ANI | Webinar | Why great leaders must unlearn to succeed today | Barry O'Relly | 16 Dec 2019

scaling
innovation
means
descaling
work
BARRY O'REILLY
ADVISOR | ENTREPRENEUR | BESTSELLING AUTHOR
MAY 2020

unlearn
Today’s businesses have resources
and capabilities that were
unthinkable even a decade ago.
Exponential technologies such as
cloud computing, machine
learning, AI, and data analytics are
all at their fingertips—yet they
routinely find themselves
struggling to scale innovation.
Mired in backlogs of unfinished
projects, ineffective processes,
and disappointing results ... it’s a
situation of frustration for all
involved.
Blame often lands on poor
decision-making by people, but
the real issue stems from how
organizations design their systems
of work and the nature of project-
based work.
I’m going to show you why
project-based work—a common
approach to large initiatives—is so
prone to failure and how to get
your organization unstuck by
adopting a product-centered,
outcome-based, cross-functional
approach to innovation.
WHEN WE START
BIG, PROJECTS
IMMEDIATELY
BECOME TOO BIG
TO FAIL, AND AT
THE SAME TIME
THEY BECOME
UNMANAGEABLE

A leading international bank invited me
to help them get a major initiative back
on track. The project was one of those
dreams that so many companies have
but rarely manage to realize: the single
source of data.
A classic project in the technology
world, right?
Everyone wants a perfectly unified,
single source of data for their whole
business, so anybody in the company, at
any time, can easily dip into the pool
and get what they need.
It’s a great idea that, when
implemented, could make everyone’s
job easier as well as provide valuable
insights, analysis, and actionable steps
to attract new business.
For example, with such a capability,
the salespeople for this bank could
offer potential large clients high-
precision predictive analytics to
support their business growth with
better services:
“We noticed that your rate and
frequency of foreign exchange transfers
from operating companies in Europe to
the US has increased by 20% in the last
3 months, and using SWIFT as a
provider is actually costing you 5%
more than if you used two others
services we now integrate with. We also
suggest holding 10% of your USD cash
due to a 73% likelihood of a 10%
increase in currency valuation
compared with EUR in the next two
months. This could save you an
additional $19,000 in fees plus upside
from the currency shift.”
BARRY O'REILLY | SCALING INNOVATION MEANS DESCALING WORK
MAY 2020
The Golden Data Quagmire

That's a powerful service to be able to
offer—and everyone wants that
capability. Yet the majority of industries
are failing at making this data vision a
reality. Many such initiatives have been
running for years without achieving any
of the results they're aiming for. On the
surface, everyone is busily working away
at it, but amazingly, very little
functionality is actually being
produced.
The bank team was struggling. When I
met them they were two-and-a-half
years into their “Golden Data” initiative,
and they had released nothing. Not a
single use case had actually been
shipped—nothing in a single customer's
hands.
Yet, they had some of the most
sophisticated cloud computing
capability I’ve ever seen. The cloud
team was building amazing, automated,
scalable instances on Amazon and
Google Cloud because speed, scale, and
performance were what they valued.
They proudly pointed out how they
could manage more data than many
Google services on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, the sales team had their
backlog, and they were working on the
components they thought most
important: reports to wow customers,
screens to share with them and
interesting edge cases that would
differentiate their product and make it
the only one with such capabilities in
the market. The traders were working
on their risk components, as were the
tax team, operations, data, and so on.
People were solving incredibly tough
problems—their critical thinking and
individual components were fantastic.
However, none of it was connected.
There was no coherence across the
entire platform.
Each group was well on their way to
achieving their own projects’ measures
of success, yet no customers were being
delivered the promised powerful
insights. There was simply no path to
bring the product vision alive with an
end-to-end use case or valuable
solution.
And so, like many organizations, they
were stuck in a myriad of dysfunctional
patterns, conflicting priorities, and
business politics that were preventing
effective collaboration and real
progress.
MAY 2020
are we done yet?

