Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Thrive on Disruption

Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy

Survive & Thrive on Disruption

Jutta Eckstein and John Buck

This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/bossanova

This version was published on 2020-01-20

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© 2020 second edition. © 2018 first edition. Jutta Eckstein & John Buck. 38106 Braunschweig, Germany. All rights reserved.

ISBN for EPUB version: 978-3-947991-08-2

ISBN for MOBI version: 978-3-947991-09-9

Table of Contents

Release Notes to Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I Gathering the Band

1. Today’s Challenges

1.1 Challenges For Companies

Size

People

Digital Revolution

Collision of Values

Summary of Challenges for Companies

1.2 Challenges With Expanding Agile

Difficulties with Agile at Scale

Attempts at Company-wide Agility

Summary of Challenges with Expanding Agile

1.3 Summary of the Overall Challenge

2. Tuning the Instruments

2.1 Developments We Considered

2.2 Tools For Analysis

2.3 Considered But Didn’t Use

2.4 Converging Streams

Beyond Budgeting

Open Space

Sociocracy

Agile

2.5 Summary

II Improvising the Tune

3. Self-organization

3.1 Challenges for Self-Organization

3.2 Perspectives from the Different Streams

Beyond Budgeting

Open Space

Sociocracy

Agile

3.3 Additional Perspectives

3.4 The New Synthesis - Self-Organization

4. Transparency

4.1 Challenges with Implementing Transparency

4.2 Perspectives from the Different Streams

Beyond Budgeting

Open Space

Sociocracy

Agile

4.3 The New Synthesis - Transparency

5. Constant Customer Focus

5.1 Challenges with Establishing Company-wide Customer Focus

5.2 Perspectives from the Different Streams

Beyond Budgeting

Open Space

Sociocracy

Agile

5.3 The New Synthesis - Constant Customer Focus

6. Continuous Learning

6.1 Challenges for Continuous Learning

6.2 Perspectives from the Different Streams

Beyond Budgeting

Open Space

Sociocracy

Agile

6.3 Additional Perspectives

6.4 The New Synthesis - Continuous Learning

7. A New Tune

7.1 A New Organigram

Static View

Dynamic View

Discussion of cross-functional teams

7.2 Summary: The Four Values As Instruments in the Band

7.3 Final Thought

III Shall We Dance?

Gain a New Perspective

Start Experimenting

Diagnose Your Organization

Keep Reflecting

8. Strategy

8.1 Trust

Probe: Do we need standardized metrics?

Probe: Is trust cheaper?

8.2 Alignment

Common Aim

Collective Ownership

Feedback

8.3 Equivalence

Probe: What would happen if we emphasized transparency company-wide?

8.4 Experimentation

Probe: Can we be more scientific?

Probe: Can we really learn from failure?

8.5 Reflection

9. Structure

9.1 Cross-Functional Teams

Probe: Is cross-functionality actually useful?

9.2 Relationship with Customer

Probe: Can reflective meetings improve customer relations?

9.3 Feedback

Double-Linking

Multi-Stakeholder

Production not Support does the Leading

9.4 Reflection

10. Process

10.1 Meeting Techniques

Probe: Can group reflection improve problem solving?

Probe: How can we include customer feedback in each board meeting?

10.2 Understanding Your Customer

Probe: Can our customers learn from us and would that be attractive to them?

10.3 Production

Probe: Can you have a process that is in flow?

10.4 Feedback

Individual and Team Growth

Learning Strategies

10.5 Innovation

Probe: Can we organize transformative learning?

10.6 Reflection

11. Dance Around the Clock

11.1 Revisiting the Challenges from Chapter 1

Size

People

VUCA World and Digital Revolution

Collision of Values

Expanding Agile

More work to do

11.2 How to use the probes

11.3 Now Roll Your Own

11.4 Strengthening Fluency

Indicators of Fluency in Strengthening

IV Party Time

The Four Values

Connected Perspective

Societal Awareness

Summary

Bibliography

For Part I - Gathering the Band

For Part II - Improvising the Tune

For Part III - Shall We Dance?

For Part IV - Party Time

Appendix

Beyond Budgeting Principles

Open Space Principles

Sociocracy Principles

Agile Principles

About Jutta Eckstein

About John Buck

Other Books by the Authors

Notes

Release Notes to Second Edition

This second edition reflects such updates as: the new Agile Fluency Model, the renaming / rebranding of Statoil to Equinor, and some small additions to complexity. We also enhanced the description of Organizational Open Space and explain how it differs from Liberating Structures.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank our reviewers (in alphabetical order): Eric Abelen, Bjarte Bogsnes, Andrew Buck, Gerard Endenburg, Hendrik Esser, Marc Evers, Aimee Groth, Azy Groth, Michael Herman, Gergely Hodicska, Diana Larsen, Evan Leybourn, Yves Lin, Sandy Mamoli, Steve Morlidge, Christa Preisendanz, Annewiek Reijmer. We are really thankful for all these great and serious comments. We incorporated many of them.

