Johnny Ordóñez, Agile Coach
For the company to evolve, we have to consider cultural factors, how these factors support people, how people relate to each other and learn, and how knowledge flows and evolves within the company.
Tools are important, but they must be an intelligent response to a correctly identified problem. Putting all your hopes in software tools as the remedy to your problems usually distracts people from what really matters—the cultural and human aspects—and keeps them from finding a sustainable solution.
The seduction of tools takes place for several reasons. It’s often due to industrial-era mindsets that apply excessive control in areas where high creativity is needed, or in areas where people are already accustomed to solving problems with software.
There’s no doubt that it’s much easier to outsource a service or carry out a software update than to change mental processes. In my experience, except for the problems derived from limited resources (or even a complete lack of resources), most barriers are generally the result of human factors:
Individual habits when interacting with others.
How people process ideas or exchange knowledge.
How individuals learn or assimilate learning.
How they react to unexpected situations.
How they accept feedback and resolve conflict.
As you can see, being a great facilitator during a business transformation requires knowledge about psychology, neuroscience, business rules, and organizational patterns. Therefore, the approaches you use should take into consideration both organizational complexity and the human condition.
“As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle . . .
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, ‘Well, we followed the process.’ A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing.”
Letter to shareholders written by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.
At this point you’re probably wondering how you can finally achieve healthier habits during your business transformation. This is exactly what Enterprise Social Systems will help you with.
The First Steps in Enterprise Social Systems
Years ago, I was observing the operation of a small company and trying to understand what it had in common with larger corporations. I began to suspect that, regardless of the culture of the country or the size of the organization, employees might find it hard to support transformation initiatives.
By that time, I had witnessed several business transformations. One of the factors that caught my attention was people’s resistance when attempts were made to change their habits or when they were encouraged to evolve their mindset.
I asked myself whether I could offer a set of simple concepts to help individuals from any area of a company change how they think. I reflected and established two initial rules to help me reach my goal:
Techniques should not be intrusive.People should be able to use new concepts, different habits, or ways of reasoning without feeling intimidated.
Any individual in the organization must be able to use the new guidelines.No specialization would be required to understand the foundations of sustainable change.
It was then that I began to experiment with organizational patterns, reframing techniques, System Thinking concepts, psychology, and neuroscience. Above all, I observed behaviors within Agile and digital companies.
Little by little, I shaped what is now Enterprise Social Systems:
An approach that makes it possible to observe the dynamics and functioning of a company from a different point of view.
Five main components so that anyone, with or without specific abilities in change, can reason differently when facing a problem.
Two change frameworks (ELSA and DeLTA) to facilitate the viralization of new ideas and habits.
Enterprise Social Systems was designed with digital companies in mind. Its main objective is to help leaders, change agents, and coaches to create new frameworks, methodologies, or processes that accelerate change in the company, allowing it to turn exponential.
To achieve this, Enterprise Social Systems employs techniques, organizational patterns, and concepts derived from psychology and neuroscience. With Enterprise Social Systems, five components are used to add new ideas and employ reasoning processes during the creation or execution of a change or improvement plan.
Enterprise Social Systems also helps teams and executives find innovative solutions and discover new practices to expand processes. Those who use Enterprise Social Systems can do the following:
Plan a change in any type of company, regardless of whether traditional or modern ways of thinking are used.
Create new and powerful processes, frameworks, or methodologies.
Adapt existing practices or frameworks in software department so they can be used throughout the company.
Use reframing techniques to analyze ideas from different perspectives and thus create powerful plans.
Enterprise Social Systems can also be used by any person in the company to improve what is being done, even if the person has no experience in organizational change.
Keep in mind that Enterprise Social Systems is not a scientific theory. I have great appreciation for those who dedicate their lives to the discovery of theories of this type, but my goal is to contribute to those who live every day with the complexity of the organization and urgently need better solutions.
