Leading Exponential Change
Page 22
Enterprise Blocking Collaboration refers to the cooperation between people or teams whose behaviors have a negative impact on the organization.
The executives of a company I visited asked me to help them find alternatives to reduce their fixed costs. They were concerned because they invested a million dollars every month in the salaries of their SAP department. The management team decided to make some employees redundant, thinking it was the only viable solution.
The managers wanted to ensure that no one had idle time, and they constantly checked that people were working at 100% capacity. You could often hear one of the middle-managers exclaiming, “I do not want to see anyone working at less than 100%!”
After speaking with the employees and analyzing the situation, I discovered that the levels of Enterprise Blocking Collaboration were really high: employees interrupted their work several times a day to perform unrelated tasks, in many cases, of lower priority. They also had high and variable workloads, already at nearly 95% of their capacity. Because of this, it was difficult for them to cooperate with others or to add additional work discovered during development.
Although employees working at 95% of capacity was considered positive by management, it created a vicious circle that led to less and less business value being delivered to customers.
Taking into account the multitasking, work capacity, and quality of the product, it allowed me to quantify the average cost of the employees’ unhealthy habits. The analysis of the data showed that at least $0.78 of every dollar invested in the SAP department was lost in activities that did not provide business value for the client—all as a result of high Enterprise Blocking Collaboration. A more exhaustive investigation showed that such a situation did not occur only in that department, but throughout the organization.
I suggested adding explicit working agreements to change how work was done and set a nonnegotiable definition of minimum product quality.
I also made sure that every new procedure was supported by micro-habits. To achieve this, they had to modify processes, responsibilities, and expectations. We also had to set guidelines for people to feel safe.
Finally, we moved everyone belonging to the same value stream to the same physical location. This allowed them to achieve a more constant flow of work and knowledge.
FIGURE 7.4: Initial ideas for measuring Enterprise Blocking Collaboration
It helps to have one or more individuals dedicated to explaining Enterprise Blocking Collaboration and removing the initial barriers produced by Enterprise Blocking Collaboration.
Below is a list of behaviors that can help you detect whether Enterprise Blocking Collaboration exists in your company:
Employees take on new tasks even when they are already above 80% of their personal capacity or help is requested from individuals with limited availability.
The answer to a new problem in the company is usually an increase of rules, bureaucracy, or a local optimization.
People are stuck in an activity for more than fifteen minutes without asking for help from their teammates.
Teams develop a product or service together and their communication is strictly by email.
Cases of multitasking are widespread.
Several reports are prepared for management, many of which would be unnecessary if replaced with face-to-face conversations.
There is no clear definition of minimum, nonnegotiable quality of the product.
There are teams where one or more of the key members are located in another office or geographical location.
There is no clear definition of business value or there are contradictory definitions.
People have high levels of psychological ownership of what they produce, and yet the product or service needs to be improved frequently.
Reward and recognition systems don’t explicitly focus on supporting healthy collaboration habits.
Software development teams don’t use tools for streamlining collaborative editing and debugging in real-time during development (Visual Studio Live Share, Codeshare, AtomPair, JustInMind, etc.).
Keep in mind that at times it isn’t easy to identify if it’s one type of collaboration or another.
Enterprise Social Density
In the traditional organization, many decisions and communications reach teams from the highest levels of the company. These groups, in turn, copy this form of communication, also relying on hierarchies to distribute knowledge.
But digital products require a high speed of adaptation, because everything can change from one moment to the next, which is why these more-traditional ways of managing people, information, and shared knowledge are generally not the most appropriate.
When was the last time you had a fluid conversation or acquired knowledge from someone inside the company? During a casual conversation, perhaps a colleague explained how to perform a task better, or perhaps you had coffee with someone you trust and you learned something relevant that weeks later would be formally announced by the company.
Formal communications flow through hierarchical structures, which generally employ formal steps, often require corporate decisions, and have little to do with how value is actually created for the client. Therefore, information travels much slower than when it is transmitted through informal or casual connections to people trusted by the sender of the information.
The more speed and the greater the amount of relevant information that flows through the networks of employees (or nodes), the higher the capacity for adaptation and the better the ability to make decisions in the company will be.