Thanks to all of you, sharing your experiences in an insights box: Eric Abelen, Bjarte Bogsnes, Hendrik Esser, Michael Herman, Jez Humble, Anders Ivarsson, Todd Kromann, Tracy Kunkler, Diana Larsen, Yves Lin, Sandy Mamoli, Pieter van der Meché, Johanna Rothman, James Shore, and Karen Stephenson.

The members of the Supporting Agile Adoption initiative of the Agile Alliance made a great contribution to our work as both creative thinkers and as a sounding board. Thank you: Eric Abelen, Ray Arrell, Bjarte Bogsnes, Jens Coldewey, Esther Derby, Almir Drugovic, Hendrik Esser, Israel Gat, Don Gray, Michael Hamman, Jorgen Hesselberg, Anders Ivarsson, Bill Joiner, Boris Kneisel, Diana Larsen, Pieter van der Meché, Claudia Melo, Heidi Musser, Jaana Nyfjord, Ken Power, Michael Sahota, George Schlitz, James Shore, Dave Snowden, Rhea Stadick, Kati Vilkki. In this respect we also want to thank the Agile Alliance for supporting this initiative.

Special thanks to Katja Gloggengießer for all the great illustrations! Kudos to our early readers Christine Maßloch and Ramona Braddock Buck for the feedback and to Mario Lucero for inspiring us by his artwork.

Next we want also to thank all the participants who guided us with their questions and discussions in the right direction. Kudos to the workshop participants at: Agile 2016 and the ones from Agile India 2017: Vipin Agarwal, Syed Shabid Ali, Ravi P Ayyar, R Muni Yugandar Babu, Chandrakanth Biradar, Lalatendu Das, Sharath Desai, Manish Dureja, Thiyagarajan G G, Srikanth Ganugapati, Hari Iyer, Prasad Kabbur, Tarek Kaddoumi, Vijaya Kalluri, Satish Khot, Hari Kiran, Suneetha Konda, Guruprasad Krishnan, Seema Kumar, Ganesh T M, Sandy Mamoli, Shweta Mohindru, Uma Naidu, Sita Pun CSM, Divya Rajanna, Suman Ramaswamy, Mr. Shrey Razdan, Vasudevan A S, Balaji Sathram, Prashanth Shidlaghatta, Sunit Sinha, Surender Subramanian, Uday Tiwari, Mihir Ranjan Tripathy, Rajiv Tuli, Jatinder Verma, Chandar VR.

And finally we acknowledge our partners Ramona Braddock Buck and Nicolai Josuttis for their patience and ongoing support.

Introduction

Companies in general have a need for speed, face frequent market changes, deal with individual (and not general) needs of the customers (which demands individualizing products), struggle finding and keeping talent (which is even harder with the Millennials, who haven’t grown up in hierarchical structures), and find that the digital revolution means that there is hardly any place where software isn’t the disrupting factor independent of the industry’s original focus.

Many companies are successfully using some form of a process known as Agile development for information technology (IT). Agile has dramatically boosted software project completion rates while also allowing product decisions to be more nimble and accurate. Given this success, there have been attempts to apply agile concepts to parts of organizations that have nothing to do with software development, but only with limited success. They end up awkwardly using agile tools designed for software production for totally different kinds of work, e.g. by the board of directors using a daily standup meeting for synchronization instead of a traditional status meeting.

If we can all learn to apply agile-like concepts to our whole organization, we’ll achieve similar revolutionary benefits across the board rather than only in the engineering department. And, we mean all companies and organizations from a bank or manufacturer to charities supplying food to the homeless.

To extend agile-like concepts, it is important to have a holistic view of the company (or organization) not excluding any parts. The holistic view has to address two challenges: surviving (and driving) intense disruptions as a company and expanding agile methods to the whole company. As a recent survey by McKinsey discovered: Transforming companies to achieve organizational agility is in its early days, but yielding positive returns. (see McKinsey survey) Their survey further found that […] companies have higher aspirations for agility. Three-quarters of respondents say organizational agility is a top or top-three priority on their units’ agendas, and more transformations appear to be on the way.

Both of these facets, the current challenges for companies and the need for implementing Agile beyond IT, demand guidelines for implementing company-wide Agility.

After researching, we found lots of recent, independent developments that attempt to address these challenges.

We want to report what we found, and we admit that we felt overwhelmed by what is out there. However, we don’t want you to feel overwhelmed, too! So, we suggest that you read this book with the expectation that you’ll see a number of probably unfamiliar terms. Celebrate the newness without the ambition of mastering it all! You will definitely benefit from this book without juggling the terminology in your head.

At first, combining Agile and Sociocracy seemed really powerful, but the combination leaves gaps, e.g., in administrative support functions and in the people side: no consideration of passion. Beyond Budgeting and Open Space seem to be designed for addressing these gaps. In addition to these broad streams of development, we also found great insights in such specific tools and methods as Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Human Systems Dynamics, and Cynefin.

However, we also discovered in talking with various experts that if we asked them how to solve companies’ challenges (basically how to implement company-wide Agility), we got an answer from within that expert’s framework. For example,

A Beyond Budgeting expert might say, Stop fixing the budget annually, because otherwise you won’t have the flexibility to act on frequent market changes.

