We are wired for searching solutions by adding things. This leads to rules, processes and ultimately organizations being overly complex and bureaucratic.
What happens to the administration when the work diminishes? Cyril Northcote Parkinson asked himself this question and his subject of investigation was the British Colonial Office, an independent department of the British government that was responsible for the administration of the British colonies from 1854 to 1966. Parkinson found that the number of civil servants in this Colonial Office grew regardless of the work at hand. This office had the most civil servants when it was integrated into the Foreign Office in 1966 for lack of colonies to administer. …
What counts is the performance of the team. How can individual performance be assessed then? And should one do so at all?
Those who measure individual performance contributions and distribute varying rewards depending on them, not only receive demonstrably poorer results for any non-trivial task, but also disrupt the team structure in particular. Each team member is then primarily concerned with his or her own area of responsibility. This loose group of mediocre soloists does however not make a good orchestra.
Yes, but …
What about “low performers”? And what about key players? How can the former be punished and the latter rewarded? …
For your agile transformation you have to think big to break up silos, but at the same time start small to learn together.
Language is sometimes revealing. Traditional hierarchical organizations consist of functional divisions that areas of responsibility, divide power in terms of budget and headcount, and subdivide value creation. Divide et impera, divide and rule, is a time-tested maxim since the Roman Empire, the core of which is to encourage “divisions among the subjects to prevent alliances that could challenge the sovereign” ( Wikipedia). The result is silos whose walls become thicker and thicker every year due to evaluation and incentive systems that are based on this maxim.
Think Big
Without tackling this structure and the underlying maxim, agility will silt up within these…
What we can learn from the sugar consumption of Gandhi, from Netflix’s surprising resemblance to a nuclear submarine, and from the frightening team dynamics of super chickens about new leadership.
The X‑Conference on “Corporate Digital Responsibility and Digital Ethics” took place on October 30, 2020. My keynote, which is now also available as video, revolved — as expected — around the Manifesto for human(e) leadership and specifically around the question what (corporate) digital responsibility has to do with modern leadership. My core thesis: Concepts like digital ethics, compliance or self-organization in agile organizations require all discipline beyond obedience. They cannot simply be imposed, but are based on the personal responsibility of the employees. …
Productivity
E-mail was intendend to make work easier. In fact, the simple communication corrodes structured workflows and becomes the work itself.
In complex social systems, technology always unfolds unexpected side effects. When IBM introduced an internal e‑mail system in the 1980s, the very high cost of computing power at the time made it necessary to analyze very precisely how people were communicating with memos and phone calls. It was assumed that this communication would shift to the e‑mail system and, based on this, the mainframe computer was generously sized. Nevertheless, the system was already massively overloaded in the first weeks. ( Cal Newport, When Technology Goes Awry. In: Communications of the ACM, May 2020, Vol. 63 №5).
Because it was so…
Beat the system with its own weapons
Is it possible to measure agility? And if so, how and with what? Organizations that have been operating very successfully in a plan-driven manner for many years and are therefore used to thinking in terms of metrics will raise these questions sooner rather than later in their journey towards more agility. Unwavering is the belief in the dogma that you can only manage what you can measure. But is this dogma actually true? And is it somehow useful and applicable to agile transformation?
It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — a…
Practical Constraints
Every transformation entails friction with the status quo. By accepting the practical constraints too willingly the transformation itself is transformed and its protagonists are either assimilated or repelled.
A little change, reorganization and optimization has not been enough for a long time now. Today, transformation is the name of the game. Transformations are therefore everywhere, in many forms and shades. A digital transformation for the business model, because data is supposed to be the new oil. An agile transformation for the organization because of its flexibility and speed in times of great complexity and uncertainty. A cultural transformation, because self-organization and creativity simply won’t thrive in stale corporate cultures.
However, there are worlds between the equally justified and radical aspirations of these endeavors and the dreary reality. Instead…
Leading yourself
Changing habits requires more than motivation. B.J. Fogg’s behavioral model provides the basis for sustainable personal change and growth.
Humans are creatures of habit. And that is a good thing. Habits make our lives easier by automating decisions. On the one hand. On the other hand, habits necessarily eliminate other options for action. If we perceive those habits as good, we gladly accept this loss of alternatives. Of course, the situation is completely different for habits that we have recognized as harmful or inappropriate and that we honestly try to change — mostly in vain
That’s why the list of New Year’s resolutions is long and seems to get longer with each passing year. More exercise, more mindfulness, less…
Agile Transformation
Entire organizations also suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect and are stuck in transformation at the peak of Mount Stupid.
Organizations are made up of people and people tend to have many cognitive biases. One of these is the Dunning-Kruger effect ( Wikipedia), first described by the two social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in an article published in 1999. In essence, the Dunning-Kruger Effect states that less competent people tend to clearly overestimate themselves and consequently are not able to correctly assess the superior skills of truly competent people.
But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning…
The credo of the start-up culture, “Fail fast, fail cheap”, still has the bland aftertaste of sloppiness for German engineers and their managers. This typical German fixation on gap sizes prevents agility and slows us down.
Many companies that have been accustomed to success for years and decades feel that they have to reinvent themselves in the face of an ever faster changing and increasingly digital world. They want to become more innovative, faster and more agile. Unfortunately, one of our undisputed strengths stands in the way of this in Germany: our penchant for perfection. The credo of the start-up culture, “fail fast, fail cheap,” still has the bland aftertaste of sloppiness for German engineers and their managers. …
Marcus Raitner
Agile by nature | Rebel without a pause | Working out loud | Author of https://fuehrung-erfahren.de
