stoos

An invitation to join a learning consortium

Peter — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 10:00:00 +0000

As many of you know, I have been working with Steve Denning, author of Radical Management, unofficial speaker for the Drucker Forum, and Member of the Board of the Scrum Alliance. His passion is about how management needs to reinvent itself to meet the challenges of the creative economy.

Steve and the Scrum Alliance are striving to build a Learning Consortium to explore the management implications of the emerging Creative Economy.

The members of the Learning Consortium will select five organizations from among these submissions and organize one-day site visits at their locations. Each host organization will make presentations and hold discussions about what it is doing, how it is doing it, and what it is learning. Membership of the consortium is limited to 30 organizations.

Each organization will be invited to send participants on the site visits. Once the site visits are complete, Scrum Alliance will organize a conference at which the Learning Consortium will make presentations and hold discussions about what has been learned. The Learning Consortium will produce a report of the conclusions of the visits and its review. The report will be made available to the 30 organizations.

Could your organization want to be one those 30 companies?

Are you curious? If so, please contact me, and I will be happy to put you in touch with Steve! Or here is more info:

Steve presents the idea on Forbes.com.
You can find the full concept on Steve Denning's website.
You can find Financial Times columnist Andrew Hill's article supporting the idea online (paywall).

Could someone in your organization be interested in participating? If so, please drop me a line! And I will be happy to put you in touch with Steve directly.

EDIT: fixed missing links, formatting.

A Manifesto for #Stoos Movement?

Peter — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 01:31:00 +0000

I have asked whether Stoos needs a Manifesto twice, once just before the first Stoos Gathering (on the Stoos), and once again about three months after the fact on the Stoos LinkedIn group. Neither discussion produced a strong demand for a Manifesto. The topic came up again at the Stoos Stampede (and I was pleased to participate in the discussion). Is this the monster that won't die? Or is there a deeper need for a manifesto?

On the one hand, a manifesto seems like a very logical byproduct of the Stoos movement. Stoos-I was inspired directly by the gathering at Snowbird Lodge which produced the Agile Manifesto. This is turn has served as a rallying point and common identity for Agilists around the world. Today, no less than a dozen different frameworks and methods can be called Agile. Surely we need a manifesto as well.

The online discussions did not generate much enthusiasm for a Stoos Manifesto. First of all, there are many principles and not much agreement on what the right ones are. Others pointed out that there are too many manifestos, so many people just roll their eyes at the idea of a new manifesto.

"My Evernote is full of manifesto's, so I'm not really waiting for another one...."
-- Patrick Verheij

"I think you already have something better than a manifesto: a vision. Organizations become learning networks of individuals creating value whose leaders steward the living."
-- Justin Redd

"No. Please no more manifestos! Maybe a set of values, or principles, or practices or methods or something. But if we care about being taken seriously, don't call it a manifesto. And especially not the cheesy "4 things on the right that we value more than the 4 things on the left", Agile manifesto parody."

-- Kurt Häusler

And there are some good parodies of the Agile Manifesto out there!

Given this background, I participated in a Stoos Stampede session "Does Stoos Need a Manifesto" facilitated by Fabian Schiller and Steffen Lentz.

Many of the same issues were discussed in the session. One argument sticks in my mind. There is no one way or one right set of values or principles. We are not looking for the one better way but for better ways. The affirmation of Stoos is very simple. Believe in and respect people.

We talked about how people discovered Lean, Agile or Scrum. Not as the result of long study, but rather as transformational epiphanies, "A-ha! moments."

The purpose of the Stoos network becomes clear: Enable learning about better ways. Enable sharing and learning. Enable epiphanies and moments of enlightenment.

And this is exactly what the Stoos movement has been doing:

Create and disseminate a compelling vision: the Statement of the Stoos 21.
Share information about the movement on StoosNetwork.org
Enable global discussion and learning on the Stoos LinkedIn group.
Enable local discussion and learning through the Stoos Satellites.

So who needs a manifesto? We have a vision. And we have a growing network of Satellites and potential Satellites (Geneva, Berlin, Phoenix, San Francisco, Munich, Zurich, Hamburg, Sao Paulo, Lausanne, Copenhagen and Munich - did I miss any?) to enable learning and share the vision around the world. Is there a Stoos Satellite near you? There can be! Just start it!

