ORGANIC agility in Helsinki

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Come and join us in an evening of interesting talk, networking and food & drink. agile42’s founder Andrea Tomasini will be in Helsinki on October 7 to talk about the approach that he has built over the year in working with numerous clients evolving their organizations to become more resilient.

Today market cycles are rapidly shortening. Organizations need a new way to resilience, equipping the leadership to deal with complexity and the challenges of today. ORGANIC agility is such an evolutionary approach to organizational agility and resilience that has been developed by working with hundreds of companies around the world.

Register your place for the event.

The three pillars of ORGANIC agility include a capability-based leadership model that focuses on the three dimensions of situation, behavior, and culture. The second pillar provides the scaffolding for organizations to evolve to continuously improve through five key principles and the third is a set of tools, both analog and digital, to help companies attain and improve their organizational resilience.


Please note: although this is a free event we will charge a no show fee of 50€ if a registered participant does attend the event. This is due to restaurant reservations. If you cannot join but you already registered, please let us know before Friday 4.10. at 12.00 o’clock.

Article in JAVAPRO Magazine: achieving resilience

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JAVAPRO, the independent magazine for professional developers, has just published an article by Marion Eickmann on achieving resilience through ORGANIC agility and what resilience means for organizational agility, culture, and leadership. 

The article covers the significance of resilience and how it emerged as an essential response to the pressures organizations face. It then paints the picture of a resilient organization and shows how this property can apply to different levels and areas. Finally, a new way of seeing leadership is placed at the centre of achieving resilience and agility. You can download a copy of the original article in German here, or an English version here.

Agile HR

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Leading Agility

In today’s business world, organizations are changing at a tremendous pace due to technological improvements. While this change continues, human resources units need to transform their mission and focus to innovation, cooperation and speed, and even to be a leader for this transformation.

Are you familiar with issues below?Endless work lists

Ever-changing business unit requests
Focus problems
Never ending projects
Lack of ownership, (It’s not my job)
Lack of commitment
Failure to produce on time
Lack of trust and communication
Information loss
Quality problems
Start from scratch
Lingering, irregular and inefficient meetings

If you are familiar with the above, we need a change in the way we do business.

How did we come here?

In today’s world, companies that do business in the classical style are working with Taylorism since 1911. Organisations are structured in the  logic of a production line based on division of labor and specialization. Taylor emphasized that employees must specialize in a specific role and work for productivity in production. Reward is the requirement for increasing the efficiency of this system. The system has layers for making  decisions and doing business.This hierarchical and very traditional working structure was a solution for the past century. Turkish and worldwide companies have implemented this system extensively.

Agility is not a new entity, but a radical movement initiated in 2001 by the release of the Agile Manifesto by 17 software experts. Agile working methods, which created momentum in the software world, triggered a rapid change and this change affected customers’ demands. Customers demand affected almost all the products and services. And customer, no longer wants to wait. In fact, this is the main reason that leads us to agility.

Agility is based on the principles of “Lean” working method which is about collaboration of employees to solve a problem. Being agile is a response to fast changing and  complex market conditions. Human Resources experts have published another manifesto from this point of view. You can reach the Manifesto from the following link: 

https: //www.agilehrmanifesto.org/

What is agility, what is not?

It is not only daily meetings nor post-it sticking or routine of meetings.In fact, it is a new way of managing a business. A new perspective or mindset.It is a combination of good practices in the business world in a disciplined framework.It is a “system” perspective that can be understood in a shot but requires discipline , decisiveness and work to implement

How we can become Agile HR?

Actually, this might mean a new organizational design.

This design should not be a copy design of another organisation. It should be based on the experience and knowledge of the organization. The best practices, rituals should be thought together. Meanwhile, how to adapt to the cultural level should be analyzed very well. In this analysis, we can discover what are our catalysts, what are our obstacles by doing small experiments; which means we are working with Agile perspective and is the only way to progress in complex environments.

