why agile teams?

Agile teams are really a means to introducing the behavior of teaming, and only one means, albeit a foundational one. Teaming is the goal, not team.

how to improve a team

The easiest way to encourage a new mode of thinking is to simply empower the team to determine what jobs and roles mean to them. Let them determine how to share responsibilities. Encourage the team to make roles and interactions a part of their discussions on how to improve as a team.

The Traditional Organization

The traditional organization is based on concepts that are more than a hundred years old. Organized around departments, steered by management, working toward long-term plans, and operating based on a fixed playbook—the traditional organization is built to meet the needs of the industrial age, not the digital age.

 The goal was to drive down the price of production and achieve economies of scale through the principles of division, standardization, and control, ill suited objectives for the digital age.

The Modern Organization

The modern organization has been gaining prominence over the last several decades. Organized around teams, guided by experimentation, and operating through the lens of continuous improvement-  the modern organization is built to thrive in the face of constant uncertainty.

The goal is to maximize value of all stakeholders in the face of hyper-competition, crowded markets, fickle users, and shorter product lifecycles. The modern organization is based on the principles of market access, self-management, and continuous feedback.

scaling agility 

There is no magic, out-of-the-box solution that you can use to suddenly create agility within your organization. Scaling does not come from bloating your processes or from applying a more complicated methodology.

Scaling comes from taking inspiration from the agile-verse to enable team-work andsocial density atlarger organizational scales. The tangible advice to do this does not require following a prescriptive framework or dogmatic process.

knowing your audience 

From theaters to streaming, from file cabinets to the cloud, the sharing economy, the gig economy, digital everything—the world continues to go through waves of unprecedented change. The challenge of today is for organization to understand how to learn their way to the loyalty of an exact and exacting audience.

making better descisions

Succeeding in an age of constant change requires us to believe that most people want to work and that, under the right conditions, enjoy doing so.

We also need to believe that when teams with diverse skills and opinions are exposed to market feedback, they tend to make better decisions than their bosses, who possess increasingly limited context in the face of ever growing complexity.

uncovering your value network

The good news is that the new, people-centric way of working already exists in your organization at some level, else your organizations would not already be providing value in a complex world.

The problem is that your organization’s value network is working in spite of your management structure, not because of it.

 The work is to uncover your value network, remove the structural obstacles to it working, and make it official.