Announcing the Happiness App

Peter — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 07:38:00 +0000

... and I am looking for beta testers and early adopters!

The HappinessApp^tm enables you to collect, log and share information about your happiness, save it for future reference or share it with friends, families colleagues, or even the whole world! And that's just the beginning!

Today at the Stoos Stampede in Amsterdam, I am proud to show off the app for the first time! You can record your happiness level, review your scores on a graph, and install it on your iPhone or iPad (if you are a bit technically saavy). Every week, we will add a new feature or two and ask you for feedback.

Would you like to be one of the first 100 beta-testers and early adopters? Here's how you do it:

Check out our webpage HappinessApp.me
Register as a beta-tester
Follow the HappinessApp on twitter.

I'll be contacting the first people next week to help you get started!

Stoos: Is Great Management Timeless? (Continued)

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjiv Augustine) — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:03:00 +0000

In discussing the Stoos movement, I posed the question, "Is great management timeless?" That is, do we really keep reinventing management or do we just uncover different ways to manifest principles of great management?

After further discussion about the goal of the Stoos movement, I believe continued dialogue will lead us to uncover the underlying truth. It's dialectical.

Certainly, as Peter Stevens, the originator of Stoos, commented,

This [industrial] model worked extremely well in the first half of the 20th century, stumbled through the 70s, but is creaking and shuddering today.

More recently, the advances at Xerox, PARC and elsewhere (Smalltalk, IDEs, rapid feedback, not to mention the whole internet) enabled new management approaches, e.g. Scrum, XP, Kanban. The same advancements also put pressure on companies to do better, not just developing software, but at innovating for their customers. This requires more enabling management than was necessary 100 years ago.

Clearly, older industrial management is creaking and shuddering today.

But, simultaneous with the creaky industrial management that Peter identifies, we've had wonders from Walter Shewart, W. Edwards Deming, Taiichi Ohno, and, of course, Peter Drucker. We know that the Lean management model has grown and thrived through Toyota and others during the same period that industrial management has declined. Indeed, very little we propose in #Stoos and agile management cannot be found in the works of Drucker, Deming and others. In fact, Scrum draws on the work of Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, through their landmark paper, The New, New Product Development Game.

Because management is dependent on the nature of the work we're doing, Drucker coined the term "knowledge workers," and maintained that knowledge workers needed to be managed differently. This view is also supported by Nonaka, one of the grand doyens of Scrum.

So, it seems like our inflection point is the difference between industrial/scientific management and lean/agile management. Perhaps great management is not timeless, and we need to adapt management to suit the challenges and work of our time.

Thanks, Peter and others associated with #Stoos for moving that process along.

Stoos: Is Great Management Timeless?

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjiv Augustine) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:43:00 +0000

The Stoos movement is off to a great start. More than 850 people have joined the Stoos Network on LinkedIn since January and the Stoos Stampede in Amsterdam is scheduled for July 6-7, 2012. Still, as with any movement, the enthusiasm felt by many isn't shared by all. In fact, it appears that the work of Stoos enthusiasts might be ruffling some feathers.

In my opinion, this is undoubtedly unintentional, because every person I've met associated with this movement is passionate about fixing the dysfunctions in our organizations today. So what is it about the Stoos message that might not resonate with some people?

I've been mulling the message over in search of an answer. In my posts, as well as those written by Jurgen Appelo, Steve Denning and others, the message has been about transforming management. But are we talking about transforming the discipline of management or transforming organizations through better management?

Check out Peter Stevens' related blog post on this topic: Agile is the Vanguard of the Transformation of Management.

Perhaps, upon reflection and with introspection, we can say that great management is timeless. Isn't it that we uncover the immutable principles of great management slightly differently in each age? After all, there is nothing in the agile management movement not previously covered and espoused by Peter Drucker, W. Edwards Deming and Taiichi Ohno.

Should we be talking about transforming management, or should we be aiming to implement timeless best practices in our organizations using the best methods of our age? We can use videoconferencing to achieve real-time collaboration when not collocated. We can implement “commander’s intent” through self-organized teams.