In the same manner, the more balanced or symmetrical the knowledge among the members of a group is, the better their results will be.
This is expressed in the economic theory of symmetric information, and you should take this into account when designing any process or framework.
Are you familiar with the economic Asymmetric Information Theory? It was proposed by the winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2001: George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz. The theory explains how information imbalances between people can lead to inefficient results in the markets and in the company. Learn more about it at
en.innova1st.com/71B
Communication, especially when transmitted informally, is a crucial component in the culture of exponential companies, and it is the basis for change that can multiply without limits throughout the organization. But for informal communication to be effective, the company must have a culture that supports these connections as part of its day-to-day life.
This informal flow of relevant knowledge among the employees of a company is called Enterprise Social Density, and it’s an essential concept in accelerating a business change.
Enterprise Social Density can decrease because of psychological or logistical factors, or if the company employs rigid structures (processes and hierarchies) that do not allow employees to connect informally.
If the members of a team do not trust each other, they will communicate their experiences, opinions and knowledge through indirect means such as emails and virtual chats. This increases inefficiency and decreases business results.
This type of habit increases bureaucracy, dysfunction, and the final cost of the product, and decreases the number of experiments that the organization makes each month.
Enterprise Social Density consists of the flow of relevant, honest, informal, and effective information in an environment where people feel safe.
In general, a team that is geographically distant has a lower social density than a team whose members are all in the same location. Scrum Inc. states that there is a fall in social density even when people are over 30 meters (98 feet) away from each other.
There are cases when groups communicate only under extreme necessity, or where different cultures exist within the same company. This obviously affects the way knowledge flows.
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sp; I’ve witnessed teams that had to collaborate but were located in different buildings. When the managers and I looked into the reasons for this distance, I discovered that it was done with the explicit purpose of differentiating status between the teams.
Here’s another example. At a corporation I helped, I decided to stop using email to get people used to talking to me in person when they needed help. At first, it took them by surprise, but eventually many copied the habit. This increased the flow of information and relevant knowledge throughout the organization.
If you want to delay a solution, your best option is to send an email or use an indirect means of communication instead of talking to the person directly.
Low social density can also occur when knowledge is scarce. In these cases, it’s highly recommended that you increase employee rotation and that employees work in pairs so that the knowledge flows as uniformly as possible.
Some companies bombard employees with information, thinking this will help them make better decisions. It’s common to hear people complaining about having to go to meetings over and over without understanding why. Enterprise Social Systems clearly defines “necessary information” in a company as information that is relevant to people; whereas “relevant information” is anything that gives a competitive advantage to people belonging to the same value stream.
It’s essential that any practice, framework, technique, or new change initiative increases the social density among all people who create the product or service (value stream). For that to happen, you have to make it easy for everyone to use direct forms of communication as often as possible. You also need to reduce the levels of bureaucracy.
You can use the CD3 technique (Cost of Delay Divided by Duration) to calculate the economic impact of delays or impasses caused by a low social density in your company. Learn more about CD3 at en.innova1st.com/72C
You should also pay attention to how people are managed. In the most-traditional companies, decisions are made hierarchically (top-down); but creating a product or service today requires having employees from different areas and roles. Using strong hierarchical structures doesn´t support good business value creation.
FIGURE 7.5: Change the way people are managed first to match the shape of the value stream. Then increase the ESD in the value stream.
To ensure a continuous flow of knowledge, decisions, and learning, it’s essential that individuals can self-organize around their tasks and that obstacles blocking work are removed daily.
To increase the flow of knowledge, your company could define the minimum work unit as two people, indicating that there can never be a single person performing a task and that there should always be at least two.
Studies indicate that when you start working in pairs on activities that demand creativity, productivity falls during the first two months. The data also shows that growth is consolidated with a significant increase in the following months (The economics of software development by pair programmers, Hakan Erdogmus and Canada Laurie Williams).
Because collaboration within a team is usually continuous, but discontinuous between teams, it will often be necessary to create explicit between-team working agreements that clearly indicate how teams should collaborate and share knowledge.
Having implemented this paired-up working style, you will gradually see higher-quality results and more productivity compared to those working individually.