Instead of a mechanical design we should integrate necessary skills of talent management, recruitment, training, performance management, operational units that are organized in cross-functional teams to consist of all the skills needed to accomplish the working product. As we already know, teams working in a matrix structure, are distributed after the projects finish.In an agile team, team will be there to be ready to finish corresponding work from their “backlog” and fulfill their work list. In this team, there is a need for individuals who are self-organizing and working with team awareness. As they work together, we expect confidence in the relations and cooperation would increase. The critical thing is that the organization has to create a safe space for the team.Patience for the chaos that will occur in the first stage and to provide a safe environment will encourage the team to try and drive the way.The team has to take the responsibility of their work in parallel. To improve the team decision processes, we have to work on the delegation of authority and ensure that the team adds quality both to itself and to work they do each time.

In addition to that, all the written above are a development area for leaders.They need to be transformed into a profile in the perspective of what can I do for the improvement of teams and how can I eliminate their barriers.

If you ask where to start doing all this, starting with a sample project in the system will be the right approach. As an agilist, we work  “iterative & incremental”way that running the feedback loops by doing short loops with continuous increments to observe whether we have reached the target point. This will make it easier to manage a transformation that need to be done both in a team and the organization level.

Today, we do not have the luxury to ask whether or not agile transformation is necessary because of the uncertainties in the economic and political environment, increasing complexity of products and services, digital transformation speed, and changing customer and employee expectations. Instead,we have to realize that if we want to survive and compete, we need to plan when and how to transform.

The Scrum Master as an organizational multi-function pocket knife

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When I was a young boy, there was a series on television which I enjoyed a lot. It was called MacGyver and featured a young man that was practically a magician when it came to solving problems. With his trusty Swiss Army Knife, he could disarm bombs, create traps and just about do anything to get him out of any pickle or to help him solve a challenge presented by the next evil criminal mastermind. I sometimes get the impression that this is the way that Scrum Masters are seen. 

Often in classes and when coaching I conclude that Scrum Masters are expected to simply ‘fill the gap’. Is there a need for a manager? Call the Scrum Master. Is there someone needed to be pointed to, to take responsibility because shared responsibility is difficult to grasp? Call the Scrum Master! Are there problems to be solved that no-one else seems to have the answer for? Call the Scrum Master! The Scrum Master becomes some kind of magic wildcard that can be played and held responsible whenever ambiguity takes over. 

This is what makes being a Scrum Master so challenging. Having clarity of your role for yourself and helping your organization get clarity about your role can be a tall order. There are two key statements from the Scrum guide that can help guide these discussions:

  • The Scrum Master is responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide.
  • The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team.

Although this seems like two simple concepts I believe it is helpful to clarify. 

Promoting and Supporting Scrum

From the Scrum guide there are three focus areas clearly defined:

  • The Development team
  • The Product Owner
  • The Organisation

The Scrum Guide does a very good job of describing the three roles. If you are not certain of the mechanics and practices, make an effort to do so and to really understand the roles and why they are defined the way they are.

I would like to emphasize the intent and the mindset that underpins this role. In his book Emotional Intelligence, the author, Daniel Goleman makes the following statements based on experiments conducted by various psychologists:

«The single most important element in group intelligence, it turns out, is not the average IQ in the academic sense, but rather in terms of emotional intelligence. The key to a high group IQ is social harmony.

The single most important factor in maximizing the excellence of a group’s product was the degree to which the members were able to create a state of internal harmony, which lets them take advantage of the full talent of their members.

Harmony allows a group to take maximum advantage of its most creative and talented members’ abilities.»

As a Scrum Master, your focus should be on making sure that Scrum is being implemented well. This means systemic optimization and inherently facilitating group harmony. As an objective observer constantly evaluating and optimizing the system, you can ensure that harmony is facilitated by the values and principles of Scrum.

This brings me to one of the most asked questions when it comes to the Scrum roles: “Is a combination of roles possible?” Of course, it is but from my point of view, that is not the intention. When the Scrum Master becomes part of and subjective to the chaos in a system, it becomes increasingly difficult to model values that are not prevalent in the system. It becomes challenging for him/her to be the conductor of the metaphoric orchestra that is supposed to create perfect harmony. This negates a lot of the value that role is supposed to bring to the table. NO, should be a well-practiced word in the vocabulary of a Scrum Master. Learning to say NO to the right things is a skill to master on its own. 

Just to be clear, a Scrum Master should have a wider focus than just their development team. When Scrum Masters join forces in harmony, they can have a very valuable impact on each other’s teams as well as on an organizational level. Some examples of this can be  Scrum Masters supporting an engineering department by performing story mapping sessions for new products, facilitating department level retrospectives or providing systemic coaching to help improve the flow between departments.