Mistake #1: Starting Big
My mantra is “Think BIG, start small,
and learn fast,” a formula which
encapsulates what I’ve found to be the
most effective strategy for meaningful,
productive innovation.
Unfortunately, what this company had
done, which is the classic trap, was to
think big, but then start big and
implement all aspects of the entire BIG
idea simultaneously.
They looked at this massive project with
a massive mission and tried to tackle it
all at once. When we start big, projects
immediately become too big to fail, and
at the same time they become
unmanageable.
Mistake #2: Siloed Teams
The project was split across a variety of
teams, all of which operated with siloed
thinking in terms of processes and
objectives. They had limited horizontal
communication or coordination within
other teams. Ironically, this approach
effectively removes the “Think BIG” part
of the formula by narrowing each
team’s focus to their own local
objectives and needs.
Mistake #3: No Shared
Understanding of Success
Without the big vision and clear
definition of success to draw people
together, they think smaller, focus on
their own priorities, and end up
colliding. Communication suffers, as
does progress. As often happens when
people are struggling to collaborate,
the bank teams had started finger-
pointing and exhibiting other negative
behaviors toward each other in
frustration.
It’s a predictable byproduct of
conflicting goals and lack of clarity
about what constitute shared outcomes
for success. You end up with locally
optimized work and no understanding
between different groups—an alignment
gap only amplified at each
organizational level.
Mistake #4: Focused on Outputs
Rather Than Outcomes
Project-based work optimizes for
execution risk over market risk,
meaning teams measure success in
terms of delivering the project outputs
within their defined constraints (e.g.
being on time, on budget, and in
scope). Unfortunately, output metrics
have precisely zero impact on the
success of a new innovation.
Focusing on outputs is a mechanistic
approach, which means each
participant is essentially optimizing for
task completion. They’re cut off from a
sense of purpose behind what they’re
doing. Intelligently defined outcomes,
on the other hand, not only provide a
sense of “why”, but also give teams a
way to assess and communicate
whether their outputs are moving the
needle in the desired direction and
reducing the market risk of building the
wrong solution.
MAY 2020
why big projects get stuck
Without the big vision and
clear definition of success
to draw people together,
they think smaller, focus
on their own priorities, and
end up colliding

increases in the percentage of market
captured
usage rate of key functions of your
system, or
increases in customer spend for new
versus existing customers
Another byproduct of focusing on
outputs is that participants track easy-
to-measure metrics like “tasks
completed”, “features launched”, or
“releases on time” to demonstrate the
quantity and quality of their activity.
This is a poor replacement for tracking
harder-to-measure metrics that actually
signify progress towards the outcomes
we’re aiming for, such as:
Mistake #5: Competing Priorities
for Individuals and Teams
In the project-focused approach, which
the bank was struggling with,
companies want their “best people”
involved on every big project. Senior
leaders or key contributors might have
as many as 10-20 initiatives they’re
concurrently assigned to.
As a result, their focus disperses, and
their productivity diminishes. Working
on multiple initiatives and constantly
context-switching leads to burnout,
low-quality work, and a struggle to get
anywhere on any particular initiative.
Mistake #6: Too Many Initiatives in
Progress
Most organizations measure progress by
how many initiatives they have in
progress, creating a propensity to start
more projects rather than finish current
ones.
Unfortunately, the more work in
progress, the more competing priorities
and dependencies you create for
completing work end-to-end, getting
results, and using that information to
inform your next priorities.
Taking this up to the organization level,
you end up with countless variables,
components, and dependent parts
interweaving through the process,
causing delays and effectively blocking
progress.
Mistake #7: Personal Brands and
Bonuses Tied to Initiatives
Stakeholders often become personally
attached to grand projects. Rewards
and recognition get linked to the
delivery of initiatives rather than their
impact on overall business results. This
is further exacerbated by pay-for-
performance systems where 50-80
percent of total compensation for
senior executives is based on achieving
their incentives.
As a result, even if an initiative is
stalled or failing, they fight to make it
work in order to save face and protect
their reputation and compensation.
This can often mean people fear
speaking up, tending to report only
positive news and progress, rather than
failures or challenges (as well as
encouraging the same from
subordinates).
Leaders act on invalid assumptions and,
worse still, lead others to make
decisions based on the poor quality of
information provided, creating further
risk and potential for failure.
MAY 2020
output metrics have
precisely zero impact on
the success of a new
innovation
what matters is how
effectively we can Learn:
1. will anyone use it?
2. will the initiative get
cancelled?