The Four Layers of the Organization
In Enterprise Social Systems, a company is seen as a system based on four interdependent pillars:
Social Systems
Mindset
Formal Organization
Value Creation
Each of these pillars has specific characteristics and is altered by different situations. From the theoretical point of view, the main hypothesis of Enterprise Social Systems is that actions that increase the flow of relevant knowledge through these four pillars will have a positive impact on the company. But for this, you must first understand how the organization is viewed through the lens of Enterprise Social Systems.
Imagine that you want to take two weeks of vacation to visit cities you have never even heard of. You will first try to obtain a map to learn the location and proximity of each city. Then you will investigate its geography, the weather conditions, the most convenient ways to get from one place to another, the culture, and activities you could engage in during your visit. As you can see, the map not only shows the geographic location, but it also serves to organize your ideas so you know what to take and so you have an initial plan.
You’ll agree that a change initiative is much less tangible than a trip, and sometimes you don’t even know where to start. Enterprise Social Systems gives you a map to discover and sort those initial ideas, connect them, and create an initial change plan.
FIGURE 7.1: The heart of Enterprise Social Systems and the four pillars of the organization
This map or conceptual model represents the dynamics of the organization and shows how they relate to each other. The four pillars are interconnected and are represented by concentric circles, with the center having the greatest impact on the rest. Its objective is to help build better strategies for change.
Social Systems
In the center of the map you find social systems, which represents the forms of communication, interaction, and relationships betwe
en people. These include their habits and micro-habits, the informal rules on how they make their work visible, and organizational patterns that you learned in the previous chapters. Any change in this pillar will strongly affect the rest, which is why it’s found at the center of the organization.
These are external factors that can strongly impact social systems:
A Sense of Urgency
Urgency puts pressure on people and impacts their habits, behaviors, how they connect, and their mental state. For example, a deadline to deliver a product could make employees who had never communicated fluidly put aside their differences and begin to interact to achieve a common goal.
Number of People in the Organization
The size of the organization has repercussions on how people socialize. A company formed by a few people will have different habits from a corporation with thousands of employees. In a small organization, you are more likely to feel comfortable from day one and to act and speak freely with those around you. But in a corporation where there are hundreds of people around you, you will probably communicate more indirectly, through email or chat, and spend the first few days waiting for a superior to tell you what to do.
Organizational Health
These are the habits that directly impact emotional states and indirectly impact the results of the company. If people feel safe, they will communicate, move, and express themselves more openly. This increases shared knowledge and helps ideas evolve more quickly. If, on the other hand, a person feels insecure, communication will diminish, which may affect the company’s learning, productivity, and innovation. In addition, if people multitask or have many pending tasks, this will also affect their emotional state, which in turn will affect results and the product’s quality.
Remember that social systems are at the center of any organization, because any change here will strongly affect the other pillars.
Mindset
The circle that surrounds social systems is called mindset, and this represents the beliefs, values, and abstract ideas that make up the company’s culture. When a consultant specializing in Agile or Lean mindsets teaches a new set of values or principles, the consultant is working directly in this area (mindset) and indirectly in the other areas.
This pillar represents a mixture of the company’s culture, the values incorporated over the years, and the company’s preferred reasoning style for solving problems.
Formal Organization
The third circle refers to formal organization. This is where the structures that sustain work styles are “allocated” and give coherence to the information. In this area we find the following:
Formal Structures
Formal structures hold the relationships of power and responsibilities within the company. If you ask someone to draw this area, they will usually draw an organizational chart.
Information Systems
These are the processes, areas, and tools that shape information coming from other layers of the organization or from outside the company. Their main goal is for information to make sense for people and be compatible with their beliefs and values. Artificial intelligence generally interacts with this pillar.
Control Systems
Control systems represent the processes, areas, and tools used to review the activities and outcomes produced by employees, resources, and time. The goal of control systems is to ensure that organizational structures can be maintained and function correctly, and that they do not change abruptly.
