The Power of Purpose-driven Organizations
Steps to build and sustain change in a systemic fashion using the A.D.K.A.R Model on top of the Scrum Framework.
Opening Thoughts
Nowadays, most organizations are striving hard to embrace change for survival and success. While the preliminary path of the change journey is easy to kickoff. The real challenge many organizations face is when trying to find the real purpose of change. Even they fail to achieve the balancing act to sustain it. Also as per Daniel Pink’s research, it's proven that purpose is one of the key intrinsic motivators that motivate people associated with the creative knowledge economy. Now you may ask what’s it in for the organization?
This Forbes article is the inspiration for this article, “The Power of Purpose-driven Organizations”.
Profit isn’t a purpose, it’s a result. To have purpose means the things we do are of real value to others. — Simon Sinek
The brands that will thrive in the coming years are the ones that have a purpose beyond profit. — Richard Branson
Most Organizations begin their change journey in the name of Agility. Whilst many frameworks/models/practices are available. Scrum is the most widespread framework because it’s simple to use and easy to implement. Whereas many organizations fail to learn that Scrum is hard to embrace it as a whole. Now on top of your mind, many questions might start trickling like the below ones,
What is Scrum’s correlation with purpose and sustainability?
How does it help organizations to achieve success?
Let us explore their connection with the help of the Scrum Guide.
Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products. — Scrum Guide 2017
Each component within the framework serves a specific purpose and is essential to Scrum’s success and usage. — Scrum Guide 2017
As we all knew the most difficult part of the change journey is while interacting with people and dealing with their mental states. Also, they play an important role to sustain the change within the complex adaptive systems. Let us understand it with some backdrop of the ADKAR model.
People don’t resist change. They resist being changed! — Peter M Senge
I recently read about the ADKAR model developed by researcher and entrepreneur Jeff Hiatt in 1996. Jeff Hiatt explained that the process of becoming ready for change is sequential, starting from the current level of each individual, and none of the five steps could be avoided: “they cannot be skipped or reordered”.
Are you curious? and interested!
What made me choose the ADKAR model for building Purpose-driven organizations?
How does it complement the Scrum Framework?
In short, the ADKAR model was high on affinity with the Scrum framework as an immutable model. As it favors one of the major aspects of empiricism such as inspection of purpose to understand the need for change. It also supports the adaptation of change in the form of reinforcement to build sustainability. Purpose and Sustainability are the key enablers that any organization must consider to deliver consistent value in a transparent way.
Scrum is founded on empirical process control theory or empiricism. — Scrum Guide 2017
Also, the ADKAR model focuses primarily on the ‘people’ element of change. Especially on the “how” part to ensure that people are involved in the change are supportive and believe it intrinsically. As the Scrum framework already describes the “what” part of empirical change management in the form of the Scrum Guide.
People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working. — Elon Musk
As most of the community members acknowledge and believe in the below statements.
Scrum relies on transparency. — Scrum Guide 2017
The Scrum Master’s job is to work with the Scrum Team and the organization to increase the transparency of the artifacts. — Scrum Guide 2017
This work usually involves learning, convincing, and change. Transparency doesn’t occur overnight but is a path. — Scrum Guide 2017
The Scrum Master role as a change enabler among workplaces is very crucial and essential. He/She to put in place a systemic organizational change can make use of the ADKAR model. I would wish to inform the readers that this article covers the Scrum Master role standpoint predominantly. Now together let us learn the steps necessary to build purposeful and sustainable organizations using the ADKAR model on top of the Scrum framework.
Awareness: Understanding the purpose of the need for change.
The Scrum Master must work at all levels of the organization promoting the purpose of the need to embrace Scrum. Also explaining the short term and long term potential benefits that an organization can gain out of it.
The Scrum Master is responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. — Scrum Guide 2017
The Scrum Master ensures that the event takes place and that attendants understand its purpose. — Scrum Guide 2017
The Sprint Goal is an objective that will be met within the Sprint through the implementation of the Product Backlog, and it provides guidance to the Development Team on why it is building the Increment. — Scrum Guide 2017
Desirability: To support the purpose of change required.
Scrum Master senses patterns of the existing organizational parameters to gauge the support available amongst people across all levels for the change journey. This data enables him/her to instigate the value proposition that people gain from the change and co-create change management in a transparent manner.
This serves as an opportunity for him/her to persuade the people in the right manner explaining the purpose behind the implementation of Scrum. It is to deliver valuable increments leading to outcomes and impacts over outputs. Also, it guides him on how and where should he/she begin their change journey and at what state.