MAY 2020
I imagine you’ve experienced some or
all of these issues in organizations
you’ve worked in—most of us have.
It’s a shame so many companies
continue to follow this outdated
approach to innovation, because it
leads to high levels of frustration and
dissatisfaction, as well as putting the
company itself at risk of falling behind
in the market.
We all want to scale innovation and
build amazing products that will have a
seismic impact in the world and on our
business. What needs to be unlearned is
the project-based approach for
achieving a grand vision.
The answer is NOT to think BIG, start
Big, and have a Big-Bang launch.
It’s to think BIG, start small, and learn
fast what will work, or not.
Descale your work and build out your
solution based on feedback from real
customers throughout the development
process.
As I’ll show, you’ll achieve your big
vision sooner, safer, and with higher
confidence of its success in the market.
THINK BIG Start small
THE ANSWER IS NOT TO THINK BIG, START BIG,
AND HAVE A BIG-BANG LAUNCH.
IT’S TO THINK BIG, START SMALL, AND LEARN
FAST WHAT WILL WORK, OR NOT

MAY 2020
what does descaling
work mean to you?
For someone who’s caught in the
project-based, start-scaled
mindset, it's counterintuitive to
think that the way you scale
innovation is to descale work.
So when I say to people, “We need
to descale your innovation
strategy,” they look at me with a
mix of shock, fear… and (often
buried at first) relief.
In most organizations, for
innovation initiatives to get focus
and funding, they need a WOW
story to woo executives into
opening their budgets to back the
idea. So when people develop
ideas to get that attention, they
tend to go for bigger, bolder
stories.
That’s fine and important (Think
BIG); however, they usually assume
the delivery of the big idea has to
be big and bold as well, starting
and scaling the initiative across
the whole company. They think
every use case and edge case
needs to be considered and solved
from the very beginning (or worse,
feel the need to start burning up
the budget in fear of it being
taken away)!
This pattern has given rise to
massive, yet oversimplified, scaling
frameworks and a whole industry
around certification from experts
to coach teams on “Enterprise
Agile”, “Scaled Agile” or whatever
sounds sellable as a silver-bullet
solution.

The theory goes that you spend two
days locked in a room going through
the framework, take a tick box test, and
magically you are transformed to scale
innovation across your entire
organization.
Copying and pasting a fixed set of
practices onto a company—a complex
adaptive system—and expecting
extraordinary results is so overly
simplistic as to be laughable.
It will create plenty of activity and
output but yield few of the promises of
progress beyond certification numbers,
user story points, and percentages
complete. Be sure to ask every
certification agency to show the
outcomes from their work and you’ll get
a true signal of their stories of scaling
success.
So Why Descale Work To Scale
Innovation?
As mentioned, a real challenge for a lot
of organizations is the tendency to
build in large chunks or phases. They
are big initiatives that often rely on
many different components coming
together for the overall program to get
anywhere.
However, individual components usually
don't align on a true north, a shared set
of outcomes that everyone is
responsible and accountable to achieve.
When we descale work, we reduce the
impact of these challenges by
empowering a bold vision with a clear,
small, first step. When we pair this
pattern with outcome-based measures
of success, the benefits become
exponential.
Descaling work encourages the team to
identify small, thinly sliced pieces of
end-to-end functionality to ship to
customers, enabling them to learn if
their big, bold vision and first small
step is putting them on the path to
success.
Imagine that the bank had defined
their “Think Big” as a 50% increase in
new business from existing customers
based on products derived from our
Golden Data platform. Their “start
small” could be a 1% increase in the
next three months … or even smaller,
like a 0.01% increase in the next month.
If you were on the team, what type of
solutions would you start to consider?
You got it. Simpler, smaller, and sooner.
Working in small slices like this, you
quickly find out what works at the most
basic, sometimes shockingly simplistic
levels of functionality. And you get a
foundation of real data and useful
insights to build upon, iterate, course-
correct and improve your products in a
safe-to-fail manner.
MAY 2020
When we descale work, we
reduce the impact of
unanticipated challenges
BIG IDEA 1% .01%
100
75
50
25
0