Servant Leadership

Servant leadership can easily become a generalized and ambiguous term which is difficult to pin down. In a paper published by The University of Nebraska–Lincoln titled “Becoming a Servant leader: Do you have what it takes?” the concept is nicely clarified.

  • Calling: Do people believe that you are willing to sacrifice self- interest for the good of the group? Servant leaders have a natural desire to serve others.
  • Listening: Do people believe that you want to hear their ideas and will value them? Servant leaders are excellent listeners. They are receptive and genuinely interested in the views and input of others.
  • Empathy: Do people believe that you will understand what is happening in their lives and how it affects them? Servant leaders can “walk in others’ shoes.
  • Healing: Do people come to you when the chips are down or when something traumatic has happened in their lives? Servant leaders are people who others want to approach when something traumatic has happened. 
  • Awareness: Do others believe you have a strong awareness of what is going on? Servant leaders have a keen sense of what is happening around them.
  • Persuasion: Do others follow your requests because they want to or because they believe they “have to?” Servant leaders seek to convince others to do things rather than relying on formal authority. 
  • Conceptualization: Do others communicate their ideas and vision for the organization when you are around? Servant leaders nurture the ability to conceptualize the world, events, and possibilities.
  • Foresight: Do others have confidence in your ability to anticipate the future and its consequences? Servant leaders have an uncanny ability to anticipate future events.
  • Stewardship: Do others believe you are preparing the organization to make a positive difference in the world? Servant leaders often are characterized by a strong sense of stewardship.
  • Growth: Do people believe that you are committed to helping them develop and grow? Servant leaders have a strong commitment to the growth of people. 
  • Building Community: Do people feel a strong sense of community in the organization that you lead? Servant leaders have a strong sense of community spirit and work hard to foster it in an organization.

As is plain to see, Servant leadership is a lifelong learning process. It is a core competency and central to the role of Scrum mastery. Coincidently, it is also quite challenging to measure. How you make the value you bring as a servant leader transparent to your organization is up to you. I do suggest you try to get some ‘hard stuff’ to help make the ‘soft stuff’ visible. 

Back to MacGyver and his antics. I learned from him that you need to be ready for anything, that you should have the right tools to be able to solve the problems that arise around you efficiently, effectively and with passion. Within the context of Scrum and organizations, I still hold the same lessons dear. I did, however, realize that a Scrum Master is not a jack of all trades with a magic problem-solving knife in his back pocket but a master of Scrum.

Talking agility at Agile Islands conference

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agile42 will be part of the Agile Islands conference taking place on 24th September 2019 in Mariehamn, the capital of the Åland Islands. This conference is organized by representatives of the local business and the administration of Åland.

During the conference, I will keep a workshop to introduce coaching with practical exercises before lunch. It will be discussed what is coaching, what models there are to drive through the coaching process, what are powerful questions and how agile coaching differs from personal/systemic coaching. 

After lunch, we will have a talk on organizational culture. Why culture is getting more important nowadays, and what ways there exist to assess where an organization stands on the culture and what steps can be taken to improve it.

Our team will be present at the Agile Islands with a stand, where Sofia Svanbäck and myself can tell you more about the services agile42 can offer and why many big and smaller organizations from around the globe value those.

The Åland Islands are a group of 6,700 islands between Sweden and Finland out of which 60 are inhabited with a population of 30,000 people where almost half live in Mariehamn. They belong to Finland but are an autonomous and demilitarised region with own government, stamps and a top-level internet domain (.ax). The main language is Swedish. The main industries include shipping, trade, banking, farming and the production of food items.

Agile Islands conference was first organized in 2016 and has taken place every year since then. It has evolved over time and the organization of the event has become more professional year by year. Each year there has been a growing number of participants on average of 200-300. This year there are more speakers than ever, 23 in total, and it has become more international as they come from different corners outside the neighboring areas and with the majority of the talks to be held in English.