More-traditional companies, those that follow linear processes, mainly see a business change as an alteration to this layer. The objective of the formal organization layer is to ensure that information makes sense and to sustain and protect the company’s structures so they do not change abruptly.
Value Creation
The external pillar focuses on the creation of value for the client and is where frameworks such as Scrum and DSDM, SAFe, Scrum at Scale, LeSS, etc. reside. Value creation is directly affected by the methodology, framework, or definition of business value. It is indirectly affected by changes in the markets or in the other pillars.
When you create a change initiative that contains small plans to impact each of these pillars, we say that you have created a powerful plan. This is the secret for having your transformation become exponential.
FIGURE 7.2: The four components of a powerful plan in Enterprise Social Systems
Remember that the conceptual model of an organization proposed by Enterprise Social Systems does not put artificial barriers between the company’s dynamics. Instead, it shows what is needed to make a big impact.
Consider this question: Upon which pillars do you put the most emphasis when creating a change plan?
The Five Components of Enterprise Social Systems
In human activities, there are usually preferred forms of reasoning that guide people during the resolution of problems. These preferred forms of reasoning allow individuals to visualize how they will solve a problem by moving from an initial state A to a desired state B. The space between points A and B is the challenge time. This is when individuals invest their effort, trying to find solutions to a problem, establish processes and techniques, and create metrics to verify whether they are going in the right direction.
FIGURE 7.3: During the challenge time, people invest their energy to solve a problem.
During the challenge time, traditional companies often use forms of reasoning based on previous experiences, or they use structures and processes that are already in use in other areas of the organization. While this may work when dealing with well-known and relatively stable markets, we need to use different techniques when there is high variability and when creative solutions are required.
During the challenge time, Enterprise Social Systems offers five components so different forms of reasoning can be employed to maximize creativity and the impact of the change.
New ideas and mental processes change conclusions and help people establish new neuronal connections that will serve them well in future situations. Thinking differently makes it possible to develop new questions and points of view—and to move in a different direction. The following are the five components that help people during the challenge time:
Enterprise Blocking Collaboration
Enterprise Social Density
Enterprise Social Visibility
Complexity and Complication pattern
Permission-to-learn pattern
At the end of this chapter, you will learn how to use these five components to help others to create new plans or modify existing ones and to change processes, tactics, or habits. But first, let me explain what they are about.
Enterprise Blocking Collaboration
Many consultants focus on trying to increase collaboration between the company’s employees. But this can be a trap. At the beginning of the book, I mentioned that a consulting firm for which I worked had a clause in its contract “suggesting” that we collaborate with another employee if requested by that employee . . . even if the tasks were of lower priority than what I was doing.
There are situations where cooperating benefits everyone, and I personally do so every day. But interrupting a task without taking into account the type of collaboration established between people can lead to less-than-positive consequences.
Imagine that your department improves its internal processes, but such improvement has a negative effect on the rest of the company. This is called local optimization. Would you consider this collaboration? Such situations are common and can be positive—as long as they are well planned, they are temporary, and the negative effects are limited.
Suppose someone asks you a favor when you are working at over 80% of your personal capacity and heavily multitasking. You accept the request and begin working on the new tasks. Obviously, you’ll be under more pressure and your pending work will be delayed, which in turn will
affect timeframes in the rest of the company. Would you call this collaboration?
Again, this type of behavior works better if the company has clear priorities for business value.
In the above case, it would mean that the request has a clear business priority and can be carried out without having to multitask. Unfortunately, in many of the companies I visit, people take on new activities that entail more multitasking. This increases the possibility of errors, complexity, and the cost of the product or service. Such a situation requires more energy and will usually reduce motivation. As you can see, there are two distinct types of collaboration:
Positive collaboration
Blocking collaboration
Positive collaboration favorably impacts the objectives of the organization, while blocking collaboration has negative effects on the workflow. It is healthy for people to understand, detect, and quantify the different types of collaboration.
Leading Exponential Change Page 21