Is great management timeless or not? Do we really keep reinventing management or do we just uncover different ways to manifest principles of great management? What do you think?

Stoos Gathering Recap: Lessons and Reflections

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjiv Augustine) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 16:35:00 +0000

So, it's taken me over a month to get around to writing this, but then catching up on the backlog of work built up over three weeks of vacation is pretty darn tough.

Before I went to meet up with fellow Stoosians, I blogged about preparing for #Stoos. I also presented the polio eradication initiative as a possible model for transforming management. It certainly seems a viable model for global change. Last month, the Washington Post reports that, as of January 13 2012, there have been no new reported cases of a child being paralyzed by polio in a year.

Back to #Stoos. I had been vacationing in India and headed to Zurich, breaking journey on my way back home to Washington, DC. Met up with old friend Michael Spayd, and we traveled together to Stoos via the railway.

Growing up, I'd heard that one could set one's watch to the Swiss trains, and in this case, it turned out to be true. We arrived in Stoos after having changed four trains, all arriving and leaving precisely on the dot. Maybe it doesn't always work this way, but it sure did for us! Serendipitously, we ended up doing the last legs of the journey with Deborah Preuss and her husband, Ilya Preuss.

Once at Stoos, we met up with organizers Peter Stevens, Franz Roosli and Steve Denning; and a day later, Jurgen Appelo. Several others in the group came together from various parts of the world. The full list can be found at http://www.stoosnetwork.org/.

Among the different streams of thought represented were: Beyond Budgeting (Franz Roosli), Radical Management (Steve Denning and Peter Stevens), Wiki Management (Rod Collins), Strategic Management (Julian Birkinshaw), Management 3.0 (Jurgen Appelo) Informal Learning (Jay Cross), Self Sustainability (John Styffe), Elastic Leadership (Roy Osherove) and of course Lean and Agile Management (Catherine Louis, Kati Vilkki, Esther Derby, Deb Hartmann, Michael Spayd, Peter Hundermark, Klaus Leopold, Simon Roberts, and myself). Industry representatives included Jonas Vonlanthen, Melina McKim and Uli Loth.

Here are some of my learnings from the gathering:

The agile community has evolved a model for collaborative, networked organizations independently of counterparts on the business side.
Business leaders at firms like Blue Cross Blue Shield FEP have simultaneously instituted similar models completely independently.
Pioneering companies like W.L Gore have created collaborative, networked organizations several decades (!) ago and agile management is nothing new to these companies.
The Stoos Gathering created occasion for enthusiasts from many of these different disciplines to come together and learn from each other for the very first time. We also discovered that though we might be referring to concepts and techniques by different names, there was very close alignment between all of these disciplines.
The general management community has been moving in the direction of reforming management. From the article, "The New Path to the C-Suite," is a great quote for senior executives,
“The C-level person today needs to be more team-oriented, capable of multitasking continuously and leading without rank, and able to resist stress and make sure that his subordinates do not burn out. And he needs to do all of this with a big smile in an open plan office. In other words, we’re looking at a whole new breed of top executive.”

At some organizations, executive reinvention of management and the rollout of agile methods have gone hand-in-hand with great results. For example, I was quite thrilled to see that one of our own clients that has been implementing agile, Nationwide Insurance, was referenced in the work of Julian Birkinshaw from London Business School. Julian's new book, Reinventing Management, has an interview with Nationwide's erstwhile CIO Srini Koushik that captures some of Srini's groundbreaking work. Also, Nationwide's agile adoption has been gaining plaudits as well. The Application Development Center at Nationwide has scaled agile to nearly 30 teams, using a Lean standard work framework.

The time at Stoos was short, and served to introduce and begin to co-mingle the work of many different disciplines. Before we left, we worked on a communique.

Over the next few months, I'll be blogging on some essential agile management concepts including customer value orientation, networked or flat organizational structures, collaborative decision making, long term perspective and transparent/visual management.

As the discovery of how to transform management evolves, I invite you to join in the conversation. I would also much appreciate your comments and feedback!