The vision of Agile Islands is to contribute to Åland to become the #1 agile community in the world. “This means that all parts of the society are based on agile values and they are leading examples in agile methods and practices in their respective areas, regardless of whether the organization is based on commercial, public or non-profit principles.” The local administration’s focus is on people’s wellbeing, the environment, and sustainability. “All parts of a community are better, efficient and creates more value if run by agile values and, irrespective of the being commercial or non-profit organizations”. I think this sounds quite noble and is very cool in my opinion.

This year the program of the conference offers a big variety of talks in 6 tracks. There are speakers who approach agile from different perspectives, IT, culture, public authorities, HR, and others.

Also, there is time for mingling and networking, as the location is quite functional for this purpose. On top of that, the conference tickets are at a quite affordable level compared to many other conferences. More information about the conference can be found on the webpage at agileislands.ax. You can book your tickets here.

It would be really great to see you there! Come and talk to either Sofia or myself or even both! Let’s get connected and exchange viewpoints on agile.

Food for your soul: the FOODBOOM story

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There is a lot of creativity in FOODBOOM’s teams. They want to change the world, so that food becomes more than a necessary response to hunger and turns into a part of building unique moments. Their customers love what they do, so how could it get any better? Here, our challenge begins. When engaged people want to bring all of their great ideas to life, sometimes we end up with exhausted people who fear they are losing quality. This is what caused FOODBOOM pain, and the organization was not sure what to do about it. 

For FOODBOOM’s management it was clear that they all had to work together to find a way to maintain success, making their customers happy but also looking internally, and getting back to having happy people who love coming to work. They brought in agile42, who started with a workshop designed to discover more about organizational culture, issues and possible next steps for creating a supporting structure. 

The FOODBOOMers worked together all day and by the evening they had a common understanding of what needed to be changed and how they could change it. Clarity, transparency, and better communication emerged as common needs that they all wanted to address. 

The next step started working towards those goals already: a Strategy Map Workshop was held with the leadership, to develop a transparent, adaptive, and validated way for FOODBOOM to move towards its goals. Identifying that shared goal was the first step in the process, followed by recognizing all that is successful in the organization currently, and making hypotheses about what could help bring them closer to their goal in the future. Those hypotheses were then further refined through multiple parallel safe-to-fail experiments, whose success or failure would reveal the best way to move forward. 

The agile42 coaches found FOODBOOM a pleasure to work with. From the beginning they sensed the readiness for change and the commitment to take their destiny in their own hands, which are necessary ingredients for success. Staff at all levels wholeheartedly embraced the possibilities of a new way of working and the potential for transparency, collaboration across the company, and a shared vision that the Strategy Map brings. 

The coaches are convinced that they have triggered a permanent change. Every single person is again aware that they can count on each other and gain synergy through their diversity. Building on people is key at FOODBOOM and they plan to keep working on the Strategy Map, using experiments to test their direction in regular intervals, so that they can maintain and amplify their current success. Last but not least, the agile42 coaches love good food, and enjoyed every single meal cooked during the workshops… 

Dive deep into Cynefin™ for Agile

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In this masterclass, Dave Snowden, the creator of the Cynefin framework
and the agile community’s favorite curmudgeon, will address agility
from the point of view of complexity and bring to participants a
realistic approach that puts context before dogma and shows a future for
Agile that goes beyond fighting over methods and towards a
sophisticated application of agility in organizations.

agile42 is happy to host the Advanced Cynefin™ for Agile Masterclass in Berlin on September 24 and 25. This course is for people who have some experience with agility and
Agile as well as the Cynefin framework, and it is especially recommended
for Agile professionals and practitioners, coaches and trainers,
consultants, digital specialists and people who work in the highly
complex area of organizational transformations.

“Front of Class” ticket price is valid until August 22, check all the details.

From Agile to Agility in Lisbon

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I will present during Day 1 of the eXperience Agile Conference on 30 September in Lisbon, Portugal. The title of my talk is Moving from Agile to Agility where I will cover the key issues that are leading the development of ORGANIC agility.

The eXperience Agile Conference is an event that brings together great speakers, cutting-edge Agile practices and exciting learning opportunities for any domain or industry. Taking to the next step is the leitmotif for this year conference of eXperience Agile. The team in Lisbon started five years ago with a small step, fell frequently, learned from the previous events, but with the determination that they could make a differentiation, they now organize an amazing event.

Tickets are still available

https://www.experienceagile.org/#tickets

for the eXperience Agile and DevOps Conference 2019, see you in Lisbon.

