Inspire, develop, and guide a winning organization.
Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
Explore our extensive library of experience reports.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
Weekly discussion around “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge” with author John Willis.
VIRTUAL — Helping leaders succeed and organizations thrive (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit).
Venue: Fontainebleau — Helping leaders succeed and organizations thrive (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit).
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Is slowify a real word?
Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
May 26, 2022
In his book A Radical Enterprise: Pioneering the Future of High-Performing Organizations, Matt K. Parker profiles successful companies that have changed their structure from hierarchical to self-managing. Maybe you’ve read the book or maybe you’ve heard conversations about it on Twitter or at conferences, and you’re left wondering: How do I make this happen in my own organization?
In his presentation from DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – Europe 2022, Matt tackles this exact question, and we’re going to break it down for you here.
But first, some background on the book. In A Radical Enterprise, Matt profiles companies from around the world like Haier, Morning Star, W. L. Gore, and Buurtzorg, that all follow his ethos for the book:
The fastest growing and most competitive organizations in the world have no bureaucracies, no bosses, and no bullshit.
All of these organizations are out-competing other organizations on all kinds of different financial metrics: increase in market share, business results and customer satisfaction, systemic innovation, employee loyalty, business model, sustainability, willingness to recommend, and so forth. And they are doing it within a radically collaborative framework.
There are other terms for this type of structure, like “self-managing,” but Matt uses “radically collaborative” because it speaks to the experience of the workers in these companies. It is grounded in intrinsic motivation. People in these organizations are doing what they actually enjoy doing, day in and day out, with the freedom to make commitments to their peers. There’s a total lack of coercion in these environments, which feels fundamentally different from more traditional organizations. In other words: radical.
In his book, Matt outlines the four imperatives that seem to underlie the success of these organizations:
Once you understand these imperatives and you are ready to start applying them to your company, Matt recommends four ways to get started with radical collaboration.
This technique comes straight from the experience of one of the companies profiled in the book, Tim Group. They began their journey to radical collaboration not with an announcement from on high, but with research. They formed a group to research other organizations that were pioneering the future of work. They were careful to emphasize that this “management” group was not just for managers, and was focused on “management” in the sense of how an organization is governed—something everyone had a vested interest in learning about.
The group functioned a bit like a book club. At first, they would read case studies and guidance papers on their own and then come together to discuss the things they’d learned and observed. However, as things developed, they decided to make small experiments to see if these theories could work in practice within their own organization.
They began small: What if they gave individuals the power to decide when they can take vacations? If everyone is on a team together, and they care about their teams, they won’t let their teams fail, and they will naturally be able to work vacation time out together. They were able to implement this small change very easily, and it inspired them to go bigger, eventually transforming the whole organization. And it all started with a little study group.
Even if your organization as a whole is very non-collaborative, very top-down, and bureaucratic, there are still usually opportunities where you can run a collaborative meeting as opposed to an “adjudicated” meeting.
In a traditional meeting, you often have someone assigning tasks, others pushing back, and the final decision ultimately being made by whoever is the loudest in the room. In a collaborative meeting, you create an atmosphere where anyone can propose an idea, and that idea has equal weight with any other and can be discussed and analyzed. The focus shifts from whatever goals individuals bring into the meeting, to a shared goal of coming up with ideas and insights based on shared perspectives.
In order to run a collaborative meeting, Matt offers three easy steps:
You can read more about this process in Matt’s blog post on the subject!
Just going through these steps can change the atmosphere in the room, and inspire change and growth. They are simple steps, but they can feel like a breath of fresh air, especially if your previous environment was very non-collaborative.
In large enterprises, it can be easy to lose sight of what your role actually is, aside from just your job title. What does it mean for your role to succeed, what can you make decisions about, and what should you be held accountable for?
These may seem like obvious questions with easy answers, but they can be more complicated than they seem. Without role clarity, it’s very easy for people to have conflicting ideas of their responsibilities or their authority in relation to each other. When you dig into role clarity, you can ease these tensions and make sure people are working in complementary roles, instead of conflicting ones.
This last one flows pretty naturally from role clarity. Once you know what you are responsible for, and what you have authority over, it’s time for implementation. In order to achieve outcomes, groups have to be united in their goals and have ownership over their process.
To understand this, imagine a medium to large size software development organization. It’s important for a group of product managers, designers, and engineers to know what it is they’re trying to achieve and to have a domain of authority around how they’re going to achieve it. They can be given a goal, say, to increase shopping cart conversion by 5%, and then they get to figure out how to make that happen. They get to own the backlog for how they get there; they get to design how it looks and how users experience it; they get to own the code for how it works under the hood. That is their domain of authority.
In this size company, there could be an infinite number of possible outcomes at any given time, so you also have to decide which ones are the most important. There are many ways to do this, but one way is with portfolio managers, who are responsible for owning a backlog of outcomes. They may be responsible for increasing shopping cart conversion, reducing manual production attribution toil, and increasing product recommendation usage. You may have a number of portfolio managers in an organization that each own a backlog of high-level outcomes, each of which is mapped out to an outcome team. In this way, you create liberating constraints that allow for complementary, instead of overlapping, domains of authority.
In this scenario, portfolio managers are prioritizing the most important outcomes, but the teams get to decide how the actual work is handled on a day-to-day basis.
As this concept goes higher and higher up the organization, you create a structure that is concentric, instead of hierarchical. Spheres of support within an organization. A CTO might set annual objectives, which will influence how portfolio managers think about their own prioritization. And so on and so forth.
—
Of course, these steps may help you on your transformation journey, but there is no one “right way” to create a radically collaborative organization. There is no silver bullet that will bring down a traditional, hierarchical structure and leave a collaborative one in its wake. All the companies that Matt profiled shared one thing: they knew that there was no substitute for critical thinking. They knew they had to work things out themselves, resolve tensions themselves, and come up with radically collaborative ways of working together, using their own prior knowledge and preexisting culture.
A lot of thought has to go into radical collaboration, but hopefully, this post (and Matt’s book) will help set you on the right path.
Trusted by technology leaders worldwide. Since publishing The Phoenix Project in 2013, and launching DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014, we’ve been assembling guidance from industry experts and top practitioners.
Welcome to the twelfth installment of IT Revolution’s series based on the book Investments…
In today's fast-paced and ever-evolving business landscape, organizations are constantly undergoing transformations to stay…
Holy cow, Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit Europe Virtual is happening next week, and I’m…
Welcome to the eleventh installment of IT Revolution’s series based on the book Investments…