The concept of market facing teams is at the core of Agile Organizational Design. But not everyone in the organization is going to be a full time member of a single team. If we want to support agility at any scale we need to complement the idea of full time team members with other ways […]
Traditional jobs and roles suck Let’s face it, most conversations we in have in the workplace about, job positions, roles, accountability, etc tend to be pretty depressing. One popular topic is whether or not you are meeting someone else expectation of you, another is hold another individual accountable for not doing their job. My favorite […]
Note: If you like this post check out my latest book on Agile Organizational Design! Before we start digging in to how we do organizational design for the new age, let’s spend a bit of time explaining why we need to consider a new model in the first place. I’ll do a brief history lesson […]
So, I have finally published a reasonable first daft of my next book, titled Agile Organizational Design. This is still very much a rough first cut. The chapters in the mindset section are in decent shape, although hey need an example / use case to tie them together, along with the usual caveat around editing […]
Before We Get Started Before facilitating an Organizing For Agility workshop it’s important to lay down a few ground rules. Invite Everyone First try to involve as many people who are impacted by the change as you can. Emphasis on invite, the last thing you want is a room full of non participants. So make […]
Before I get into some techniques we can use to facilitate organizational design, as part of my next book, I thought it would be important to lay out a few overarching principles we can use to guide our thinking. These principles are: Organize For Cross Functionality, not Functional Specialization Organize Based On Market Pull Try […]
The New Mental Model for Formal Organizational Structure For decades the predominant mental model for an organization has been based on the hierarchy. We grouped people, typically according to specialized capability, and put a single manager in charge of the group. As the group grew larger we in turn grouped similar manager’s and the people […]
Agile Teams in a nutshell Agile teams are awesome. The how and why of agile teams are relatively straight forward concepts. The value of why you would want to rethink your organization as a set of agile teams is reasonably apparent to most people I talk to, but let’s do a quick recap and touch […]
Recently, our team have been leveraging the excellent book Organizing for Complexity by Niels Pflaeging. The book is an awesome read for a number of reasons. This text is now serving as a baseline for us to better describe our own thinking and experience on the topic of Agile Organizational Design, so much so that […]
The traditional approach to organizational design has got it wrong, completely wrong. More specifically, traditional org design models are a barrier if you want grow an organization where smart people make amazing decisions that delight customers and enrich their careers. If you talk to many in the organizational design profession, they will lead you down […]