On Transforming Organisational Archetypes
At some point these days if you work in transformation, in particular, digital transformation you will be involved in changing the archetype of the organisation, or at least some part of it.
I think I’m fortunate to say that I’ve been involved in 4 significant transformations now, whilst all being slightly different they all share common themes and challenges. Ranging from tech scale-ups to enterprise scale banks the human experience; the fears, the tribes and the longing for certainty persist.
The desire to transform tends to be born from the same cause, a failure to improve against the relentless forces of entropy, an inability to break out of customs and see the world “as it is”, to orient and align to the right thing. The executive need for capability, scale, speed, responsiveness, concurrency, efficiency, value anything to stay in the game, anything to beat inertia.
What are we changing from and to?
The general movement is from functional alignment to market-oriented. The thinking is to benefit from the strategic impacts of Conway's Law, make the silos belong to the customer by running a train through the functions.
Change is needed no doubt, those smaller, nimble companies operate in an ecosystem that competes with the enterprise, decoupled and aligned each one a contender poised to break through the canopy like an Amazonian tree. The enterprise tries to decouple itself from itself, whilst the scale-up outgrows its immature start in the hope that it too can feel secure becoming too big to fail. We have anchored on financial growth being purpose and progress, is it?
Value streams, labs, tribes, the nomenclature may not be too relevant. All language is made up so it is what you define it to be, but as knowledge synthesizes and new complex language evolves, shared meaning will emerge, common understanding of terms will create new sticky customs and as the next generation comes through, expectation comes with them.
If you call it agile and it isn’t agile the narcissism of small differences will polarise and create churn; not everyone can be expected to be past the slope of enlightenment. So like Optimus Prime, the best transformers must keep the Iroquois principle at the forefront of their mind and build for the generations ahead as well as the one here and now.
But the incumbent structure won't welcome change, whether it's an old one or new, the longing for familiarity, for customs that make us feel at home don’t take long to embed, federated change disrupts this, federated change is a threat. As part of the change cycle, Cortisol will create fear and paranoia, it passes as all things do, in the midst of this period remember we own our actions, like Invictus, we are the masters of our soul our character is all we own. Don’t chase the shadows that move around in your head long after the sun has gone down.
Changing in this way, transforming an organisation, requires bucking the trend of what makes us human. What reason discovers becomes embedded in custom, custom becomes the antithesis of reason, it is custom that makes this life possible but it closes the mind to wonder and learning. Like agile has now become, what was once open-mindedness in search of better ways, is now a source of certainty, confidence, and consensus. The world has moved on the technical constraints are lifted, but the mindset has frozen regardless of the need to solve new problems, the ones further upstream.
Why Do We Change?
But there are good reasons to change, the old archetype, the one where people don’t work as teams or at least teams that create outcomes, they aren't a good place to be. The inevitable silo’s don't help the business thrive, each silo has its own priority so we waste time prioritising something of little value.
Because of the natural contention that arises between silo’s those that have to create outcomes from function have few choices to create value. Escalation is the Force Majeure that eventually decides the tunnel-visioned tasks and the order of execution. This is the antitheses of meritocracy, delivery through power, power in the face of reason and mastery.
By breaking through the functions and putting the customer at the source of our problems and in front of our solutions we have the opportunity to create mission; to make the journey as worthwhile as the destination, so many small destinations.
Measuring Transformation
How do we know if the changes that are happening align to our intent? the scale is beyond what is in our control, how do we make sense of the complexity?
Value delivered.
Communication in delivering it.
We create communication channels, high bandwidth, transparent, effective. No longer framed by authority, the mission becomes the only guide rail we need, data becomes king.
Value delivered in the moment is not comparable across approaches, across archetypes as no two moments are the same. But value is entirely measurable as is the bandwidth of communication in delivering it.
Done well the needle of measured value moves as frequently as the pace of change, done badly its chunks resemble moon cycles.
Done well the communication channels in delivering that value are optimal along the value stream, they ignore the Berlin wall of silos, done badly the odd bridge of information and knowledge can be seen traversing them but its a trickle, not a river.
Understanding the complex clustering of communication and the outputs from that communication will tell you if Conway's law is working for or against you. It’s a map to understanding the future state of your architecture, that North Star that keeps being emailed out in slide decks means nothing in the face of interactions, against the relentless force of teamwork. No wonder we are so powerless to create change.
The Artist or the Analyst.
Greenleaf once wrote: “criticism has its place, but as a total preoccupation it is sterile… If too many potential builders are taken in by a complete absorption with dissecting the wrong and by a zeal for instant perfection, then the movement so many of us want to see will be set back. The danger … Is to hear the analyst too much and the artist too little”.
In transformation there will always be conflict, we constantly fail to remember what is really inside of our control and get frustrated when others don’t align to our will, the lack of power is a frustration for those in positions of power.
It’s even more a frustration for those whose role it is to influence improvement in practice. They read books and form perspectives, the problem is those perspectives rarely align, the univocity of writing, the propensity to take as Gospel what has been written or taught without learning or approaching the subject open-mindedly will always be a cause of conflict for the analyst.
Fashion will dictate opinion, today the Spotify model is cool, next year the Spotify model is rubbish. If we were to go back before it was publicised and publish it ourselves would we be proud? No one ever presents a why, or a how to fix the strawmen, they just clutter up the pages of Linkedin. The immaturity can be mapped to Dunning-Kruger.
Life is perception but we inherit our opinions from the respected in our fields, respect the opinion to think for ourselves, think through the veneer of analyst certainty and into the mist of artist uncertainty. It's a painful place to be but its where the leader needs to be, someone has to take it.
If we can pass ourselves through the storm of change there always comes a calm on the other side, a place where teams unite around a common purpose, where functions provide service to the cause, free from concern of empire. Where value and communication flow in parity, there can be no doubt that through relentless continuous improvement, through bringing practice closer to theory, with intent and through team that we will be able to look back and appreciate that the journey was the right one, that the challenges were worth the rewards and that the work to do was and will always be enough.
And if not we can be sure our biases will rationalise it that way for us anyway.
