Treating Your Organization Like a Connected System
This video dives into the importance of viewing your organization as a connected system rather than a collection of isolated practices and tools. By focusing on first principles like encapsulation, lightweight governance, and empowered teams, we explore how to create conditions for true agility. Instead of fixating on methodologies or frameworks, the emphasis shifts to aligning strategy, data, security, and processes to solve real business problems in a cost-effective, customer-focused way. If you’re looking to drive meaningful, systemic change in your organization, this discussion provides a compelling roadmap for transformation.
Video Transcript
What we’re really passionate about is figuring out how to make meaningful change within the organization. And I believe that the only way to make meaningful change in an organization is to look at your organization as a system. So much of what we’re doing, whether it be agile or product extraction or engineering modernization or technology practices, or buying tools to do data buying, tools to do DevOps, buying tools to do ai, what we’re doing is we’re just piecemealing an organization together.
And if we can really take this first principle of encapsulation over orchestration, it’s really like services oriented all the way up to the top. Again, I’m not dogmatic about service oriented, I’m not talking about microservices or whatever. Just this idea of encapsulation exposed by APIs, wrapped in tests, that kind of a thing. If we can take that idea all the way from the top of the organization all the way down and create these strategies across with minimal, lightweight flow-based governance, empowered teens at the bottom, right, then we’ve got a shot for, I might also say that if we did all those things, the methodologies that we choose likely wouldn’t matter as much, and so you wouldn’t have a battle over whether Scrum is better or safe is better or less is better, or discipline, agile delivery is better or flex is better, or scaled Scrum is better.
Whatever wouldn’t be having these conversations because teams aligned towards business problems that are just obsessively focused on their customers, obsessively focused with solving problems in a cost-effective economically justifiable way, and the teams aren’t so big, right? At the delivery team level, it’s maybe seven, eight people. Maybe at the organization level it’s 150 or 200, but if we can do that right, then we create the conditions for agility and then we can start to think about ideas like wrapping them with process that makes sense, whether that be Scrum or Kanban or some lightweight governance or even a lightweight form of safe, like no problems.
So we get the organization, we get the encapsulation, right? We get the data strategy, get the security, get all that stuff thought out, and then wrap it in practice. That makes sense. We can get the agile culture to emerge and we really get the best of both worlds over time. So in closing, it’s not a matter of just installing practices, it’s a matter of changing the fundamental operating model of the organization, understanding that it’s a system and all the stuff has to be aligned. And also understanding and recognizing that it has to be driven by a rational economic strategy, and it has to be driven by a big goal. And so if that’s ai, great. If it’s the next thing that comes on the pipe, great.