Empirical process control and understanding people are Andrea’s biggest passions. In this episode, Andrea shares his deep experience and best practices on Agile transitions, the challenges one faces and what companies and leaders can do to better manage uncertainty. Understand what agile is really all about and how to develop and implement an agile mindset in your teams and company.
A couple of weeks ago, on Feb 17th, I held a webinar on ORGANIC agility Principle #4: Validating Change in Small Increments. As you may know, ORGANIC agility is our meta-process or framework that you can apply to any organization in order to make it more self-organizing, agile and resilient. Principle #4 is the key component concerned with how to design and run experiments in a structured and directional manner.
This webinar was one of the last in our ongoing series on how to naturally transform an organization into something that is more flexible and resilient, however you can look forward to at least one more webinar touching on Principle #5 — more about that later.
Many organizations try to take a “fail-safe” approach to change, by e.g. buying a big model from a consulting agency, marketing the concept internally, and setting milestones. There’s so much money, ego and expectations attached that the change project will simply not be allowed to fail. The outcome can be summed up as the operation was a success although the patient died. The organization becomes agile-in-name-only, the change project is celebrated as a good investment, and would everyone please shut up, you are now agile, just sort it out and do it.
With this 4th principle, we propose that organizational change should be addressed in an agile way. We create transparency, then inspect and adapt our way by the use of small safe-to-fail experiments — small changes that people propose themselves. We reduce the risks and side-effects by leveraging something called “the adjacent possible" and the predispositions of the organization.
This allows the organization to:
Work strategically. Set a strategic goal and nudge the organization in the right direction slowly but surely, choosing known interventions as well as more experimental ones.
Remove the burden and risk of maintaining several co-existing systems of work for long periods of time. Small changes are easily understood, quickly piloted and rapidly integrated, minimizing the uncertainty, confusion and loss of effectiveness inherent in change.
Anchor results in the organization, as champions ask for volunteers to help define and run the experiments. By involving everyone and asking people to pull improvement work, we get more perspectives, ideas and options. We also get more certainty about the applicability of the results, and a wider acceptance throughout the organization.
Increase transparency. Everyone hates it when an organizational change program is unexpectedly announced by top management. By having a common strategic goal and a public list of ongoing experiments, everyone — including leaders — can see what is happening and facilitate work in that direction.
Base the improvements on organizational reality. We validate assumptions and hypotheses in a safe-to-fail environment, by running small, quick and inexpensive experiments. We can quickly react to emergent patterns and either reinforce or dampen them.
Gain a deeper understanding of the organization by studying repeating emergent patterns. The conditions that led a group of volunteers to achieve success in an experiment can be replicated to catalyse change in other parts of the organization.
During the webinar, we explored the concepts behind this principle and looked at some practical tools for managing organizational change in an agile way, including the Agile Strategy Map as well as Dave Snowden’s Safe-To-Fail Experiment canvas.
If you would like to go into more detail with us regarding these topics, please get in touch with us to schedule a call. We also suggest you join our agile42 Community to stay in touch and receive helpful and interesting insights from the agile42 team.
If you missed the live session, don't panic! The recordingis available online.
Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.
Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.
Find out what your customers actually need and how to get it to them
Our coach Lasse Ziegler, continued on our ORGANIC agility webinar series by addressing Principle #3 - “Focus on Value Creation”. A successful organization must be good at delivering value to its customers. There are two sides to this equation.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Firstly, the organization needs to understand what value is. This is related to market dynamics and the identification of the target groups associated with a specific market segment. Identifying what is valuable to a target group is a process that requires validation, not an assumption to be made on the fly or within the organization's own echo chambers. So, what is value? And what do the customers describe as valuable? These are questions we need to ask ourselves as a company that wants to provide value to our customers. We can not assume that value to us means the same to the client.
Secondly, the organization needs to understand how to create value more effectively. Under high levels of uncertainty and volatility, the concept of value can shift significantly within a short timeframe. This is why delivering effectively and establishing fast feedback loops between the market and the organization is of vital importance.
Whilst Lasse was going through the topics, he briefly touched on some of the tools we use for discovering the value stream as well as how you can design an organization to deliver on a value stream. The ORGANIC agility Portfolio System Designis a package that aims at creating/designing a streamlined approach to value delivery. Both tools, Value Stream Discovery and the Competence Mapping, were presented during the webinar.
