Network Organization Circle
A contemporary way to empower, engage and motivate people in the knowledge economy.
In the 21st Century as per Mckinsey & Company research, it states that organizational leaders certainly have to embrace contemporary ways of working in the form of Agile organizational structure to empower, engage, and motivate their people (Knowledge workers) in Knowledge Economy from Fixed Mindset towards Growth Mindset.
Primarily, it begins with self-organizing teams which is imperative and inevitable for organizational success. Also, there are many ways of forming self-organizing teams using the following widely used frameworks namely Scrum, Nexus, Spotify, LeSS etc.,
The Most Valuable Asset of 21st Century institution will be its knowledge workers and their productivity — Peter Drucker
Simon Sinek, a leadership guru and author of the book “Start with Why” found that most of the organizations guided by Golden Circle will succeed more often than those which don’t. Along the similar lines and inspiration, I would like to explain a “tale of two frameworks” using their strategic and tactful ways of working together with Vision, Mission and Values form the Network Organization Circle to help the leadership team achieve a valuable outcome from “Mission to Metrics”.
Firstly, let us explore the “Why?” associated with Network Organization Circle using the Vision, Mission, and Values of an organization which is critical and should co-exist together. As it communicates why the organization exists by fostering discipline, laser focus direction, and enable structured conversation amongst people by stimulating their limbic system and intrinsic behaviors driving them to achieve the purpose of valuable outcomes as a whole team.
Secondly, by introducing and implementing the OKR (Objectives & Key Results) Framework created by the late Andy Grove, a famous leader during his era, covers the “What?” and “How?”. Ideally, from a strategic standpoint What? represents our goals in the form of Objectives which must be audacious, inspiring, action-oriented, significant and qualitative whereas the How?provides the information radar for measuring our Key Results which must be quantitative and time-bound outcomes.
Predominantly, OKRs are set at both annual and quarterly intervals to promote disciplined thinking, transparency, and alignment among people associated with various business functions of the organization. The to-do list will transform into initiatives to accomplish in shorter cadence.
“A Goal without a plan is just a wish” — Antoine de Saint-Exuper
Ultimately, unless the How? part is executed tactically by doing things right, it will be back to square one situation resulting in a big bang failure. Based on the current market trends, while exploring the growth rate of well-known product organizations ranging from e-commerce to social media they encompass a multitude of technology stack changing rapidly like machine learning, microservices, and event-driven systems. It involves a lot of complexity requiring multiple systems to develop new features and to enhance further. Also, nowadays customer expectations are continuously emerging and becoming more complex in nature with more unknowns than knowns over the period of time amidst the knowledge economy.
As per Stacey Matrix in complex problem domains, using empirical process is effective by implementing a simple and less prescriptive framework like Scrum Framework. It enables transparency to inspect and adapt the progress within every sprint which helps people to course correct the path towards the destination.
Conclusion
I would like to convey my two cents that real efficacy of both OKR and Scrum framework can be realized as follows, the Product Owner in alignment with the stakeholders establishes the objectives based on Customer Value Proposition and defines the key results along with the Development Team and Scrum Master during Release Planning.
The initiatives are further translated into Product backlog items to frame Sprint Goals during the respective Sprint Planning event and the sprint backlog items are created by the development team aligning to the Sprint Goal within a respective Sprint. The Scrum team adapts these items and inspects the progress of key results within respective Sprint events like Sprint Review facilitated as needed by the Scrum Master to create high-quality products that deliver a valuable outcome.
As always, I am curious to hear any kind of feedback about this article so that we can have experiential learning!
Quick References:
- Basics of OKR
- Scrum Guide
- Why Scrum is essential for Software development?
- Ted Talk explaining the significance of OKR by John Doerr
- OKR + Scrum
- Summary about “Start with Why”
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