How to Diagnose Your Company’s Operating System
Using the Operating System Canvas
At the 2nd Annual Responsive Conference in September 2017, The Ready took participants through an exercise using its operating system canvas to identify tensions within organizations, tactics for addressing those tensions, and readiness for change.
The canvas is portrayed on a table using a 9-box grid. Each cell represents a different aspect of the organization — structure and space; authority and decisions; information and communication; policy and governance; purpose and values; meetings, rhythm, and coordination; strategy and innovation; resource allocation, targets and forecasts; and people, development, and organization.
Participants worked in small groups to select the most important tensions they experience (from preprinted cards) and placed them on the canvas in the cells where the tensions are most evident. Tensions were things like:
- “No slack in the system”
- Lack of trust
- Lack of feedback
- Indecisiveness
The group discussed the tensions they experienced and looked for patterns to understand where in the operating system these tensions were showing up.
The small group then considered a range of tactics that could be applied to address the tensions. Tactics were things like:
- Clarifying decision rights for roles and teams
- Using team charters at the start of projects
- Moving from personal to shared files
- Restructuring current teams into a dynamic network
Participants from each small group placed their chosen tactics along a continuum from readiness to resistance to show how receptive the organization would be to each.
The cards provided a vocabulary for people by putting into words the pain people feel at work. By sharing these pain points, individuals see that they are not alone.
There is a tendency for the issues to cluster and by breaking the system into boxes in a grid, it allows participants to see the interconnections and have a conversation about the system. It is also helpful for seeing blind spots.
The tools bring more clarity on readiness and the level of resistance that may exist around creating new ways of working. It was interesting to note that any given tactic could appear in various places along the readiness-to-resistance continuum from one organizational context to the next (including at different levels within one organization). Participants noted that the simple tactics (like clarifying decision rights) tended to fall at the readiness end of the spectrum, whereas more adaptive tactics (restructuring teams into networks) tended to fall at the resistance end. If a tactic was placed on the readiness end, it might be something to try.
Team of Teams
The operating canvas is one tool an organization could use to understand the steps it would need to take to implement a “Team of Teams”.
The Team of Teams model contains linked tensions:
- Individual fear — we innately feel we’re not good enough; not confidant in how we are showing up to play the role we are asked to play
- Team confusion — The model requires team members to depend on each other. There is bound to be confusion because team members don’t know what they are responsible for and what those around them are responsible for.
- Alignment anxiety — Any centralized function or leader fears how they will create alignment. That is, how am I to make change and align around a common mission if I can’t tell them what to do?
Adopting a Team of Teams model takes investment. Factors to consider include:
- The model is cross-functional and multi-disciplinary.
- The team is mission-driven — it sets and understands its mission.
- There can be six different experiments with the model happening at any one time and learning takes place serially (vs. being within a function and learning only that function’s process).
- The way you spend money and invest impacts the culture. (For example, no commission for sales people leads to “hunt as a pack” vs. “eat what you kill” culture.)
- Create community. This takes real investment and effort — to learn together and support each other.
When deciding to create a more responsive organization, it is important to consider:
- Why we will do this?
- Can we cope with doing it poorly at first?
- How do we know it is the right thing and get better at it?
Cultural Sprints
Steve Hopkins from Culture Amp talked about cultural sprints as another tool organizational designers can use when implementing practices such as Team of Teams. Like the sprints used in Agile development, the culture sprint starts with collecting feedback and moves through the phases of:
- Understand (what’s driving engagement?)
- Focus (selecting an area to focus on)
- Ideate (generating and selecting ideas for action)
- Act (experimenting with change)
- Measure (asking for feedback)
- Adopt or adapt
When choosing to make a change to be a more responsive organization, it is likely that we will experience failure the first time we try. How do we know if it was the right decision and we implemented it poorly or a poor decision in the first place? Using the cultural sprint approach allows us to learn as we go.
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This is the second in a series of articles presenting key insights from the 2nd Responsive Conference. You can read Part I here.
If you are interested in learning more, visit the Responsive Conference website or join the Future of Work newsletter .
Learn more about me, Deb Seidman at GreenSilkAssociates.com