If you would like to take a closer look at the tools, please visit our website, or get in touch with us to schedule a call to discover more together! We are keen to explore how you can work towards creating better value for your customers.
Join our agile42 Community to stay in touch and receive helpful and interesting insights from the agile42 team.
For those that joined our series of webinars for the first time, we strongly recommend viewing the recordings from our past webinars if you want to get up to speed for the next sessions. Upcoming and past ORGANIC agility webinars are listed here, along with other recordings on Agile and Scrum topics, so feel free to take a look!
Decision-making is an essential process in every organization and can be used as a proxy for the level of resilience and agility. There aren't any right or wrong ways to decide and there are trade-offs involved in each approach.
For example, centralized decision-making processes lead to more coherent decisions at the cost of longer information flows and synchronization delays. If decisions are distributed and frequent, the organization might instead be more autonomous and responsive at the cost of process coherence. In both cases the downsides can be partially offset, e.g. by deploying information systems or by increasing the cultural coherence.
In our latest webinar on November 16th, called “A decision making approach for resilience”, continuing the series on ORGANIC agilitytopics, we explored Principle #2 and how to use a common and transparent framework for decision-making processes which adapts to each specific context.
Using the Cynefin framework as a guide, we have created a specialized approach to decision-making based on the Cynefin domains, separating out two processes, which are both critical for resilience:
Situational analysis: this is how the people making the decision perceive the context in which the decision needs to be made.
Decision-making: how the actual decision-making is carried out, based on the situational analysis.
Both parts of the decision-making process are critical for resilience. In order to quickly recover from failure and adapt to changing circumstances, the organization must have the ability to manage the trade-off between speed, risk, and anticipated consequences.
We explored how a situational analysis can be done, through both individual and group sense-making, and we provided an overview of possible decision-making based on context:
When the problem at hand is self-evident and doesn’t require specific knowledge or expertise, the organization must have defined policies, processes or tools in place, so that every employee knows when such constraints apply, either because they are common sense or because they are explicitly taught as part of the organization's on-boarding process. The way to improve decision making in this context is to hold regular reviews of those policies and see if small changes can improve the quality of decisions.
When some sort of expertise or analysis is necessary to make a decision, then the approach to decision making is to identify the experts in the specific domain, allow them to provide options (vetted through peer review) and then decide based on those options. To improve decision quality, multiple experts can collaborate, facilitated by a non-expert who can introduce naive questions, avoiding the risk of analysis paralysis and a limited expert point of view. If the experts cannot decide between multiple coherent options within a reasonable amount of time, we might follow into the next scenario.
When it is impossible to analyze a situation given the high level of volatility and uncertainty, then the approach to decision making is to run multiple parallel probes, in the hope that certain patterns will emerge that will help decision making. Under such conditions expertise doesn’t play a role, and in fact can hinder if experts cannot see beyond the scope of their expertise, and instead of exploring potential patterns they see every new input through their pre-existing mental models (to an expert in hammers every problem will be a nail).
When in a true crisis, it is impossible to analyze the situation, because the volatility is so high that even experimentation won’t help. The only way to proceed is to make decisions with authority as fast as possible. A bad decision is better than no decision at all, as it will create some constraints that will allow patterns to emerge in the system. We recognize such situations as chaotic and very energy-draining, but the presence of constraints and creation of coherence will allow us to move back into a context where experimentation is possible.
Last we discussed how organizational Archetypes can influence the way these decision making patterns are implemented in practice.
Connect with us on social media, to stay updated with blogs, webinars, training and other events which support your learning journey :) We hope to see you in the webinar regarding Principle #3 in January.
On October 14, I held a webinar about the first principle of ORGANIC agility. Together with 50+ participants, we explored the importance of culture and various ways of making the culture visible both in theory and practice.
Culture is, briefly, “the way we do things around here”. It is the context of all activities within an organization and sets the norms for what behaviour is acceptable and what is not acceptable. It has a very strong influence on how people behave. And companies that are unaware of their culture, uninterested in what it means, or lacking the right tools, risk ending up with a culture that does not fit their strategy.
Culture also plays a very important role in determining how people react to change. If the culture is incoherent, people will find it difficult to agree on which way to go. They may also react to changes in wildly different ways.