Advanced Agile Team Coaching Course in Berlin and Helsinki

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The Advanced Agile Team Coaching Course is the result of years of activity of the agile42 coaches with our clients around the world. This training is aimed at ScrumMasters, Team Coaches and others who want to take their skills, knowledge, and abilities for coaching and facilitating teams to a professional level beyond the basics. The program is run routinely for our larger clients, but in 2019 we also offer it in public classes in selected locations.

The course is held over a time period of six to eight weeks, accommodating the other activities in the company. It consists of five scheduled class days plus two times one-on-one coaching conversations and activities in learning groups. The 5-day-course includes three days of training (day 1, 2 and 4) and two workshop days (day 3 and 5). 

The new edition of the Agile Team Coaching Course Open Edition will start in Berlin in August 2019 (Day 1 and 2 on the course will take place on August 12th and 13th, Day 3 and 4 on September 9th and 10th, day 5 on October 15th) and in Helsinki starting October 2019 (October 21st and 22nd, December 2nd and 3rd, January 13th). 

In this course, you will learn about team theories. You will be introduced to a variety of tools, which you will have the chance to practice, learn coaching approaches and use them the way professional coaches do. You will also learn how to set up a team coaching structure that helps you and your teams achieve the goals you set.

During the period of time between day 2 and day 3, you will practice what you have learned, share knowledge with your peers in learning groups and revise your coaching structure based on your learnings. You will also have a one-on-one coaching conversation with one of the agile42 coaches that are coaching your company during the transition. The purpose of this conversation is to provide you with as much help as possible to develop as an agile coach. The agile42 coaches will of course also give you on-the-job coaching when needed.

In the period of time between day 4 and day 5, you will again practice all you learned, meet with your peers for sharing experiences and have a one-on-one coaching conversation with an agile42 coach.

Read all the details and get in touch with us to register for ATCC in 2019!

Cynefin, Wardley Maps and ORGANIC agility in Stockholm

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We live in a whitewater world. Change is rapid, and uncertainty is unavoidable. Leaders need the ability to take their organizations safely through these waters, but the old cliches and tools are no longer useful. Instead, frameworks and approaches that have been developed specifically for the management of uncertainty and complexity are essential. How do we make sense of the world so we can act in it? And how do we find a way to map our challenges onto a real business map that allows us to find our way? Two popular approaches are Dave Snowden’s Cynefin™ Framework and Simon Wardley’s Wardley Maps. Many people have found these useful separately, but increasingly people are exploring the potential synergies, as they both provide valuable sense-making capacity in strategic and operational work across a broad range of applications. Maps, frameworks, methods, and manifestos all have their role and function in organizational strategy and the theory behind it, and understanding the differences and connections between them will be important as we enter times of increasing uncertainty.

We are very happy to have the workshop Navigate uncertainty: Strategy and innovation with Cynefin™ & Wardley Maps in Stockholm, Sweden on October 22-23, 2019.


This two-day workshop is an opportunity to take part in an event where the two thought leaders will engage in a seminar-style dialogue, which will explore the blending of their ways of thinking, as well as interact with participants to address responses to their real-world challenges. The first masterclass of that type in the UK, in December 2018, was unique in creating novelty out of the interaction of the two approaches. This masterclass will allow this synergy to mature even further, to the benefit of the participants. It promises to be a seminal event.

Participants will build skills for facilitating discussions and promote action-oriented thinking that responds and evolves as conditions change within leadership teams. In this masterclass, we will explore and put into practice the synergies between the Cynefin™ and Wardley Maps. 

To be able to understand how you can put the theory from the workshop into practice, we would like to add the ORGANIC agility® Foundation training as a practical day after the workshop. Becoming a resilient organization and adapting to an agile way of working requires a shift in mindset and culture. For organizational leadership at every level, from strategy design to implementation, this means understanding the challenges the current market environment poses and how best to respond to them. This interactive workshop helps you to, not just understand, but experience how ORGANIC agility can support your organization in dealing with complexity and how to become resilient in a volatile environment – and why that matters. During this day there will be space to ask questions and get an introduction to the ORGANIC agility principles and ways of applying them in your organization. 

We have a special package price for the 3 days of learning. Read all the details and contact [email protected] to know more.