There is a Spotify model
People are just trying to copy the wrong one.
I have seen an article, entitled “There is no Spotify model”, being shared multiple times over the last few weeks. It’s a good article explaining why you shouldn’t try to copy the Spotify model in your own organisation, as it is highly specific to Spotify itself. The Spotify model was well explained in a blog by Henry Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson back in 2013, as well as in a set of animated videos. However, whilst I agree you shouldn’t copy everything, I believe there is something that you should try to copy from Spotify, and in fact it is the key to being successful in the tech world.
When you watch those animated videos it can be really tempting to think “Yes! We should create chapters and guilds!”. But of course, it’s not that simple. Even if happens to be appropriate to your organisation (unlikely), then making that change happen and getting everyone bought into the change to make it stick is still a monumental task for any company, especially one that is big enough to require “tribes”.
However, there is one quote from Henry Kniberg that stands out to me:
“It wasn’t a big re-make, more like a continuous stream of small iterative improvements to our organization and process.”
It wasn’t a visionary CEO or an expert management consulting firm that came and decided that Spotify should be set up this way. They evolved to this model (and by now will have evolved to a very different one) by continuously iterating and making small incremental changes. The ideas for all these changes could have come from any part of the organisation. They will have tried them out a few at a time with separate parts of the business. They will have seen how they go, and then decided whether to junk them if they didn’t work, or to continue their new ways of working and share them with the rest of the organisation.
The fact that all employees can be involved in improving the whole organisation allows Spotify to harness the intelligence and diversity of a great range of people. This will surely bring many more great ideas to the table than if it was just the executives deciding the way. But much more importantly than that, the fact that everyone feels like they are represented in discussions about shaping the organisation means that everyone is much more bought in to any change that comes from it. It means that any change will actually be embedded, and employees are more likely to pick up anyone that is not coming along for the ride and try to bring them along.
If you have spent any time working in a vaguely agile organisation, then you have probably experienced a retrospective. These are regular sessions that allow teams to assess their current ways of working and make sure they continue to improve. They can be extremely powerful tools for improving the output of a team, as well as (arguably more importantly) increasing the engagement and motivation of all its members. They can also be quite difficult to facilitate, especially if there is a lot that could be improved.
What I am talking about here is much harder than running a retrospective for a team. You could say I’m talking about running retrospectives on the next level(s) above; for the whole organisation. Some way of constantly assessing how the organisation is working together, and finding ways to improve, one little bit at a time. Making sure the issues of all groups are listened to, making sure that all the good things continue to happen, and making sure that the best new ideas are tried out.
This is the Spotify model that you should try to emulate. The concept of making regular small, iterative changes that are based on honest assessments of how things have been going, with the input of employees. Not sweeping changes that are decided by some executive that has come across some new organisational model at a business conference. It’s not just Spotify that do this; you will hear very similar concepts talked about if you read about how companies like Amazon, Netflix or Facebook have evolved over time. Constantly evolving their ways of working (as well as their products) is the key to dominating the tech world.
Creating a culture of change, one where the organisation harnesses the talent of its employees and gets everyone bought in to change, is the Spotify model that you should try to copy. How do you create that culture? I’m sure that Spotify is constantly evolving the way they embed that too. As ever, there is no silver bullet. But it is something we should all be trying to do, one little step at a time. If you’ve had good experiences doing just that, then I’d love to hear your stories. Please let us know in the comments, it might help people make their first steps.
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