Do We Always Need Orchestration and Heavy Upfront Planning?
How a simple, lightweight planning method achieved in two days what took a traditional approach ten months.
At a meetup where I talked about FaST Agile, a comment/question came up: "Surely there must be a need for orchestration when the scope and size of a creative endeavour is very large”.
In FaST, the recommendation for almost everything is — “ask the collective”. That is to say — tap into the crowd's collective wisdom to find the right answer. This includes planning, design and scheduling. This response is often met with disbelief and can push people into a state of cognitive dissonance depending on how heavily invested they are in what planning and project management must look like. Or if they are married to current best practices — that, in fairness, have been around for a good century now and not much innovation or experimentation has been done since.
My question to organisations is — what harm could come from trying an extremely lightweight experiment in alternative planning and design? At worst, you lost a few days and the cost of the meeting/forum. And in the scope of big planning and design costs, this is negligible. At best, you stand to save considerable amounts of time, money and angst.
I wish I had been quick enough in that meeting to have recalled the stories shared by Harrison Owen in his book Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide that give an alternative method that at least deserves consideration. I like these stories because they show how collaborative, real-time collaboration, tapping into the crowd's wisdom, created remarkable results. As we say in Open Space — Be prepared to be surprised.
These are the stories:
Boeing Aircraft needed to redesign how it manufactured doors for aeroplanes. This redesign had to take place in a very short period of time. Some twenty-five thousand people in five countries made the doors for Boeing planes. Normal procedure for such a redesign could take up to two years if everything went almost perfectly. That time was unavailable, so some five hundred Boeing engineers, executives, managers, and technicians were sitting in a circle, creating a bulletin board and going to work. Two days later, according to their own reports, they had the essential elements of the redesign in hand. It wasn’t “pretty,” laid out in all the detailed drawings and multicoloured presentations, but the first cut had been taken, and there was apparently sufficient time to complete the details.
What was achieved in two days with this alternative approach would have taken (up to) two years in the traditional.
In 1995, AT&T was in the process of designing the corporate pavilion for the 1996 Olympics, to be held in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the course of ten months, an expert team of architects, exhibit producers, publicists, and security people worked very hard to produce a completed design. They succeeded only to discover that plans had changed.
Originally the pavilion was to be sited at the edge of the Global Village, where an estimated five thousand people might enjoy it daily. However, the Olympic Committee invited AT&T to occupy a new site at the very centre of the Global Village. Since AT&T was about to spend $200,000,000 for one thing–exposure–accepting that invitation did not take a second thought. However, there was a problem at the new site: anticipated daily attendance zoomed to seventy-five thousand. Needless to say, the original design would not be adequate for a fifteenfold increase in visitors. To further complicate the situation, the calendar had moved to November, and the Olympics effectively started in June (you should at least have your buildings). Seven months remained, the building still had to be built, and everybody knew, based on their prior experience, that the design process alone would consume ten months.
Clearly, the Olympics would be history before the first shovel full of earth had been turned. Twenty-three anxious and confused people sat in a circle looking at each other and a blank wall with only a few hand-lettered signs announcing Four Principles and a curious Law of Two Feet. Considering the gravity of the situation, the circumstances appeared outrageous, and anger began to replace anxiety and confusion. Things did not improve when an unknown gentleman — Harrison Owen — turned up and said, “Welcome to Open Space.”
Forty-eight hours later, the situation was markedly different. Starting with a completely blank sheet of paper (literally), a new design was created down to the level of working architectural drawings. This design may have lacked polish and finish, but it more than made up for with practicality. Everyone agreed that the design would work for the occasion. They also agreed that aesthetically it was a vast improvement over its predecessor. And finally, the whole (new) project was actually ahead of the old one, for as the designing had gone on, cell phones were busy ordering supplies and materials. By the end, there was only the silence of satisfaction interrupted by Russ Natoce, the AT&T executive responsible for the pavilion, who could be heard muttering to himself, “It’s magic.” I sincerely doubt that magic had any part in the business, except possibly for the magic which appears when human beings perform at superior levels.
Russ Natoce, the AT&T executive responsible for the pavilion, could be heard muttering to himself - “It’s magic.”
What happened with Boeing and AT&T is not unique, and when you can accomplish in two days what you absolutely knew would take ten months, it is fair to say that we are in the presence of genuine high-performance.
Stories taken and slightly adapted from — Owen, Harrison. Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide (pp. 176–178). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
