making sense of organization impediments @ lkce2015

Managing complexity for organization effectiveness Making Sense of Organization Impediments

Ken Power Principal Engineer, Cisco Systems Monday November 16, 2015

@ken_power

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Let’s look at some examples

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• How do you feel? • What does it mean to you? • What does it mean for what you are working on?

• How would you respond?

For each example:

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My manager did not show up for our 1:1 meeting yesterday.

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I was in Frankfurt with Team X last week.

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Our last release exceeded all expectations.

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Satir Interaction Model: Our human processing systems have 4 parts.

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probe sense respond

“More stories like these; fewer stories like those”

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Brené Brown

“Maybe stories are just data with a soul”

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We want to see and understand the soul of our organization through the stories we tell

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Sent Received

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Tea/Coffee

Milk/Cream Sugar

N/A

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Meat

Vegetables Spices

N/A

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Concern

Anger Empathy

N/A

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Collection Methods

Paper Web Apps

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Use of Catalytic Material More likely to fail when used to

Reduce or resolve inquiry

Achieve conformity and end debate

Reduce exposure to detailed content

More likely to succeed when used to

Multiply and energize inquiry

Achieve diversity and stimulate debate

Facilitate and guide exposure to detailed content

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Three Basic Approaches

Group Led Push Pull

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•  Anecdote Circles •  Peer-to-peer

•  Small Groups

•  Retrospectives

•  Ceremonies (Daily standup, Planning meetings)

•  Manager interviews (Manager as Scribe)

•  Manager/Director broadcast (“This week I want experiences that relate to working with customers”)

Methods for Collecting Stories

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Sense Making is a form of Deep Democracy process. We are giving every voice in the system a chance to be heard.

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77%

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77%

~70%

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77%

~30%

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!!

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!

!

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Systemic Impediments

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Implications for leaders, managers, change agents

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Power, Ken. "Sensemaking and Complexity in Large-Scale Lean-Agile Transformation: A Case Study from Cisco,” in Proceedings of the 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2016), Kauai, Hawaii, USA, 2016. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2016.

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•  Sense-Making provides valuable insights •  These insights lead to actionable interventions in the organization

•  A complexity perspective helps inform action appropriate to context

•  Specific things that are useful to monitor: •  Progress on strategic objectives •  Level of organization agility •  Types of impediments that make work more difficult •  Quality of customer engagement

Conclusions

@ken_power

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ken.power@gmail.com http://kenpower.ie/

With some graphics by