Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
—Dave Snowden, management consultant and creator of award-winning framework for decision making
This framework sorts the issues facing leaders into five contexts defined by the nature of the relationship between cause and effect. Four of these—simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic—require leaders to diagnose situations and to act in contextually appropriate ways in order to lead continuous improvement opportunities, making situation-appropriate decisions at organizational level. David Snowden emphasizes the value of learning in achieving structure of an organizational change leadership and execution.
In sum, the book you are holding in your hands contains a description of a holistic approach to an organizational transformation in a flexible culture-driven and customer-centric way. This approach is complemented by ideas, best practices, anti-patterns, tools, and templates that will allow you to orchestrate and navigate the change, no matter what your role. If you bought this book, if you are investing your time in reading this chapter, this means that this book is for you.
Are all of the following practices and the overall framework applicable to your company and your situation today? No one can answer this question for you. It is up to you to explore, engage, and discover. This is a framework, not a methodology, because it defines the areas of importance, shares points of view, and offers food for thought supplemented by practical guidance. As you read through the book, you will engage in practical exercises that will challenge you to think how these concepts apply to your specific situation.
Tip
Once you complete a section of this book and get an exercise or a question to answer, approach these assignments as a brainstorming session within your company. If you are an employee, create a Community of Practice to share ideas in a book club on the topic, experience sharing session, or on your work wiki. If you are a manager, seek opinions from your team by facilitating a team-level discussion. If you are an organization leader, consider turning part of a leadership session into a brainstorming session or a workshop on this topic and solicit opinions throughout the organization. Bring in customers as early as possible in order to validate your assumptions and co-create the value.
Use these techniques to identify your pain points and establish priorities, whether you use contemporary Post-Its or a digital board for your distributed team.2
As you embark on this journey with me, I invite you to answer the question, which is fundamental in any coaching area, including product development and organizational coaching: What’s in it for me (WiiFM)? No one except for you will be able to answer this. I am convinced this framework is a perfect fit for you and I hope that this book will provide you with food for thought, and that if you choose to pursue this change effort, it will give you highly effective practical advice and a compass to follow throughout your organizational transformation.
How? Become an Entrepreneur.
This book describes an organizational transformation journey from several perspectives. What are the steps of the journey that you need to embark on as you transform your organization? Think of it as a map that will help you navigate the transformation journey. I will start by setting the course of your transformation and its success criteria since no journey will be successful unless you know the destination. The task is even more complex because your destination will change and you need to recognize these changes and adjust the course accordingly.
I describe the crew that you need to assemble on your ship in order to successfully navigate the waters. The crew has to be skilled, knowledgeable, highly collaborative, and cross-functional so that if one of them becomes unavailable, the others can carry the load.
I define the structure and the framework you will have to establish so that your ship sails steadily despite all the winds and challenges of the open ocean. Moreover, I describe the ways of continuously improving these processes and frameworks.
Finally, I define the equipment you need on board: what tools and hardware you need, how to build the knowledge to operate it, how to upgrade it on a regular and frequent basis, and most importantly, what comes next.
In sum, for each of the areas, you must define three ways of introducing and orchestrating the organizational change: people, process, and tools, described on a timeline of implementation. I will explain the product as a result of people applying tools and processes to achieve the desired result. I will also discuss the organizational ecosystem, from envisioning a new product or service initiative to implementing the minimum viable product (MVP) and further incremental delivery based on customer feedback and validated learning.
From an entrepreneurial mindset, the three sections of the book provide you with a complete map of such a journey.
Part 1: Five Lessons from Lean Startup Thinking
Start with the customer in mind.
Define and communicate the mission and vision.
Synthesize an integrative operating model.
Identify metrics that matter.
Pivot or persevere.
I describe each of the concepts and their practical implementation, and review examples of how each of these concepts applies at an enterprise level. I analyze successful implementations and discuss the danger of “doing” lean agile at the enterprise vs. applying values and principles to versatile and complex business environment.