From a Blame Culture to Fearless Trust

Peter — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 06:00:00 +0000

As a manager, you understand the second principle of Radical Management: your role is changing from being a controller of people to an enabler of teams. In my coaching work, I've met many managers who, even though they understand this principle, they get really uncomfortable with relinquishing control.

If I trust my team, how do I prevent them from abusing this trust? How do know I will I get results?

This is a perfectly normal question at the beginning of a transition, especially in large organizations. What is trust? How can you trust your people? And how do create a climate that encourages trust?

Without trust, people have to protect themselves from betrayal and attack. Work is a dreary grind, in which people are constant fear of punishment, and the workplace resembles a Dilbert cartoon with slightly more lifelike renderings of the people involved. In fact, if Dilbert is a favorite subject for decorating people's offices or the coffee corner, then you probably have a problem with trust and fear in your organization.

A company living a trust culture can be a wonder to behold! Happy, motivated staff working effectively with each other, with stakeholders, with managers and even with customers to produce great outcomes! Is your company like this? Stop and imagine for a moment what it would be like...!

Trust means a lot of things to different people. Let's look at the different kinds of trust in an organizational context:

Blind Trust: Don't worry, be happy! It will all work out in the end.
Commitment Trust: I say I will do something and you can have confidence that I will do it.
Confidence Trust: You can tell me something in confidence and can be sure I will not betray that confidence.
Alliance Trust. You and I commit to a course of action and we both have confidence each will stay the course, even in the face of political resistance.
Fearless-Trust: I can admit weakness without fear of attack.

Blind Trust
Blind trust is what every manager is afraid of, and rightfully so, especially when s/he will be held accountable for the results.

It's a common fear that Radical Managers must engage in blind trust. Let's look at how Scrum addresses this issue:

A Team commits to a achieve a "sprint goal" within a defined time box of one month or less. The goal was requested by a special management role, the Product Owner. Only items representing potential value for the customer or user are normally defined in the sprint goal.
At the end of the time box, Product Owner and Team review the results.
The product owner may not change the sprint goal until the time box has expired.

If the team achieves the goal, everyone is happy. If not, it is a learning experience for all concerned. In the future, the team may commit to less (overly) ambitious goals and/or the team will seek to eliminate impediments which limit its capacity.

Radical Management calls this process Dynamic Linking. I prefer the expression Direct Linking because people seem to grasp the essential idea more quickly: The people doing the work have a direct line of site to the beneficiaries of their work. The results are visible in form that the customer can understand after a short period of time. After a learning phase, when the team learns what it can really do in one month, the team should be able deliver what it promises, month after month. The manager can now focus on managing outcomes, not inputs, outputs or coffee-breaks.

Commitment Trust

When I ask groups of managers and team members what trust is, their answers often refer to Commitment Trust. This is more or less the main dictionary definition of trust. Managers want employees to do what they say they will (e.g. show up for work, deliver on commitments on time, etc.) and management's control function is to ensure that they do so.

Commitment trust is closely related to delegation and accountability. As manager, what can you can you delegate and to whom? How much do you need to be involved in creating, validating, verifying the results?

Jurgen Appelo has created an excellent tool for visualizing and discussing delegation as part of his Management 3.0 Training: Delegation Poker. (BTW - I am a Management 3.0 Licensed Trainer). He identified 7 levels of delegation ranging from

Level 1 — Manager decides and communicates his decision, to
Level 7 — Manager delegates and does not even inquire about the results).

So given a task, you can identify how much competence you wish to delegate. You can reflect on how and whether you want to develop your staff so they develop the ability and/or earn the reputation necessary for higher levels of delegation. And you can put display a delegation matrix on the wall, making the policy visible, transparent, and easy to adapt when needed.

BTW — A Scrum product owner works at about Level 6: Manager delegates and inquires about the results.

Confidence Trust
When I talk to individual employees, I am often confronted with Confidence Trust. For instance, "You didn't hear this from me, but...." There is an issue, but s/he is not allowed to mention it in public for fear of the consequences.

There will always be a need for discretion. Particularly discussing about individuals and personal problems requires sensitivity. However if people in your organization rely frequently on confidence trust when discussing what should be factual issues, this is a sign that a culture of fear is preventing a free flow of information in operationally or strategically important areas.