FIGURE 7.6: Pairing 24/7 means during working hours
Rotating people is also essential, allowing everyone to balance knowledge and appreciate different points of view. People may initially feel uncomfortable with this type of arrangement. For the new forms of work to be incorporated into the culture of the company, support from leadership is needed. My recommendation is that you create a metric to show how an increase in social density can impact business value and improve organizational health.
FIGURE 7.7: Social density metrics should account for the habits to be improved
The following are ten recommendations to support the increase of Enterprise Social Density. You should consider them when creating or implementing a process or framework:
Everyone in the value stream must be able to clearly identify the processes, activities, and individuals involved.
Face-to-face communication is used as much as possible.
Employees are given direct access to other employees who could help them, without bureaucracy or formal approvals.
Bureaucracy is actively simplified each time a new process is added.
Individuals teach each other using communities of practice or other informal sessions (Lean Coffee or another informal meeting).
Individuals can try new ways of working, feel safe if they fail, and identify the most-appropriate type of collaboration.
Informal structures that maximize relevant conversations are fostered.
A positive attitude is encouraged when the work to be done changes abruptly.
People are encouraged to work in pairs as much as possible.
Information provided by artificial intelligence or Big Data is available to all and is used in the same way as knowledge obtained by other means.
The Permission-to-learn Pattern
High Enterprise Social Density is key for the flow of relevant information. But without the right knowledge, techniques for quicker information flow are of little use.
Large corporations have explicit rules that regulate how people learn. This results in a flow of knowledge that isn’t constant. In your organization, you might find that the following habits hinder continuous learning:
Those around you have to ask for permission and wait weeks for the company to authorize training in new skills.
There is no rotation within teams, or people do not frequently work in pairs.
Employees can’t self-organize around their tasks; it’s usually the managers who assign the work.
Skills are taught theoretically, with a person in front of the room explaining and showing examples.
There are no communities of practice where individuals can acquire knowledge or provide feedback.
When unable to perform a task, teams must turn to management to solve the problem.
There are no informal structures to help employees teach each other. Remember that all who teach also learn!
In many places, long-term employees are told what and when they should learn. In such cases, it’s common to require approvals and follow a long list of actions before the knowledge is acquired.
Waiting for knowledge increases workflow interruptions, which leads to an increase in blockades and in the final cost of the product. This also forces people to create techniques or processes to compensate for their shortcomings. I am not recommending that we eliminate all formal learning. But we do need to ensure that other means to gather knowledge are made available.
If your company lacks communities of practice, talk to those around you to learn the skills they require. Then involve those who have these skills and support them so that they can spread their knowledge.
In a company I visited, I suggested that communities of practice could be both a place to gain knowledge and a space where members could vote democratically on the strategies and technologies to be used in their products and services. A few weeks after my recommendation, the software architects worked hard to ensure that everyone better understood the options and that they had time to reflect before voting.
The Permission-to-learn pattern entails people waiting for a decision from the company before acquiring specific knowledge, instead of actively self-organizing around learning needs.
The higher the Permission-to-learn pattern index, the harder it will be for people to acquire knowledge or skills.
Understanding this pattern is important, as it helps employees focus on creative habits for maximizing their learning. I usually ask companies how long it ta
kes to gain a skill after an employee requests a course. If the answer is over three weeks, you are likely witnessing an organization with a high Permission-to-learn index.
The company culture must support people teaching each other without formal approvals or unnecessary bureaucracy. Achieving this requires that you empower employees and give them the time they need.
A company where I offered coaching required that two of their software teams learn the Kanban techniques. The training course was approved after two months, and the members were thrilled. It was only at the end of this training that I discovered that the groups surrounding those members were all experts in Kanban.
Incredible! Why hadn’t the groups shared this knowledge with each other?
The management team of another company that I helped was initiating an Agile transformation. They had created eight Scrum teams through a tortuous process, mainly because many of the skills were scarce or not available.
To overcome this situation, the three managers defined a formal procedure for team members to learn how to act if a new skill was needed. Despite this, the number of rules and exceptions to this procedure remained high, so I proposed an experimental activity called the Farmers Market.