A classic anti-pattern example is the
development of the Healthcare.gov
website for the launch of Obamacare.
The US government had a big idea to
create a single source for people to get
health care. They set a launch date, put
out 60 contracts to 33 different
vendors, and set off to build it.
All these vendors knew they weren't
going to hit the deadline, but they
were just waiting for one person to
come out and say, “We're going to be
late,” so everybody could blame that
vendor. When they launched it, the
whole site went down. It was a disaster.
So they fired everyone and got a new
group of vendors ... and the exact same
thing happened again.
The only way they got out of this mess
was to descale the team and the work.
Todd Park, White House CTO,
reorganized the technology leadership
team, demoted some of the
underperforming employees and 3rd
party contractors, and recruited a small
group for a government sabbatical to
save the site.
MAY 2020
DESCALED WORK SOLVES REAL PROBLEMS
Amazon started as an online
bookseller in the early days of
internet adoption, then expanded
to multimedia, to toys, to
everything ... plus building out
Amazon Web Services and other
initiatives over time.
Starbucks started out selling high-
end coffee beans, teas, and
equipment. In fact they started
incredibly small, with just one type
of coffee.
Airbnb started as a couple of
friends renting out their air
mattress in a room and started to
build out from there, growing into
the largest hotel company in the
world.
This tiny team was formed with the
narrow mandate of getting the
system working properly; the team
met daily, triaged existential risks,
and prioritized the most important
defects on the critical path.
Over the next six weeks, the team
fixed around 400 system defects and
increased system concurrency to
25,000 users. They also improved
website page responsiveness to one
second by continuously shipping
small slices of functionality to
support scenarios of user segments
and scaling out over time.
Enrollment jumped from 26,000 in
October to 975,000 in December. The
tech surge worked so well that many
of the fellows stayed on to establish
the successful US Digital Service
organization in 2014 to transform
important, public-facing digital
services provided by the US
government.
Recognizing the Pattern
This is not a new pattern. It’s how the
majority of innovation actually
happens. Big companies of today
didn't start big. They started small,
then they grew into their business
models over time:

Here are my top strategies for descaling
work to generate real results safely and
quickly. This is the counterintuitive,
competitive advantage for achieving a
bold vision.
Think Big, Start Small, Learn Fast
Yes we need to think big and be
aspirational about what we're trying to
achieve. But we don't build big. To get
real results and solve real problems, we
actually start small… incredibly small.
When people hear “small”, or “minimum
viable product”, they often think “fragile
and crappy”—a stunted release that will
never be revisited. But thinking about a
1% or even 0.01% improvement relative
to the big outcome you’re aiming for is
a powerful way to deliver something of
real value quickly.
Yes, it’s a simplified set of your desired
functionality, delivered to a subset of
your desired customer segment, but it
solves a problem end-to-end. You can
quickly learn and test assumptions
before you go big. You get this
information sooner, and you get it
cheaper. This enables you to safely start
learning how to make sure the full
version itself not only doesn’t end up
fragile and crappy (or useless), but
becomes a meaningful success.
Favor Outcome-Based Measures
Of Success
An outcome is a change in behavior
that leads to a business impact.
Shifting to an outcome-based approach
to innovation is non-negotiable in
creating a culture of experimentation
and learning. It demands that you
clarify the success you seek—in
quantifiable terms—by crisply defining
what you’re trying to achieve so people
know why it matters.
Everyone wants “happier customers”,
but that’s too abstract. Outcome-based
businesses want “a 30% increase in
customer retention in the next 12
months”. Clarity of destination allows
people to explore different options to
discover if the investments you make
are moving you in the direction you
desire.
An outcome-based approach allows you
to be more accurate and adaptive. You
own the results you gather—checking,
rechecking, and thereby navigating the
uncertain path towards the desired
benefits and behaviors your product
exists to create.
Empower Your Employees
Great people want meaningful
problems to work on—they're not
excited by simply increasing
shareholder value. I was pleased to
have long-standing innovation experts
Mary and Tom Poppondieck on my
podcast, and appreciate how they
framed empowerment
“This is not about great people. This is
about making people great. So much
organizational architecture prevents
people from making a real difference,
and if they could, great things would
happen. It's not that you have to have
super people, but you have to have a
super environment.”
MAY 2020
Great people want
meaningful problems to
work on—for some reason,
they're not excited by
simply increasing
shareholder value.
How to Descale Work

