Choosing an Organisational Design Model Which Works
In his post ‘Moving beyond Agile’ Rian van der Merwe quotes Andy Budd to establish how we might begin to cherrypick from Agile instead of adopt “strict” Agile.
“Perhaps we’re moving towards a post-Agile world? A world that is informed by the spirit of Agile, but has much more flexibility and nuance built in.”
We can cherrypick from the Agile Manifesto because it is a set of principles not a practice.
Combined the principles are equally useful but we could also rip out “Software Development” and replace it with “Organisational Development”, and replace “software” with projects and the Agile Manifesto remains useful.
We’re suckers for categorising ideas
Play us a new song and we’re likely to shelve the the track into a genre as soon as we can. This bundling technique helps us form communities around similar groupings of ideas and also separate communities more easily. But, when there are overlaps we start to fumble. We begin to see a mish-mash of genres: indy-rock, post-punk, metal, post-hardcore, post-rock, thrash-metal … and the common links between them all are pulled ever father apart and the communities grow wider apart and begin to look for reasons to be different.
Speak to a fan of music and they’ll argue that it’s time for a genre-busting. Free to experiment outside of genres bands can do the best work of their lives.
It’s time to genre-bust organisational design
Head to Google and type in “organisational design” and you’re likely to read proposals to move toward the forms or principles espoused by: Teal Organisations, Responsive Organisations, Adaptive, Agile, Exponential …
Now imagine you’re a team, or, an executive looking for a way to improve the conditions of your organisation.
Which genre would you choose?
Books, papers, posts have been written and communities have been established to support each.
Smart people are writing smart books and smart posts — this one excluded — about each form as the right choice for your organisation.
Organisations are declaring that they’re moving toward Teal or Responsive and are actively looking for practices and practitioners to support them through the change.
They’re meaningless genres of the same set of ideas and they’re doing more to confuse us all than they are to form a coherent discourse about what needs to be done to improve the working world.
How can we start genre-busting?
The fundamental notes
Work Sucks
Each movement or manifesto has its own nuances, or has a bias toward a particular type of organisation or team, but they all work out from a similar view of the world. They tend to hold to be true that “we live in complex and uncertain times and organisations are maladapted for the present-day which results in stunted growth and a worsening quality of life for the people who work in them.”
Complexity and Emergence
They all concur that organisations are complex adaptive systems. They agree that trying to predict what the system will do is difficult, and that instead it can only be understood by understanding the relationships or connections in the system. By doing something in the system we can see what happens in response — what emerges — which gives us some insight as to how the system might react if we repeated the action again.
We Can Make Work, Work
Yup whether you’re going Responsive, or Teal, or Agile we can agree that work sucks and any hope of making it better isn’t going to be found in case studies and “best practice”. The good news is, if your organisation allows for it — and it should — we can experiment with new ways of structuring organisations, and working, to determine which works best for us.
The Right Organisational Design Model — the one that works
At Inquisition we coach teams who want to improve the way they work. We’re often asked to make the decision for our teams which model, or practice they should establish so as to be more effective. Wanting to be certain that a new idea will succeed is hardwired into the DNA of most organisations and it is why teams spend so much time creating planning documents rather than trying out a bunch of new ideas to see what works.
It would make our lives so much easier if we could point toward the definition of a Teal organisation and say that’s what we’re going to identify with and try to be more like. Instead we can only experiment with ideas we cherrypick from Teal Organisations and give them a go. We might grab “self-governance” as a principle and see what happens when we establish a system of self-governing teams. GitHub experimented with a “bossless workplace”, discovered it didn’t work for them and tried another way. Medium experimented with Holocracy and it failed but they haven’t abandoned the reason why they experimented with it. Its this flexibility to adapt and respond to on-going change that makes it GitHub’s Organisational Model not a Responsive or Teal model. Your team doesn’t need to go “Teal” it needs to go with whatever works.
To paraphrase Andy Budd, perhaps we ought to move toward a post-Responsive working world? One where we test structures, practices, and policies on an organisation to see what fits. This way we won’t get duped into believing there is a right model, or a wrong one, there is only the one that works, and the one that works allows your team to do the best work of their lives.