What to do about it? It’s clear that culture is complex and can't be designed. We simply can't draw up an “ideal culture” and then deploy it. What we can do instead is measure what we have, and influence it to create more of a certain type of behaviour, and less of another. By running small safe-to-fail experiments, we can try out different approaches and see what works.
When measuring culture, we can choose from a large number of dimensions, including proactivity/reactivity, subordination, risk appetite, emotionality, masculinity/femininity, conflict resolution, power distance, etc. etc. As it turns out, the two most important dimensions — the ones with the strongest explanatory power — are outwards vs. inwards focus, and flexibility vs. control. They form the basis of the Competing Values Framework.
If you want to measure your culture in your organization, you can have a look at our Organizational Scan here.
A company would start by taking a baseline. A month or two of continuous sampling is typical, in order to even out temporary fluctuations. We then run the survey continuously, following the organisational culture in general but also tracking our pilot/experiment teams specifically. What happens over time? If the experiments are giving positive results, we should see the experiment teams migrate slowly in the desired direction.
Leadership styles are going to be particularly relevant to the change process. Subordinates slowly change their behavior to conform to the leadership style that is visible. Having a conscious approach to storytelling and an awareness of ritualized behavior can also support the change and provide some coherence.
Below you can find the slides from my presentation.
The recording is available online. You can watch it again or share it with your network as you see fit. It is also available on YouTube.
During the webinar, I referenced an article on organisational culture. I’ve found it valuable because it gives a decent overview of cultural dimensions.
Kim S. Cameron and Deborah R. Ettington. The conceptual foundation of organizational culture. Working Paper #544, The University of Michigan, School of Business Administration, Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 1988.
On November 16 @ 16:00 CET, my colleague Giuseppe will be continuing the webinar series with Principle #2 on decision making in context. Here is the link to that webinar, and we hope to see you there.
*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*
As many of you might have seen, agile42, along with our long-standing client, Swedbank, wrote a Success Story about our journey together. Ever since we've been keen to host a webinar on this, to tell the story! We had the honour of inviting Cecilia Kåhrström to join the webinar with us, where she, together with agile42Sweden's, Giuseppe De Simone, walked the audience through the work we did together.
The journey has been long: some parts of the work with Swedbank began back in 2014. This webinar and the Success Story, specifically focused on the work with Group IT, which started in 2018. A lot has been done together since then, and we are happy to say that we today can call Cecilia and all Group IT leaders and employees, not clients, but friends.
In the picture below, Cecilia summarized all the activities that supported the achievement of their current level of agility and we are particularly proud of the bubbles on the right. In fact they show the things which Swedbank continued on their own after we left, witnessing the accomplishment of our mission: grow our clients’ capabilities so that they are able to persevere on their path to agility sustainably after we leave.
The discussion between Cecilia and Giuseppe opened up these topics.
A particular focus was given to one of the most important factors in this Success Story: how the leaders understood early on that agility could not be achieved just by buying and deploying a predefined process. It was amazing to observe how fast they got this clear understanding compared to other leaders we've met that are just looking for a pre-packaged solution. Every organization that is interested in becoming sustainably agile needs to make this journey on their own: you should not worry about reinventing the wheel, because the journey is more important than the goal.
The slides from the webinar can be found here. You are welcome to have a look at them, and for any questions you have, you can turn to us.
This webinar broke our record with questions from the audience. We had more questions than we could answer. From the recording you can hear the answers that we managed to get to live.
If you missed the live webinar, the recording is available here!It is also available on YouTube. Please have a look at it and feel free to share it around with friends and colleagues.
We hope that you enjoyed this Success Story. For any questions, feel free to reach out to us!
*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*
I wrote an article (08/2020) for the Coaching-Magazin Online about "Archetypes for change - Leadership coaching in complex times" and I'm happy to share the content with you here on our blog. The different archetypes are part of our ORGANIC Leadership® framework which we support organizations with.
Archetypes tie together in an intuitive and powerful way a diverse range of concepts that affect leaders and organizations. This article examines the concept of leader and organizational archetypes. Starting from the root of archetype in myth and narrative and combining this theoretical literature with leadership theories and psychological literature on behavior, it discusses the coaching of leaders through the process of changing themselves and their organizations by understanding their relationship to certain archetypes and the effects of their behavior.