Will customers use this?
Can we complete it?
Descale Work
Here’s what we want to avoid: starting
big to accommodate all the complex
scenarios and outlier use cases, finally
shipping your product, and then
realizing most of your assumptions
were incorrect.
Instead, make solutions as small as
possible so you can iterate and test
quickly. If your big vision is to increase
factor “x” by 250%, decide what a 1%
improvement would entail, and start
there.
If someone wanted to go from couch
potato to running a marathon, they
wouldn’t start out running 26.2 miles on
day 1 of training—they’d start by
walking around the block and scale out
from there.
Ask yourself what is the smallest slice
you could complete end-to-end that
will help you answer the two critical
questions:
1.
2.
Only after proving you have a “Yes” for
both questions should you start to scale
and increase the complexity.
Start With Things That Don’t
Scale
Software is simply an automation of a
manual process, and we should only
automate when our manual systems
become over-subscribed.
What is the problem?
How does our solution address the
problem?
Does anyone use the solution? How
do people react to it?
What's experience like?
How might we evolve it?
Should and could we automate and
scale it?
Kim Atherton is CEO of Just3Things, an
organizational alignment and goal-
setting platform. She developed the
product as Chief People Officer at OVO
Energy, when faced with the problem of
productivity, clarity, and
communication breakdowns as they
rapidly scaled from a startup to the
second largest green energy provider in
the United Kingdom.
What was the first iteration of the
product? Sticky notes on the CEO’s
office door alerting people to the
company’s top priorities. Incredibly
primitive and simplistic, right? But it
was effective, and it helped them start
learning how to solve the problems,
scale up their innovative new structure,
and create an automated version of the
system in their product.
Alberto Savoia had a successful career
as Chief Technology Officer in
companies like Sun Microsystems and
was Google’s first Engineering Manager.
He created “pretotyping” as a concept,
and he relayed the story of how Jeff
Hawkins developed the Palm Pilot. The
first version was a block of wood with a
notepad on it. How could that possibly
be useful? Because it taught him the
most important functionalities he
would use in a digital version.
On the surface, these initial solutions
look embarrassingly naive. But they
provide an end-to-end solution, so
you're learning:
This is why the Just3Things and Palm
Pilot examples provide such important
lessons. It’s okay, and often even
preferable to start with things that
don’t scale — solve the problem
manually, and stay close to the pain
points while you’re learning.
MAY 2020
It’s okay, and often even
preferable to start with
things that don’t scale —
solve the problem
manually, and stay close
to the pain points while
you’re learning.

MAY 2020
Scale Solutions By Working in
Small, Thinly Sliced, Reversible
Steps
The reason to work in small slices is so
you can complete work and gather
results sooner. Results are what we
learn from to inform decisions, course-
correct, and take better action in the
new future.
This approach to work makes it safe to
fail by setting up a series of small wins
and recoverable losses. You can either
scale up your solutions to reach your
ultimate outcome, or you save face,
time, and money by moving on when
something proves unsuccessful.
It’s a counterintuitive approach,
because the nature of innovation is
embracing uncertainty—which means
you don’t actually know what will work,
and what won’t.
But paradoxically, the only way to get
the information you need is through
action … taking your best guess, starting
small, and learning your way through
the uncertainty.
Invest In The Technology
Platforms To Enable Continuous
Delivery
The mantra of continuous delivery is: “If
it hurts, do it more often, and bring the
pain forward.”
If your product integration, testing, and
deployment are painful, you should aim
to perform them every time anybody
makes a change. This reveals any waste
and inefficiency in the delivery process
so you can address it through
continuous improvement.
However, to make it economic to work
in small batches, you need to invest in
extensive test and deployment
automation and a technical
architecture that supports it. This
makes it economically viable to work in
small batches. The cheaper, quicker,
and safer it is to release your product,
the more your team will do it ...
iterating, learning, and adapting faster
than ever.
To help you understand the power of
descaling work to scale innovation and
bring a big vision to life, let’s take a
look at a couple more examples.
THINKING ABOUT A 1% IMPROVEMENT
RELATIVE TO THE BIG OUTCOME YOU’RE
AIMING FOR IS A POWERFUL WAY TO
DELIVER SOMETHING OF VALUE QUICKLY

