Organizational Developer 101 - Agile TO Meetup

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT 101
Worst . Session.
Title. Ever.
@ j a s o n l i t t l e | l e a n i n t u i t . c o m
Go to http://sli.do and
use the code “meddlers”
to answer a 1-question
survey

#m30meddlers | @jasonlittle | leanintuit.com
The Alice of Leanintuit
Author of Lean Change Management
Author of Agile Transformation
Organizer of Spark the Change Toronto
Management 3.0 Facilitator
Happy Melly Mastermind
World’s Greatest Cold Fusion Developer
leanchange.org
agiletransformation.ca
sparkthechange.ca
management30.com
happymelly.com

Containers
Your Game Pieces
Resource Pool

What You’ll Be Doing with Them
This short version of the game focuses on 2
basic OD principles:
(1) How people are grouped
(2) How groups are linked
It doesn’t focus on:
(1) Organizational strategy
(2) Organizational networks (affinity vs affect
vs advice networks)
(3) Organizational culture
(4) How all these attributes are connected
But we’ll talk about that stuff after the game!

How People Are Grouped
In organizations, people are typically grouped by:
- Function
- Cross-function
- Market
- Business unit
- Product
- Customer
- Geographical region
None are correct, there are only tradeoﬀs to be made.

How Groups Are Linked
None are correct, there are only tradeoﬀs to be made.
In organizations, groups are typically linked by:
People (PM’s, SM’s, Team Leads, Functional
Managers etc)
Processes (Status meetings, SoS, PI Planning)
Tools (JIRA, MS Prj, Wikis (Chris Chapman
recommends SharePoint))

Flow of the Game
You’ll be given a scenario
You’ll implement an organizational design with your game pieces:
You’ll choose how to group people
You’ll choose how to link those groups together
We’ll debrief your organizational designs:
What similarities exist?
Where do groups diﬀer?
You’ll be given a 2nd scenario
You’ll change your organization and we’ll debrief again:
What changed?
What stayed the same?

Game Rules
(1) Tiles must be linked together somehow:
This example shows that the Red Tile with 2
LM’s have no direct contact with the customer
while the two blue cross-functional teams are
close to the customer
(2) A resource that overlaps tiles implies that
resource manages the link between tiles
This example shows the SM has direct contact
with the customer, and is the SM for two
teams. IT also shows the UX person is split
between two teams.

Scenario 1
Context: You are a cool interweb startup called
“SharePoint-ly” You build kick-ass, high-quality
software.
Your primary shareholder, Chris Chapman, has
signed up your ﬁrst customer and has given
budget to hire 10 people.
Scenario: Build an organization that has 10
people, and works on 1 project for 1 customer.

Scenario 1 Debrief
How did you choose to group people?
How were groups linked?
Any interesting observations from teams or
facilitators?

Scenario 2 - Yer Growing!
Context: Chris is pleased! He’s signed on 2
more customers so now it’s time to scale!
Change your organization to accommodate 18
people while you work on 5 projects for 3
customers.
I am VERY
happy!

Scenario 2 Debrief
What changed?
What stayed the same?
What new roles, if any, were added?
What roles, if any were, uh, removed?
What types of tradeoﬀs were made?
Any interesting observations from teams or
facilitators?

The Meddlers
https://management30.com/product/meddlers/
Management 3.0 is a set of actionable practices
and games that help organizations improve
how they manage work and people that puts a
priority on the happiness of people.
The full game in the 2-day workshop has 5
rounds, with each one going deeper into
organizational change.

Which Lens are You Looking Through?
How do we interpret data?
How do we assign meaning to events, object and people?

3 Lenses to Consider
STRATEGIC
“RATIONAL VIEW”
POLITICAL
“SOCIAL VIEW”
CULTURE
“IRRATIONAL VIEW”

CULTURE
Attributes of Each Lens
Grouping
Linking
Aligning
Fit?
Power and inﬂuence Conﬂict
Social NetworksNegotiation
Habits
Mental Models
Cultural Assumptions
STRATEGIC
“RATIONAL VIEW”
POLITICAL
“SOCIAL VIEW”

@jasonlittle | leanintuit.com
Rational View (Brain)
Logical, structured
Leadership Stance/Role:
Architect
Important Skills:
Sense making, inventing
Simulus for Change:
Not hitting your targets, objectives not being met.
Not doing the right things, or structure is not aligned to the strategy
How to change it:
Get more information, more analysis
Barriers to Change:
missing information
Agile Through a Strategic Lens
• Someone must be accountable (VP of Agile)
• Standard processes must be defined by a
central office
• Strong focus on measurements
How this drives behaviour
• Coaches are processes experts, not coaches
• Further separates people at the top from
people at the bottom (centralized Agile team
controls flow of information)
Models that may help
• Value stream mapping
• Systems thinking
• Complexity models (Stacy Matrix, Cynefin)
• Anything devoid of all feeling
Strategic Lens

Emotional View (Gut)
Social view
Navigator
Important Skills:
Relatable, negotiating, inﬂuencing
Simulus for Change:
Dominant coalition shifts (new ppl, new groups)
How to change it:
What do stakeholders, customers, people want? Who decides
what?
Barrier to Change:
Deep rooted self-interest
Political Lens
Agile Through a Political Lens
• At its best, co-creation
• At its worst, coercion
• Flow with the power of the organization
• Power struggle between central agile team
and delivery teams
• Can promote individualism
• Knowledge hoarding (knowledge is power)
• Network mapping (Keyhubs - http://
www.keyhubs.com/)
• The book “Inﬂuencer” or “Start with Why”
• Perspective Mapping (leanchange.org/
perspectivemapping)