Archetypes are part of stories: they represent structures or character types that stand for, or even represent, collective ideas, ideals, characteristics, fears, and desires. Some archetypes are almost universally recognizable, such as the self-sacrificing hero, or the loving mother, while others are more culturally specific. It is important to note that archetypes are not stereotypes (Snowden, 2005). People or situations are not shoehorned into them and they are not used for categorization. They just emerge out of repeated collective representations in stories, and we might recognize them when we see them. They also continue evolving as stories are retold or new ones are added into the canon. Because that makes them essentially pattern abstractions with a personality, archetypes can be incredibly flexible and practical: they are instantly recognizable, but rooted in different specificities.
The roots of archetypes go back to ancient Greek philosophy and Plato, who envisioned a world of ‘ideas’, ideal types whose specific reflections make up the real world. They were then picked up in Renaissance philosophy. In the 20th century, the psychoanalysis pioneer Jung gave them clearer shape and much of their modern understanding, identifying archetypes with prototypical images of the world that we all carry around with us, and which are so inherently bound to us that they keep surfacing again and again in our stories. These days, archetypes often feature in narrative research and literary criticism, informing approaches that seek to take a big-picture, comparative view of the word (Campbell, 1968; Frye, 2001).
What do archetypes have to do with coaching, leadership, and organizations?
It is clear then how archetypes might be relevant in approaching a book or film, but what do they have to do with coaching leaders? In fact, there are two major connecting points: one has to do with stories themselves, and the other with the kind of understandings and representations that archetypes can support in an organization.
Narrative has of course become a dominant theme in organizational coaching in recent years, with leaders often encouraged to take courses in storytelling (see, for example, Choy, 2020 or Denning, 2005). In fact, narrative goes far deeper than that. The unstructured, natural stories that are told every day around the coffee machine, the stories of success and failure that circulate and justify organizational practices and choices, the elaborate mythology and grand narratives that make up and support organizational values, all these are part of what constitutes the all-important organizational culture (see, for example, Ravasi & Schultz, 2006 or Gabriel, 2004). And archetypes, once we start looking, are one of the elements that crosscut across different levels and connect them, appearing in different forms in all kinds of stories.
By seeing and understanding those archetypes, a point of access in organizational culture in all of its complexity becomes available, which means that we can start affecting it. Archetypes bring together different elements in a natural way. Those studying the art and science of organizations know that the attitudes of leaders in an organization, the underlying culture and structure, and the response of others to those behaviors are connected: directly, indirectly, and sometimes in ways that we cannot immediately see. Understanding archetypes means that these connections are built into our perceptions and interventions without reducing the complexity of both organizations and leadership.
Complexity theories of leadership
Mentioning this embeddedness of leadership in partly visible and partly understood networks leads us to necessarily discuss a complex approach to leadership in general. Leadership theories can help us understand what archetypes contain. Given the characteristics of archetypes and the way they are used in coaching (to be more specifically addressed in the next section) it makes sense to turn to complexity theories in particular (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007). Complexity leadership theories were developed as a response to the changing world of work, from a more structured and mechanical to a rapid-based, adaptive one that is primarily built on human knowledge, relations, and capacities. This modern world of work moreover operates in dangerous, constantly shifting markets, sped up even more by technology. Complexity leadership draws from complexity science, which focuses on large, dynamic systems of interconnected components that evolve over time and are in a constant state of change, even without external inputs. In organizations, those components include people and their networks, which brings complexity to a whole other level.
Leadership for an evolving dynamic system should be evolving and dynamic itself or fall behind and desperately try to maintain control of the uncontrollable. In this environment, flexible leadership (now meant as a quality and a dynamic, and not as a position of power or a job description) can create the right conditions to enable responsive evolution, and therefore resilience, and trigger the evolutionary potential of the system without directing it, focusing on speed and learning over efficiency and process control. In order to achieve that, a high degree of well-connected autonomy will be necessary.
Because coaching a dynamic is generally rather difficult, in this article reference will often be made to leaders themselves, with the understanding that they are especially well-placed to influence how leadership is exercised. The rest of this article will focus on how coaches can facilitate through archetypes the emergence of coherent autonomy in a context that enables evolution.
