sensing portion of sensemaking.
Constraints are limitations or restrictions that affect the behaviors of agents. Managing to remove unnecessary constraints is necessary for an organization to function effectively. Within The Flow System, constraints are viewed as something that limits or prevents flow from occurring. We can view constraints as being the weakest link in a chain. To increase the chains capacity, or flow, we must first address the weakest chain link.
The OODA loop is a non-linear decision-making tool or a guide for action. It ensures all available relevant information is observable (“sensing yourself and the world around you”) and trains an observer on how to orient themselves and process the information for effective decision-making. Once the right decisions are determined, by hypothesis generation and testing processes, it enables the rapid testing of the choice selected to determine if the decision was correct.
Scrum The Toyota Way (STW) is a program designed to enable organizations understanding the boundaries between systems thinking approaches and complexity thinking strategies through the application of the Scrum framework as a behavioral pattern, as well as a range of tools and cognitive skills. It involves problem identification and definition skills, customer profiles, teamwork skills, planning, and estimation skills, and to gain visualization techniques. STW uses the empirical planning system with a built-in customer feedback loop from the Scrum framework, while also bringing together some methods and tools TPS (or Toyota Way), like focusing on quality and automation towards efficiency, waste elimination, Genchi Gambutsu (“Go-And-See”), visual control, Kaizen, or Root Cause Analysis.
The 3 Agile Analysis horizons
The types of inputs that BAs can provide have different usage perspectives depending on the Agile Planning Horizons. They were originally defined in the Agile Extension of the BABoK®: Strategy, Initiative, and Delivery. The latter is the horizon where BAs work with the team with very fine-grained information in a very short span. As the work goes from the Delivery to the Initiative and then at the Strategy horizons, both the granularity of the information and the time span grows. The scope becomes wider.
- The Strategy Horizon: refers to the decisions that impact the entire organization, with a focus on short-term goals, initiatives, and risks that align with organizational strategy, and articulate the problems that must be understood to make strategic decisions.
- The Initiative Horizon: refers to decisions that impact a particular goal, initiative, or team with focus on solution options, features, priorities, and lifespan.
- The Delivery Horizon: refers to decisions made about how to best break down work, how to deliver and test the value the team is creating, and how to learn from the work the team is doing.
Between each horizon, there are upstream and downstream feedback loops, which means that the outcomes within the three horizons are in constant movement.
Nimbleness within the 3 horizons
How are the 3 horizons used in Nimble organizations? Fabricio Laguna (“The Brazilian BA”) has interviewed Ryland Leyton, where they discussed how nimbleness and adaptability play within the 3 horizons (a link to the interview here):
● In the Strategy Horizon, adaptability might mean reassessing the business direction or overall goals based on new market research or shifts in consumer behavior.
● At the Initiative Horizon, it involves tweaking or overhauling specific projects or initiatives to align better with strategic goals or respond to unanticipated challenges.
● In the Delivery Horizon, nimbleness is about making quick adjustments to the workflow, processes, or specific tasks to address immediate issues or opportunities.
Nimbleness by dealing with complexity in each horizon
As already mentioned, TFS is built upon 3 helixes that are interconnected and synchronized. In this article, I will focus on dealing with complexity thinking. But this doesn’t mean that distributed leadership and team science don’t have a say in nimbleness. For leading in a complex domain, it is essential that it follows a distributed approach, as traditional leadership isn’t appropriate for complex domains. Same for team science, where new theories had to emerge to deal with complexity and in close relation with distributed leadership, and vice-versa.
In the strategy horizon, sensing means searching for weak signals impacting the business goals and outcomes. Weak signal detection may come at business outcomes related to the existing initiatives not corresponding as expected. In this horizon, all initiatives are analyzed in their progress and contribution to the business outcomes (a common technique is a Portfolio Kanban, as per the Agile Extension of the BABoK®. Techniques like Value Stream Mapping indicate weak signals in the delivery process and steps until a product is in the hands of a customer. Responding means setting up the new business outcomes, derived from that sensing exercise, and reviewing them together with the previously existing outcomes. In this Horizon, we make the strategic decision on which outcomes are more important, which leads to reviewing the need to continue or cancel the ongoing initiatives, or responding to those weak signals by creating new initiatives. Impact Mapping is a good technique to review the initiatives that relate to the business outcomes.
In the initiative horizon, a weak signal may come from customer feedback about the progress of the initiative and if it indeed is meeting customers’ expectations. Continuous customer interviews as approached by Teresa Torres are a powerful tool for getting feedback on what you’re delivering. For responding, we may use another tool from Teresa Torres, namely the use of the interviews' main takeaways in opportunity solution trees, whose structure and prioritization enable planning for the response to change. Additionally, the Scrum the Toyota Way (STW) uses one of its complimentary practices of traditional Scrum, namely Gemba (or Genchi Genbutsu) for making an effective plan from the in-person analysis, in this case, the Gemba walk focuses on the customer journey. Insights from the Gemba will impact the initiative plan, like its Product Roadmap. This roadmap is used in STW as its Product Backlog. And the progress reviewed at each Sprint Review (same use in “traditional” Scrum and the STW). In general, the experimentation mindset is very useful in this initiative.
In the delivery horizon, a weak signal will come from the team. A common source will be the Daily Scrum or the Retrospective because those signals will come from within the team itself. For responding, again the Gemba within STW enables an in-person view of how the team actually works.
Key takeaways
● Nimble organizations navigate through complexity, and TFS has a number of methods for handling complexity as one of its helixes, together with Distributed Leadership and Team Science;
● For complexity thinking, TFS follows the Cinefyn framework, based on sensemaking and response;
● TFS uses weak signals for sensemaking and tools for taking actions like OODA and STW
● The feedbacks from the 3 Agile Analysis horizons allow Nimble organizations to take actions