Habitual View (Heart)
Irrational, emotional
Visionary
Important Skills:
Storytelling, inspiration
Stimulus for Change:
Evidence that the assumptions are not working
How to change it:
Establish new rituals, create a more compelling purpose
Barriers to change:
Deep, long lasting assumptions “this is the way we
do things”
Agile Through a Cultural Lens
• “That’ll never work here because this is the
way it is”
• Extra processes (agile teams do new agile
stuﬀ, still need to adhere to PMO or other
centralized processes that create extra, low-
value work)
• Agile stick beatings
• Can promote individualism
• Knowledge hoarding (knowledge is power)
• OCAI (Competing Values Framework)
• Schneider Culture Model
• Edward Hall’s Iceberg model
• Theory U - Otto Sharmer
Cultural Lens

Consider All 3 Lenses
STRATEGIC
“RATIONAL VIEW”
POLITICAL
“SOCIAL VIEW”
CULTURE
Sweet Spot
• Jay Galbraith’s Star Model
• McKinsey 7S
• MIT Leadership Model

Jay Galbraith’s Star
Created in the 1960’s after Jay Galbraith
discovered 5 interconnected dimensions that
need to be in some sort of alignment for change
to happen successfully.
http://www.jaygalbraith.com/services/star-model

McKinsey 7S
Created by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in
the 1980 after 3+ years of research into
“organizational eﬀectiveness”.
Tom popularized “Management by walking
around” at HP in the 1970’s, and later created 8
themes in “In Search of Excellence” based on
his years of research and analysis/interviews of
63 organizations.
“The picture of the thing, isn’t the thing. That is,
an organizational structure isn’t the
organization.”

McKinsey 7S - Plus the 3 Lenses
Strategic (Brain)
“Hard Factors”
Political (Gut)
“Soft Factors”
Cultural (Heart)
“What emerges”

8 Themes of Organizational Eﬀectiveness
A bias for action
Be close to the customer
Autonomy and entrepreneurship
Productivity through people
Hands-on, value-driven management philosophy
Stick to the knitting
Simple form, lean staﬀ
Simultaneous loose-tight properties
Only 2 of the 62 organizations that inspired this list in 1980 have died.

How to Make it Real - 1 of 3
Play “Meddlers”, but start by
designing your existing structure
Move people to the new structure1 2
3
We changed our Strategy (Go Agile), and we changed our Structure (Agile
Teams):
Discuss what needs to change in each of the other dimensions.
To be continued…

Center conversations around:
Strategic Lens:
Did we group and link groups correctly? How would we know? What evidence would we see?
How long should we experiment with this change? Is it a temporary structure? Permanent one?
Political Lens:
What’s in it for our customers? People in the new structures? People outside the new structures that need to interface with the
new teams?
Who else is aﬀected and how?
Who are key inﬂuencers?
Cultural Lens
What existing behaviour is rewarded? Punished?
What are the unwritten rules?
What industry are we in? (Risk adverse? Risk taking?)
What organizational debt exists?

Cultural - find intervention points, establish new rituals, sunset ‘legacy’ rituals
Political - Establish relationships, find ‘movers’ and strong influencers
Strategic - make evidence-backed decisions, thin-out processes

AND HAVE FUN!!

Spotify Installation Process
Please wait while the system copies the DNA of all Spotify employees, and
invents a way to replicate how people think and interact from a company
that is completely different from the utterly fucked company that is yours.
Renaming Communities of Practices to Guilds…
Purchasing enterprise JIRA because stickies don’t work here…
Implementing punishment scheme for squads that underperform…
Installing mandatory innovation time at 1pm every tuesday…
Renaming functional departments to Chapters…
done
Critical Error: Tried Doing Agile instead of
Being Agile. Installation will now revert.
done
done
done

Firing Agile Coaches…
Preparing bad performance reviews for managers and staff…
Preparing year end bonuses for executive team…
Unable to un-install Agile. Teams have gone
rogue. Run for your life.
Spotify Un-Installation Process
Please wait while the system exercises the demons…

Agile
An error has occurred. To continue:
Press Enter to download SAFe, or
Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart your organization. The
people who get agile will quit, and all the
naysayers will say ‘I TOLD YOU SO’
Press any key to continue _

Other Interesting Stories
Xerox - arguably made the laptop economically viable, but made
$0 from it.
http://www.johnseelybrown.com/
Ford’s “One Ford” turnaround led by Alan Mulally by essentially
implementing a weekly standup.
http://leadership.mit.edu/rare-ﬁnd-alan-mulally-complete-leader/
Paul O’Neil, Alcoa CEO who created a ‘zero accident’ culture
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-changing-one-habit-
quintupled-alcoas-income-2014-4

Thanks!
Upcoming Leanintuit Sessions:

Coaching Beyond the Teams on September 12th, 2017 (sold out)

Facilitation Skills for the Agile Workplace on September 18th, 2017

Lean Change Agent Toronto on September 27th, 2017 
 
Coaching Skills for the Agile Workplace on November 3th, 2017

Management 3.0 on November 27th, 2017 
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Organizational Developer 101 - Agile TO Meetup

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