MAY 2020
I had the pleasure of working with
British Airways to help a group of senior
leaders rethink their innovation
portfolio, which led to a number of
interesting breakthroughs. One
initiative that came out of our sessions
was a group booking feature to provide
discounts for people traveling together.
A fairly simple idea: if you could
demonstrate you were traveling in a
group, you'd get a rebate between five
and 10 percent.
In highly regulated, often bureaucratic
industries such as the airline industry,
delivering even small software change
can typically take anywhere between 12
to 18 months.
So to deliver an idea as straightforward
as group booking can take many
months, hundreds of millions of dollars,
and hundreds of people.
In these situations, descaling work to
scale innovation becomes even more
important. So with an innovation like
group booking in mind, how would you
start?
In this case, we applied the “1% better”
approach I mentioned earlier, and we
even went through several rounds of it—
the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. We ended
up cutting the scope down to one
single flight on one single route. That’s
about 400 customers to deal with.
descaling airlines
CASE STUDY: BRITISH AIRWAYS
GROUP BOOKING

MAY 2020
a 400% reduction in lead time
from idea to scalable solution
If we had just said to the team, “We
want to have group booking,” they
would have treated it as a project:
jumping to solutions and managing
the execution risk, making sure
everything in the idea was built on
time, on budget, and in scope. By
descaling the work, they got a naive
but end-to-end, complete solution
much faster and cheaper, with less
risk and greater confidence at every
step that they were on a positive path
to meaningful impact.
We used a highly sophisticated
communication tool called email, as
well as manual handling of phone
calls and rebate processing. We
brought in one person at British
Airways who knows all the systems,
and she took care of everything.
Once people had booked, we simply
reached out to ask if anyone was
traveling in a group, and if they
proved it, we'd give them a discount.
This allowed us to learn what
percentage of people on the plane
would want to take up the service. We
could start to gauge demand for the
idea (will people use it?).
Even though we were testing post-
booking, it was useful enough to
decide whether the service was worth
building. Crucially, we also learned
what it would take to build it, and
what software systems and processes
would have to be automated to avoid
bottlenecks.
The next step was to add more flights
on the same route. Then we added
more routes. And we developed the
ability to compare data, building a
learning system at the same time as
delivering the system. We were
thereby able to get enough data for
the revenue management people to
determine the financial viability of
offering the service at scale.
The initiative turned out to be both
popular and financially beneficial,
and they were easily able to build on
the foundation we created to launch
it at scale. The whole process took
less than 14 weeks—a 400% reduction
in lead time from idea to fully
functioning solution! We launched
early, continuously learned, and safely
course-corrected along the way.

MAY 2020
So at this point you must be wondering
how things turned out with the bank’s
“Golden Data” project.
First, we had to step back and align on
a bigger aspiration to bring people
together … and break free of their
localized, individual goals. The first
question I asked the team was whether
they could describe a bold vision for
the product: how it would affect
customer behavior, and the outcomes
the initiative would achieve for the
business. Of course, no one could agree
on them. They'd actually never had that
conversation—they’d all just started to
work on their own piece of the puzzle.
So I got them thinking about outcomes
to describe what success might mean.
They initially started dreaming up
complex schemes to trade an array of
different stocks and currencies in
different markets at different times
with different global entities. This was
great in that it brought them together
out of their siloes to connect with a
unifying vision.
On the other hand, they were adding a
huge amount of complexity into the
system. So after a while, I stopped them
to ask, “What would be 1% of the
product vision you’re aiming for? And
1% of that, and 1% of that?” And this
allowed them to narrow down from the
“think BIG” vision to a scenario where
they could start small.
SCALing Financial services
CASE STUDY: FORTUNE 50 BANK
THE GOLDEN DATA PROJECT