The purpose of each Sprint is to deliver Increments of potentially releasable functionality that adhere to the Scrum Team’s current definition of “Done”. — Scrum Guide 2017
An increment is a body of inspectable, done work that supports empiricism at the end of the Sprint. — Scrum Guide 2017
The team model in Scrum is designed to optimize flexibility, creativity, and productivity. — Scrum Guide 2017
Knowledge: Have the skills and education required for the change.
The Scrum Master must invest his efforts to evoke people to understand empiricism. The Scrum Master co-creates a safe workplace and instills growth zone behavior where people can grow empirically. He/She helps the people succeed by helping them improve their knowledge of Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values. By explaining the significance of them during their interactions with every individual part of the organization.
Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known. — Scrum Guide 2017
The Scrum Master helps everyone change these interactions to maximize the value created by the Scrum Team. — Scrum Guide 2017
Scrum exists only in its entirety and functions well as a container for other techniques, methodologies, and practices. — Scrum Guide 2017
Scrum proved especially effective in iterative and incremental knowledge transfer. — Scrum Guide 2017
Ability: To exhibit the skills required to instill the behaviors of change.
The Scrum Master exhibits skills as follows,
- Teaching and Coaching everyone about Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values.
- Coaching people within the organization at all levels to build self-organization and cross-functionality.
- Facilitating the Scrum events effectively by ensuring everyone understands the purpose so that later on people become adept at it and self-organize themselves.
- Co-create and collaborate with the Product Owner by discovering effective and useful techniques and practices that align with the Product.
Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk. — Scrum Guide 2017
Scrum Masters do this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values. — Scrum Guide 2017
Development Teams are cross-functional, with all the skills as a team necessary to create a product Increment; — Scrum Guide 2017
Finding techniques for effective Product Backlog management; — Scrum Guide 2017
Coaching the Development Team in self-organization and cross-functionality; — Scrum Guide 2017
Coaching the Development Team in organizational environments in which Scrum is not yet fully adopted and understood. — Scrum Guide 2017
Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact Scrum and empirical product development; — Scrum Guide 2017
Reinforcement: To strengthen the sustenance of change with emergent learning and feedback loops.
The Scrum Master enacts the importance of feedback loops in several ways as follows,
- The Scrum Master must clarify the need for regularity of Scrum events and their purpose.
- Empower teams to develop and deliver product increments at a cadence. Release them on demand of the Product Owner.
- He/She also ensures the feedback loops stimulate emergent learning organizations.
- Encourages active participation, co-creation and the evolution of change within the organization.
- Identify an actionable improvement plan as a team every sprint that favors reinforcement.
- Adapt it as part of the organizational ways of working holding the entire team accountable for the same.
- Take accountability for the Scrum process prevalent within the organization.
- Improving ways of working by co-creating practices with regards to people, relationships, development practices, and collaboration channels.
- Always emphasize the necessity of creating high-quality products.
Scrum Teams deliver products iteratively and incrementally, maximizing opportunities for feedback. — Scrum Guide 2017
Prescribed events are used in Scrum to create regularity and to minimize the need for meetings not defined in Scrum. — Scrum Guide 2017
The Scrum Master participates as a peer team member in the meeting from the accountability over the Scrum process. — Scrum Guide 2017
As Scrum Teams mature, it is expected that their definitions of “Done” will expand to include more stringent criteria for higher quality. — Scrum Guide 2017
Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools; — Scrum Guide 2017
Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements; and, — Scrum Guide 2017
Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work. — Scrum Guide 2017
Closing Thoughts
I recommend every individual within an organization must apply empiricism as a compass to navigate through the complex world. Also, understand that empiricism is imperative for thriving in the VUCA world. Finally, we must all acknowledge and understand that agility is a “state”, not a “destination”. Hence, I suggest we should give more focus on the purpose of a great start of change journey and sustainability pertinent to the changing environmental factors.
🔍 Inspection without Adaptation is “pointless”. — Gunther Verheyen
♻️ Adaptation without Inspection is “meaningless”. — Umar
Inspection and Adaptation without 👁🗨Transparency are “worthless”. — Umar
As always, Thanks a Ton for reading my article. I am eager to know each of your valuable feedback to inspect and adapt in my next article. Also, please spread this information within your community, if you find it valuable. “Sharing means Caring”!
Many Thanks to Maarten Dalmijn, Paddy Corry, Marty de Jonge and Sjoerd Nijland for your review.
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