🌿🧭🌳 OD42: Unintended consequences of "Agile at scale" ∙ The Team Chemistry framework

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1. OD Goodies

Curated starters for this week’s edition:

• EnterpriseDesign.io: the Enterprise Design community will hold their annual Intersection conference in about 2 weeks. Really excited about this learning opportunity 💡 You can find lots of videos from previous editions here.

• MasterClass: after enjoying Bob Iger’s masterclass on business strategy and leadership, we rediscovered this diagram created by Walt Disney back in 1967.

  

• #orgtalks: A new series of gatherings with newsletter readers across 9 timezones took place yesterday, discussing challenges like enabling a cohesive culture in a post-merger, distributed organization (tough one!) and scaling flat organizations (rich conversation). See details about #orgtalks in OD34 and sign up for the next gatherings on 25 NOV here.

• LinkedIn: Beautiful piece about OD as humanity-in-action by Bill Brendel. Thanks Alexandru Popa-Antohi for kindly sharing this with us.

  Awareness of Self & System

  “Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.”
  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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2. Unintended consequences of "Agile at scale"

In our work of serving client organizations, we often encounter the aspiration of increasing organizational agility, so this is a space we’re closely watching.

While doing some extra research for a talk today titled “Forms without substance: what do we actually understand from Agile?” hosted by an internal community of practice, found this insightful piece by Nicolay Worren which references a detailed case study of a large telecom company that implemented Agile methods.

The authors interviewed more than 100 people at the team level, middle management, and top management levels, and also analyzed internal document and archival records.

Maria Carmela Annosi, Nicolai Foss, and Antonella Martini have published their findings in California Management Review and the opening paragraph is intriguing:

(…) widespread adoption of Agile in large-scale settings presents issues that threaten organizational efficiency.

The 6 pitfalls - the unintended consequences that they highlight - are:

1. Learning and ideation behaviors are not legitimized by the team. The author’s data pointed to a divergence between the goals set by managers and the professional norms developed by team members. As a result, team members did not devote time to generate new product improvement ideas or reserve time to explore the software functionalities embedded in the software systems. Thus, they did not gain a better understanding of the required changes before implementation.
   

2. Organizational Structure Drifting toward the Prioritization of Urgent Issues above Learning and Innovation. Team members were under constant pressure to deliver and the presence of short feedback loops within each work iteration increased the time pressure and the debilitating effects of stress that accompanied it. These processes often exerted pressure on the teams and reinforced counterproductive behaviors.
   

3. Reduced Knowledge Accumulation. Team members reported that the cross-functional and cross-product nature of Agile team activities dragged them into unrelated activities. As a result, they forgot knowledge related to their specific domain. Attempts to learn and absorb the information needed to implement new technologies taxed team members’ absorptive capacities.
   

4. Reduced Knowledge Integration. Given the absence of organizational routines to incorporate new knowledge into daily operations and to facilitate access to the constantly evolving organizational knowledge, team members found it difficult to acquire new knowledge.
   

5. Loss of Know-Who Knowledge. As a result of the decentralized development of knowledge within teams, individuals found it difficult to easily identify who might have the knowledge they needed. Thus, no role was established to break up pre-existing norms, restructure individual behaviors, deal with teams’ isolation, systematically help team members develop innovative ideas, or determine contingency rewards that would motivate team members to more actively clarify problems and propose novel solutions.
   

6. Lack of Individual Self-Efficacy. Individual team members perceived a lower level of personal efficacy related to generating new product ideas, developing high-quality software products, and executing changes in the program code. They showed cognitive inertia in terms of learning and ideation—becoming passive and relying on others to solve problems.

Nicolay shares some additional points, from an org. design perspective.
We invite you to read the whole piece here:

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3. The Team Chemistry framework

On our quest to create and share accessible knowledge to help people address the complex challenges they (will) face, we’ve recently created and successfully tested a team effectiveness framework and a Do-It-Yourself guide to help you and your team have better conversations about you, as a team.

We think these talks will help you evolve as a team, discovering new insights from the diversity of opinions and gaining clarity and progress through the decisions and actions taken together.

The Team Chemistry framework consists of 6 enablers x 6 elements that might be relevant to teams in various contexts.

The 9-pages DIY guide includes some facilitation tips for the team gatherings + questions associated to each element of the Team Chemistry framework to spark the conversations.

We’re making the guide freely available - you can download it here:

We invite you to explore the guide, give it a go if you find it useful and share it with others if it might help them. If it helps you, we’d love to hear from you about how it worked for your team.

How could we evolve this framework and guide to help more teams worldwide have better conversations about themselves?

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Thanks for reading

We hope you found something useful in this edition!
Please feel free to forward the newsletter to any colleagues who you think might benefit from these resources.

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This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the Sense & Change team.

We're using systems thinking, behavioral science and mental models to advise organizations to become more effective.