Complex-friendly movement through change and coaching for awareness
So how do coaches put that to good use in the process of organizational change, and what does it mean for coaching leaders through it? There are processes for extracting the archetypes that are present in different parts or groups of an organization (see for example Snowden, 2005): contrasting those reveals unarticulated, sometimes critical, variations in perspective. Here, however, we will propose using a series of pre-existing, high-abstraction organizational archetypes that can then be given specific form into the context of application. These high-level archetypes bring together leadership attitudes, organizational expectations, and culture, as well as levels or types of structure and autonomy present in the organization.
The last point is critical, because the range of autonomy levels represented in archetypes makes them an ideal transition tool. The proposed archetypes start from The Expert, characterized by a leader who is the primary decision-maker and communicator with the team. Relationships are one-to-one with the leader and the culture is focused on control. All five high-level archetypes proposed will not be outlined here, but they move in increasing levels of autonomy from The Expert, through The Co-ordinator and The Peer (includes collective decision-making, solid feedback loops, increased responsibility for personal action and a collaborative culture). Finally, at the higher levels of autonomy there are The Coach and The Strategist archetypes, where ultimately leadership is distributed instead of concentrated on the person of the leader, in true complexity fashion, and the leader as a person acts as a strategic conduit between the team and the organization.
Identifying relevant archetypes and using them to better understand autonomy
So how does a leader, a team, or an organization know which archetype they can identify themselves with, and use that knowledge to intervene and gradually increase the level of autonomy, and therefore adaptability and speed of reaction, in the organization? As a coach, the process can start with facilitation: in a workshop, people from diverse perspectives share stories of success and failure in the organization and then map those on to archetypes. This shows the coach, not only which archetypes are more typical of the organization, but also which ones people feel more comfortable with and which they consider more effective. Comfort levels are something to take into account in leadership coaching, because pushing premature change will only get rejected and lead to conflict.
Using the most common and successful archetypes as a guide, leaders can start seeing a possible evolutionary path, from the existing conditions to greater autonomy and interconnection within and between teams. The path however is not to the archetype representing the highest possible level of autonomy: it is to the next most autonomous archetype from the one the team is at right now, whatever that is. This is where leadership coaching becomes most crucial, because the key to triggering change are leadership behaviors.
For the practicalities of coaching, leadership behaviors can also be distilled down to six major categories, which of course subsume a whole range of actual actions. These behaviors exist simultaneously in various dimensions, from the perspective of the leader, to the perspective of the team, to ideas of how work gets done and what constitutes success. These overarching behaviors can be described with words like directing, demanding, conducting, or catalyzing. Behaviors and archetypes are mutually reinforcing and feed off culture: a leader’s behavior shapes the culture and archetype, while at the same time being affected by it.
Coaching leadership through behavior and contextual awareness
From a coaching perspective then, the first step would be coaching on Emotional Intelligence (Beldoch, 1964; Goleman, 1995), observation and awareness. Beyond the debate on the general validity of Emotional Intelligence as a concept, it is used here as a tool that can be particularly helpful in making connections: the leader can observe the way their own emotions trigger their actions which in turn shape the impact they have, so that they realize this chain for themselves and, through practices such as journaling or regular coaching and reflection sessions, build the capacities for observation.
With awareness heightened, conscious behavioral change can be possible. Going back to the evolutionary path that archetypes have helped us recognize, coaches can associate the present and the desired archetypes with specific behaviors (which are already part of an archetype’s constellation). Each archetype involves multiple different behaviors and these partially overlap between different archetypes, so for the leader the key is to start adopting some of the new behaviors of the desired archetypes, while maintaining those among the old ones that are still present in the goal archetype. This continuity is an important element for change to be accepted and happen naturally. So, for example, if an organization or group is trying to move from The Expert to The Co-ordinator archetype, a leader might still use demanding-type behaviors, but they will no longer be dictating every detail, and will instead move to a higher-level co-ordination. As the leaders’ behavior changes, the structures around it will start shifting as well, as people and structures around them respond to the changed leadership behavior and new rituals and practices (that can be reinforced to support the change) emerge. The key here is that instead of forcing organizational structure to change in appearance only, the leader uses this heightened awareness and sense of direction to change their own actions and practices, and magnify that impact.