Part 2: Five Techniques to Succeed
In the second section of this book, I bring these concepts and practical steps into a single framework. I offer you a framework, not a one-size-fits-all methodology. You will have a set of tools and techniques with well-defined values and best practices while retaining the flexibility of your implementation. You will be able to present these ideas to senior management for their buy-in as a single thought-through framework and you will be able orchestrate implementation at scale while avoiding common pitfalls. This section contains multiple templates that you can use in your organization to orchestrate experimentation, reduce risk, anticipate customer needs, and predict success of your products before you start building them.
Define the mission.
Identify customer personas.
prototype MVP and program training
Run experiments with customers to validate your hypotheses.
Pivot or persevere in a build-measure-learn cycle.
What’s unique about section two is that it structured around a timeline approach. I identify the emphasis of the various elements of the framework on a continuum: the first 30 days, the first 90 days, and the first 12 months. I describe them from the view point of you–the reader, the future strategist and implementer. I found that describing complex ideas using a day-in-the-life method provides simple guidelines for a successful rollout.
The goal is to enable your transformation to be a success. I provide step-by-step instructions to ensure initial success, communicate it broadly, secure incremental funding, and establish sustainable culture change via delegating decision-making and promoting communities of practice.
Part 3: Lessons in Building a Corporate Startup
Once you master the concepts in a simple and pragmatic way, you will start building your lean enterprise ecosystem. The goal is to achieve customer satisfaction and co-create products with them and for them. In this section, I share three mini-stories of successes and failures of enterprise lean agile transformations. There are numerous successes and multiple war stories in the journeys to agility. None of these transformations is a complete success or an absolute failure, yet some achieved their original goals while others struggled or failed.
I subtitled section 3 as “the muddy waters of reality” since in truth things never turn out as planned. With the best intentions, transformations change, impact, and are impacted by organizational realities. My objective in this section is to share the success and failure stories where best intentions meet reality and what can we learn from them.
Achieve and retain leadership support.
Consider the corporate culture.
Evangelize across the enterprise.
While written as fiction and simplified for the purpose of this book, each of the stories shares pragmatic advice and experience from the field of a lean agile transformation, which you will be able to immediately apply to the area of your responsibility, to your company or business, and even to your family. Each journey is told through the eyes of a persona who is part of this transformation and each highlights one of the “must-haves” of a lean startup corporation. You’ll learn from their experience so that you can avoid the mistakes they made and build on the successes they achieved. I discuss scaling approaches and define non-negotiables that are required to establish a cultural change.
Sustaining Your Transformation and Making It Ongoing
What now? Your immediate next steps
Why lean startup is here to stay
Within each of these topics, I suggest different ways of testing the sustainability of your lean agile implementation and I discuss non-negotiables of organizational change that allow you to feel a “bad smell” or anti-patterns, which indicate that your organization is merely following the lean agile implementation steps rather than living the values of continuous improvement, customer-centricity, and validated learning. I discuss multiple venues of sustaining this new mindset in a mature adaptive change-driven lean organization.
How Is This Information Presented?
Treat this book as a textbook. Throughout the book, I provide templates and exercises that enable you to execute on your organizational transformation goals from day one. If you would like to learn more about each specific topic, I suggest references. The only limit to the level of change you are now able to bring to your organization is defined by how open-minded you are in implementing new approaches, trying new ways of working, collaborating with your customers, motivating your teams, and delivering innovative products and services that lead to business success and employee and customer satisfaction.
Book Conventions
Meaning | |
|---|---|
Tip | A helpful idea to help you promote and respond to the organizational change. I encourage you to use these ideas in internal workshops to promote the change in your organization. I will share specific examples of turning these ideas into action |
Best Practice | The best practices are non-negotiables of your enterprise transformation. If there is anything to implement correctly, these are the concepts to follow and the steps to implement. They can be directly translated into action items for your enterprise transformation |
Anti-Pattern | Beware of these common anti-patterns. If you feel that your transformation efforts go this route, pivot as soon as you can. While providing the anti-patterns, I share mitigation techniques and approaches that will allow you to get back on track. |
If you have any questions along the way, feel free to contact me via my LinkedIn page or via my websites. I am excited to support you on your journey!