It came down to focusing on just one
type of trade, in one market (between
London and New York), at one time of
day. Their shared first step became to
use their data to understand the exact
price of that trade at that time.
By descaling their work, they could
actually get something done end-to-
end. Everybody knew what they had to
do to get this one piece accomplished.
It took them just 14 days to build, test,
and launch this small service to a tiny
segment of real customers—conducting
and completing one trade on their
systems.
It seemed like a miracle. They'd never
done anything like that end-to-end
before, so it was cause for celebration—
completing this tiny slice and seeing
the results. They could finally feel a
little success ... and get excited to start
layering on the next slice and scenario.
They could just keep building these
small slices and progressively enhance
the platform over time, while people
used it. They were finally completing
and shipping work and getting results
that allowed them to iterate toward the
BIG product vision.
Before this, they were always trying to
solve for the most complex, difficult
edge-case scenarios, which only served
to hold them back.
Tasting a complete win, even though it
was so much smaller than the big
vision, created a huge boost in morale
and generated real progress that had
been eluding them for two-and-a-half
years, despite millions of dollars
invested.
MAY 2020
slice your golden thread
TASTING A COMPLETE WIN, EVEN THOUGH IT
WAS SO MUCH SMALLER THAN THE BIG VISION,
CREATED A HUGE BOOST IN MORALE AND
GENERATED REAL PROGRESS THAT HAD BEEN
ELUDING THEM FOR TWO-AND-A-HALF YEARS,
DESPITE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS INVESTED.

that is 'agility'
THINK BIG, start small, Learn Fast
Favor outcome-based measures of success
Empower Your Employees
Descale the work
Start with unscalable solutions
Scale solutions by working in small, thinly
sliced, reversible steps
Invest in technology to increase delivery
frequency
Starting small by completing a thin slice
end-to-end yields a relatively quick and
cheap answer to the question, “Can we build
it?” Then you can start digging deeper on the
question of “Should we build it?”
So next time you’re assigned a big project,
stop. Consider how to create thin slices of
functionality to start building toward the
vision you have (or have been assigned).
When you work in small, shippable batches,
if an error comes up, you and your team can
relax, knowing it's going to be corrected
quickly. You can have the confidence to
change direction if you see that people don't
actually want what you’ve built.
And instead of derailing progress, as
happens in larger programmes, getting new
requirements actually becomes a positive
experience, guiding you toward better
results and greater impact faster and
cheaper. Having real data and the ability to
utilize it in small chunks of work gives you
options to explore.
The safety factor is huge. Committing to
small amounts of change ultimately makes
change itself easier, so people get
comfortable with it. They welcome new
information rather than seeing it as a
problem. So you end up with far less
apprehension and anger driving
communication, decision-making, and
workflows.
So, to recap the strategies for shifting from a
project-based, output focus to a product-
based, outcome focus:
So where in your company could you shift to
a product-centered, outcome-based
approach to innovation to start making
meaningful progress?

Barry O’Reilly is a business advisor, entrepreneur, and author who has pioneered the
intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational
design, and culture transformation.
Barry works with business leaders and teams from global organizations that seek to
invent the future, not fear it. Every day, Barry helps with many of the world’s leading
companies, from disruptive startups to Fortune 500 behemoths, break the vicious
cycles that spiral businesses toward death by enabling culture of experimentation
and learning to unlock the insights required for better decision making, higher
performance and results.
Barry is the author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary
Results, and co-author of the international bestseller Lean Enterprise: How High
Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale—included in the Eric Ries series, and a
Harvard Business Review must read for CEOs and business leaders.
He is an internationally sought-after speaker, frequent writer and contributor to The
Economist, Strategy+Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review.
Barry is faculty at Singularity University, advising and contributing to Singularity’s
executive and accelerator programs based in San Francisco, and throughout the
globe.
Barry is the founder of ExecCamp, the entrepreneurial experience for executives, and
management consultancy Antennae.
His mission is to help purposeful, technology-led businesses innovate at scale.
about barry o'Reilly
MAY 2020

Got any
Questions?
CONTACT ME FOR A CONSULTATION AT
BARRYOREILLY.COM/CONTACT
SCALING INNOVATION
MEANS DESCALING WORK
MAY 2020
BARRY O'REILLY
FOR MORE INSIGHTS, SUBSCRIBE TO MY
NEWSLETTER AND BLOG AT
BARRYOREILLY.COM/NEWSLETTER

ANI | Webinar | Why great leaders must unlearn to succeed today | Barry O'Relly | 16 Dec 2019

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