The letting go of control and its rewards
This process sounds theoretical, but in its application on the ground it has the advantage of making the abstract immediately specific and graspable by honoring existing knowledge through the intuitive connections embedded in the idea of archetypes. This means that the leader isn’t being aggressively guided to unravel everything and break it down into constituent parts in order to make a difference, but they are being given a way of seeing things that offers power and understanding over their own actions.
The implication here is that the leaders’ control primarily extends to themselves and what they do, as well as what they are able to observe, which sometimes might be hard to accept. It means that leaders will have to recognize that deliberate changes in organizational structures, or stating ideal company values might have very little effect. They will have to recognize that their control over others’ actions (except in the most direct and damaging way) is very minimal. The coach can encourage that process by emphasizing why it is worth it for creating the kind of impact most leaders dream of having on their organization through the cumulative power of small interventions. So what they can do is take action themselves, encouraging the direction they have chosen, as the archetype of their organization changes more smoothly around them, alongside the stories people tell.
Literature
Beldoch, Michael (1964). Sensitivity to expression of emotional meaning in three modes of communication. In Joel R. Davitz et al. (eds.), The Communication of Emotional Meaning (pp. 31–42), New York: McGraw-Hill.
Campbell, Joseph (1968). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Denning, Stephen (2005). The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.
Frye, Northrop. (2001). The archetypes of literature. In Vincent Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton.
Gabriel, Yiannis (ed.) (2004). Myths, Stories and Organizations: Premodern narratives for our times. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lavine, Marc (2014). Paradoxical Leadership and the Competing Values Framework. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 50(2), pp.189–205. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886314522510.
Goleman, Daniel (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.
Jung, C. G& Franz, Marie-Luise von (1964). Man and his symbols. New York: Dell Pub. Co.
Ravasi, Davide & Schultz, Majken (2006). Responding to Organizational Identity Threats: Exploring the Role of Organizational Culture. AMJ, vol. 49, pp. 433–458, https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2006.21794663.
Snowden, David (2005). Stories from the Frontier. E:CO, 7(3–4), pp. 155–165.
Snowden, David (2002). Narrative Patterns: Uses of Story in the Third Age of Knowledge Management. Journal of Information & Knowledge Management, 1(1), pp. 1–6.
Tong, Yew Kwan & Arvey, Richard D. (2015). Managing complexity via the Competing Values Framework, Journal of Management Development, 34(6), pp. 653–673.
Uhl-Bien, Mary; Russ, Marion & McKelvey, Bill (2007). Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), pp. 298–318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.04.002.
We are pleased to announce that the webinar that took place on July 2nd, held by agile42's own Andrea Tomasini and his friend and colleague in leadership, Richard Sheridan from Menlo Innovations, was a great success.
We had people joining the session from all over the world, asking these two thought leaders great questions, and interacting with us in the chat.
The webinar kicked off with Richard giving an introduction into how they have been tackling the "new normal" at Menlo Innovations. Letting everyone in on stories about how they shifted to operating virtually and how they are maintaining social connections in these difficult times.
Andrea then gave an introduction into how agile42 changed their way of working, not only internally, but also with their clients. There was a need to adapt quickly and agile42 managed to steer the ship in the right direction. He also shared how proud agile42 is of their clients, the way in which they pivoted their way of working whilst taking into account the safety of their employees. Andrea's presentation focused on ORGANIC Leadership, and how this framework can help organizations lead in this "new normal".
Below you can see Andrea's notes from the webinar:
The focus of the discussion between Richard and Andrea was also about the safety of people in organizations. They stressed that it's important to ensure all employees have what they need to be able to work from home, stay safe and cope in this "new normal". It has not been easy for agile42 and Menlo Innovations, as both Richard and Andrea mentioned, however staying strong together is key.
We had a number of requests to record the webinar, and as usual, we did :-). If you missed the webinar, or you would like to listen again and share it with your network, you will find the recording below! It is available on YouTube.
Andrea also discussed the ways of measuring how the organization is performing. Survey fatigue was mentioned plenty of times in the chat. Employees are tired of doing surveys on a regular basis and struggle to see the value. agile42 has created the Organizational Scan, OrgScan for short, which uses the patented SenseMaker® technology. It shows your organizational culture, your main leadership styles and what your organization values by collecting 100% anonymous data from you and your colleagues. Through including micro-narratives and a patented design that cannot be gamed, the OrgScan offers real data, unlike an interview or a questionnaire which is influenced by the personal situation or the mood of the contributor.