An Open Space expert might say, You need to make space for what you don’t know and can’t control, for totally new things to emerge. If people are invited to follow their passion, you will be able to implement company-wide Agility, otherwise people will just do what they are asked.

A Sociocracy expert might say, You first need to resolve the power structure, because as long as you have a hierarchy defined as top-down you will not become agile.

An Agile expert might say, You need to start inspecting and adapting by using regular retrospectives in order to react flexibly, otherwise you will neither be able to learn from the market nor from within your company.

All of these perspectives are true, but the perspective is always from within the discipline. If pressed, they might assert that with their framework they would meet the goals of the other streams. But even then, they would address it within their framework and lose the richness the other frameworks provide. What’s needed is the wider perspective that comes from synthesizing these frameworks. We’ve named the wider perspective BOSSA nova because it synthesizes the four streams: B = Beyond Budgeting, OS = Open Space, S = Sociocracy, A = Agile. As a phrase, BOSSA nova has different meanings:

Translated from Portuguese it means new wave or new trend. And we think the synthesis is in some way a new wave that companies need to ride to address today’s challenges.

It is an upbeat style of music, a fusion of samba and jazz. What we are proposing is also a fusion, a fusion of the different streams.

It is an intricate dance. Dancing always means adapting both to the music and your dance partner(s) as well as initiating new steps and even new music yourself. Dancers both react to their environment and affect it as their enthusiasm inspires the musicians and may even draw the audience into the dance. Although one person can initiate a BOSSA nova implementation, it will quickly become a team adaptation activity. And adaptation means you can’t follow a recipe. BOSSA nova is not prescriptive; it flows with the situation at hand.

This book provides brief summaries of each of the streams without going into detail. The bibliography and the appendix point to details available elsewhere. However, you can use the ideas in our book immediately even if you have had exposure to only one of the four streams of development and / or if you are simply open to experimentation.

We took an Adaptive Action approach (from Human Systems Dynamics, see Eoyang & Holladay) to writing the book which suggests asking the questions What, So What, and Now What? ¹

What: In Part I we look at the What, observations about the actual challenges companies are facing. These challenges are the need (the why) for new solutions. The Agile solution, rising with and partly causing the digital revolution has been a great success. However, attempts to solve the company-wide challenges by extending Agile practices to other kinds of work are proving inadequate. We sift through other strategies to find ones that could best address these company-wide challenges. We select four streams: Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile - the BOSSA nova. Finally, to provide a foundation for a composite solution, we interpret the values of the Agile Manifesto for a company-wide context (see AgileManifesto).

So What: This second Adaptive Action question asks for insights from observations. In Part II we address So What, with our insight that the different streams describe the same values. We combine them to gain a richer, more complete picture. We develop that picture by diving into each foundational company-wide value (self-organization, transparency, constant customer focus, and continuous learning) to see what each of the four streams has to say. We conclude Part II by suggesting a new kind of company organizational diagram and a new way of viewing cross-functional teams.

Now What: Part III focuses on the third question Now What. We explore how to implement BOSSA nova in a company. For practicality, we organize the insights of Part II into strategy, structure, and process. Noting that Cynefin recommends dealing with complexity by probing it, we suggest various probes that can be tried right away (see Cynefin). Part III concludes by verifying that the probes really address the challenges mentioned in Part I and by suggesting how to keep developing BOSSA nova in a fluent way. Part IV, the concluding part, looks at the place of companies in society.

As we move from section to section in the book, our tone changes. The changing tone reflects a kind a journey of insight, and we invite you to join us on the journey. The basic purpose of this book is to help you be open to exploring new ideas. The journey begins here!

If you feel so moved, please write a review about the book somewhere, for example, Leanpub, Amazon, Twitter, or your other favorite social media. Thank you so much!

I Gathering the Band

It is quite a paradox how western business leaders praise democracy as the obvious and undisputable model for how to organize a society effectively. When the same leaders turn to their own companies, then their beliefs and inspiration seem to come from a very different place, from the very opposite ideologies. – Bjarte Bogsnes, Implementing Beyond Budgeting

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. –Albert Einstein

This Part explores the Adaptive Action what question (see Eoyang & Holladay). What challenges are companies dealing with? What is the box we want to think outside of? What are the different attempts at addressing these challenges?

With the digital revolution, one notable stream of development, Agile, is pushing to expand beyond its core field - software development. We take a look at how Agile is addressing the challenges. We note that the attempts to make the Agile approach address a broad range of challenges, although well-intentioned, aren’t succeeding the way Agile succeeds in the software world.

We start searching. We list and examine many other tools and attempts. We sift through these different attempts, keep a few set aside others.

And finally we generalize the values of Agile to make them usable company-wide.

1. Today’s Challenges

Companies must become more nimble and flexible because they face a fundamental and growing challenge of complex, rapidly changing marketplaces, including digital disruption.

In companies’ information technology (IT) departments a very successful approach to solving this challenge is Agile, as initiated by the 2001 Agile Manifesto (see AgileManifesto). But, companies trying to use Agile company-wide, beyond IT, are having limited success.

Hence, this