Self-Organizing Transformation uses learnings inspired by Gandhi’s practice patterns to apply Agile as a form of change management that rolls out Agile as a business capability. These patterns generate uncompromised agility by iteratively converting change recipients into change agents. It avoids pushing change into pre-existing teams, programs or silos, but instead grafts the kernel of the new culture onto the trunk of the old. Steadily doubling capability by splitting and back-filling, this emphasises learning by immersion and eliminates risks of value stream disruption.
Gandhi’s movement can be regarded as a model for transforming modern corporate cultures. It exemplifies simple, common-sense practice patterns to grow a new company culture from a uncompromised kernel rather than struggling to change an existing one. It works inside out instead of top down. It uses patterns that empower individuals to promote change to each other rather have change imposed on them what often leads to push pack instead of cooperation. Real change has time and time again proven to be difficult and is a lengthy process trying to fight the existing dominant culture, if exercised with a top down approach, often failing all together. But how is it achieved?
Transformation Patterns
Transformation Patterns work inside-out, not top-down. It’s not an attempt to preserve existing teams and programs, but to leapfrog them. We can use “Portland Form” to sum it up in four patterns:
Pattern 1: Steel Thread Streams
Put together an internal kernel of change, a seedling that, nurtured by executive leaders, proves the form and benefits of the uncompromised new culture.
There are natural forces to which any change program must adapt:
- In every team there are conservative and progressive personalities. Neither are wrong, and to be properly engaged in a transformation neither can be made to feel wrong either.
- A team can’t change faster than its most conservative member. Trying to take mixed conservatives and progressives into a seedling culture limits the velocity of change as hiccups and compromises multiply to disrupt value streams.
- In Agile delivery, continuous integration prevents the disruption of value streams. CI starts with a minimal integration to prove technical architecture and quality automation. It doesn’t offer business value, but makes certain the codebase is balanced and ready to adapt to iterative feature delivery. This is what delivery teams call a walking skeleton.
Having that in mind, start transformation with a kernel of self-selecting progressives drawn from different teams across the existing culture. Led by a progressive executive who supplies budget and business case, this team is empowered to form a new, slender, but completely uncompromised Agile value stream.
Ensure that this new stream includes Design, Delivery and DevOps teams working hand-in-glove – everything it needs to get all the way from business drivers to actual revenue. Instrument this tiny new capability with metrics to prove its productivity, business throughput, deliverable quality and rate of ROI.
The critical problem for the new capability to solve while it’s still being ignored is finding a path to solution deployment to prove bottom line benefits. Without that, the steel thread value stream must fail. Use these metrics to construct a case study to demonstrate to the executive that the new stream proves a working model of a transformed culture. It’s key that the steel thread doesn’t serve any pre-existing delivery or business function.
Pattern 2: Broad-based Productivity Initiative
No matter how it’s named and framed, any new capability represents a challenge to people embodying the existing capability if they have no motivation to support it.
This second pattern is about enrolling the opposition without their noticing by introducing the simplest possible change initiative they will enthusiastically support.
- A productivity initiative enrolls all players into a process of change without generating resistance among company cultural conservatives. It enthusiastically supports progressives in the existing teams to make key tactical changes necessary that enable easy progress by the steel thread.
- This initiative prevents a cultural tension between those who change and those who don’t. Because everyone changes. It’s just that the steel thread changes more and faster than the old guard.
Enroll all members of the existing culture into a breadth-first productivity improvement initiative. The specific improvement practices should include the elementary practices of Agile to narrow the cultural divide. Stand-ups, retros, definitions of done, and kanban add value without disrupting even the most conservative hierarchy.
These four practices provide obvious benefits to whet the appetite for change and reduce the distance between the old culture and the new. If any of them develop an overly progressive odour in the old culture, they can be renamed without compromise: huddles, continuous improvement meetings, standard operating procedures, and visual management boards.
Training in the productivity initiative should also include the usual Agile team practices “for those who will be participating in that”. Lego-based training games are so much fun they raise cultural literacy about Agile without threatening those resistant to actually using it.
Pattern 3: Organic Growth
By immersion, iteratively convert change recipients into change agents. As Agile teams by their nature are more effective at fostering trust, once a new behaviour gels within a team, it transmits it to new members without external agency. Splitting and backfilling increases uptake on an exponential curve.
- Agile teams have a maximum size beyond which they become inefficient. Best practice is six. Beyond eight a squad should split in two, each adding new members at a rate no faster than they can adapt and be adapted to its practices, definitions of done and trust relationships.
- Each new member brings valuable insights and skills. So these new squads are often more capable than the original while upholding and progressing its culture. As with any language, learning by immersion works better than learning by rote. Simply using Agile in their everyday work, the people from the original squad represent the possibility and methods of change to the new change recipients. They show rather than tell newcomers to change. It’s much easier for everyone – like learning a new language by visiting a foreign country rather than from books.
- As doubling increases the number of internal change agents, the usual Agile ceremonies – pair-working, stand-ups and retros – enable change recipients to come up to speed without investment in classroom training or external coaches. Indeed, all a coach need provide is explanation of the reasons for the practices. That and some trouble-shooting and one-on-one mentoring. The impetus and influence to change comes from the team itself.
Define a transformation cadence of 1-3 months. Every change increment involves splitting each of the existing Agile teams in two and enabling the least conservative members of the old culture to join them.
Since an Agile Organization is product-oriented where a traditional one is project oriented, transformation cadence may alternatively be defined asynchronously by the phase boundaries of Waterfall projects. Whenever a project would defund its unneeded resources, these resources carry proven and valuable knowledge, skills and motivations that drive energy into the new culture.
Pattern 4: Leaders Change First
Leaders of the change program consistently embrace Agile values, principles, and practices. They openly integrate the new culture’s communications and decision-making into their own way of working. They lead by example.
The forces behind this pattern run deeper than such logistics:
- Psychological safety accelerates change. When leaders embody the Agile values, principles and practices, practitioners appear to be on a path toward leadership, and resisters on a path away from it.
- Using Agile metrics and styles to track the transformation assures that the relationship between delivery bottlenecks and cultural bottlenecks is made explicit so that change leaders may rapidly discover and prioritise action on these.
- Leaders who don’t experience culture change themselves require various forms of delegation and translation layers to integrate old and new cultures. These forms act as a brake on development of the new culture and engender inefficient hybrids, whose lack of productivity may be blamed on the company culture change, scuppering it.
Create a leadership squad with daily and weekly Agile ceremonies that involve business, design and technical leadership working together as peers.
Train these leaders in the principles of team and business agility, and in particular Leadership as a Service. Ensure that any HiPPO aligns to this before the Leadership squad kicks off and that the leadership squad integrates with the chapters of the initial Steel Thread.
Set up a Kanban to represent the flow of learnings through the organization, and a cumulative flow diagram to dramatise the operating expense associated with this.
Create a Pirate Canvas for Agile learning as a product to the organization as a market, and run XPM or similar to populate and prioritise the Transformation Kanban.