If you are interested, please have a look at the Starter Kit, and get in touch! The Starter Kit is a perfect way to get started and experience the value of the OrgScan. The OrgScan is a fun way to describe what you see and feel in the organization, without the feeling of filling in a survey.
If you would like to take a look at the books Richard and Andrea have written, you can find the links to these in the original blog post, introducing this webinar.
The empirical evidence agile42 has gathered from multiple client engagements, supports the theory that ideal characteristics of a leader are based on archetypes, ideal types of what an organization should look like and their underlying culture. This has led us to observe a very strong relationship between leadership attitude, organizational design, and organizational culture.
The idea behind ORGANIC agility is that there isn’t any right or wrong leadership behavior, but rather there are behaviors that one can master, and can be appropriately called upon in specific situations within a specific culture: if a leadership behavior doesn’t correspond to the cultural expectations of the people involved, it will very likely cause a negative emotional response, and potentially increase motivational debt.
In this webinar I gave an overview of different archetypes that are expressed under specific conditions and bring leadership behavior, organizational design and organizational culture together. We also explored some methods within the ORGANIC agility framework, that allow you to recognize the archetype to which an organization can be mapped at a given moment in time, and provide guidance for transitioning to a different archetype, while increasing coherence between culture, organizational design and leadership behaviors.
If you missed the live webinar, I have great news for you!Here you can find the recording of the session, available on YouTube. Please have a look at it and feel welcome to share it around with friends and colleagues.
During the webinar, I mentioned the Archetype Assessment as a part of the ORGANIC agility framework. The archetype assessment is a service we provide either virtually or in-person, and it is an engaging and meaningful activity that reveals what people think about the way leadership achieves results in your organization. It allows groups and leaders to express what combinations (archetypes) they see themselves operating in, what expectations they have of one another, and how they can make changes without alarming and disappointing the people they work with. The aim is to support cohorts going through any sort of change, whether intentional (such as an agile journey) or unintentional (such as a merger). Change creates friction and both leaders, and the people they work with, struggle with knowing in what ways it is useful to change and how they can best reduce resistance and help support growth in themselves and others.
Please have a look at the information, and contact us if you are interested or have questions!
I mentioned the webinar from our colleague, Lasse Ziegler, in this webinar, about Leadership in complex environments, and I recommend you have a look at that one to get an understanding of the leadership styles mentioned briefly in my webinar.
One of the main aspects of any agile transformation program is cultural change. During times of working from home it’s even more important than ever.
Based on the 1st ORGANIC agility principle, “Increase Cultural Awareness and Coherence”, the main challenge is how to understand your organizational culture and how to create coherence based on shared principles without losing diversity.
In this webinar I shared my experiences of using the Competing Values Framework, developed by Robert Quinn and Kim Cameron at the University of Michigan. This framework gives us a model with the purpose to help change agents identify effective ways of diagnosing and changing culture in order to enhance organizational performance.
I am pleased that the topic of the webinar got so much attention. We had people listening from all over the world, and so many questions that unfortunately we ran out of time. We hope that we can continue some discussions with the participants in the future. It was fun and great that the audience was engaged in the topic with comments throughout the session.
For those who missed the live session, don't panic! Here you can find the recording, and it is also available on YouTube. Have a look at it and feel welcome to share it around with friends and colleagues. If there is anything we can help you with regarding this topic, feel free to contact us.
If you are interested in the Organizational Scan for your organization, feel free to look into our OrgScanStarter Kit. This is a good starting point to understanding the culture of your organization. More details about the OrgScan can be found here. Don’t hesitate to get in touch!
To learn more about ORGANIC agility, you can have a look at our webpage. We’re continuing to run the Certified ORGANIC Leadership® Foundations (provides CAL1) sessions remotely, so get in touch if you think this would be something for you and your organization.
If you are interested in reading more about ORGANIC agility, you can buy the ORGANIC agility book from Amazon.
We have more webinars coming up, and the previous ones listed on our website, so please have a look at them here. More webinars!