Alliance Trust

Every successful manager understands the importance of Alliance Trust. It's often the only way to get things done in an organization. Build alliances to help each other advance. Build consensus to ensure decisions

Like with confidence trust, there will always be affinities between people and relationships that endure over time. But what decides key decisions in your organization? The positional power of the people involved or the power of the arguments brought to the discussion (especially in context of what's best for your customers)? And when a decision is taken, do the proponents of the road not taken commit to the decision? Or do they wait for the chance to say 'I told you so!'

One symptom of too much reliance on alliance trust is an inability to make decisions or set priorities.

This often manifests itself as constantly shifting priorities in the organization. One faction has the upper hand and gets a decision in their favor, but the losers don't give up. A dramatic event (real or imagined) causes a shift in the priorities and the decision changes. Running projects are canceled and 'resources' are reallocated. This is a nice way a saying that you have wasted a ton of money and a lot time on unfinished work which will never delight the customer or produce a return for the company.

Fearless-Trust
Fearless Trust is like Fearless Change. Fearless change is not about a daredevil's approach to change. It is about change without fear, i.e. taking the fear out of change. A trust culture is about taking the fear (and politics!) of out of work, so people can focus on the real issues.

Only once have I coached a company that had an explicit policy of Fearless Trust, also known as a Trust Culture, before I started working with them. This was the easiest and most delightful transition I have ever had the pleasure to assist. People were willing to learn and try out new things. They were not afraid of the consequences of trying something which might not work out as planned (because they will not punished for trying) so the hurdles to trying out Scrum were very low. They also tripled their productivity almost instantly and made tremendous strides in improving customer delight from the first product release onwards.

The alternative to a trust culture is a blame culture, in which people are held responsible for mistakes. The most immediate symptom of blame culture is whenever anything goes wrong, the first order of business is identifying the guilty party. Those accused focus on deflecting the blame to someone else. The loser gets to fix the problem. I believe that most companies have a blame culture, because this is natural side effect of emphasizing individual performance over team performance.

Why should you foster a trust culture? Simple! In trust cultures people don't waste time and energy looking for guilty parties or defending themselves from attacks. People don't choose CYA strategies over doing what's best for the customer. People can commit to decisions - even those they did not agree with - and hold each other accountable for delivering. (For a deeper understanding of trust cultures and the dysfunctions associated with blame cultures, check out The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.

In my next article on trust, I want to look at how to create a trust culture in your company.

Are there other aspects of trust in an organization that I overlooked? And how have you experienced the flavors of trust in your company?

Video Introducing #Stoos to the Scrum Breakfast

Peter — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:16:00 +0000

Yesterday, the LAS Coreteam organized its first Scrum Breakfast without me. To fill in the spot left by the thought for the day, Kai asked me a few questions over Skype and edited them into a short video. The main topic was Stoos, but we also talked about this years Lean Agile Scrum Conference and the Scrum Retrospectives. You can watch the video or read the (partial) transcript below.

Q: The last I heard from you, you were getting ready for the Stoos gathering. What was the Stoos Gathering?

A: In January, a diverse group of 21 thought leaders, executives, and coaches from around the world met on the Stoos. Our inspiration was the Snowbird Lodge gathering with produced the Agile Manifesto.

Our invitation went beyond Agile and Lean practitioners to include Business, Leadership and HR communities. This group identified much common ground on how management should be and a tremendous discrepancy between that and how most companies are actually run. For instance, we believe organizations can become learning networks of individuals that create value. We believe the role of leaders should include the stewardship of the living rather than the management of the machine.

We want to facilitate the tipping point - the sustainable transformation of management from the command and control philosophy of the 20th century into something compatible with the context of the 21st century. I believe that Scrum, Kanban and Radical Management are examples of ways to "do Stoos," and other approaches will surely arise.

Q. How can people in Switzerland get involved?

A. Many ways: First join the conversation on linked in and twitter. The group is called the Stoos Network and it has a Linked In group, and our twitter tag is #Stoos (with two o's). Second, create or join and build community in your region to develop and exchange information on doing Stoos -- much like the Scrum Breakfasts. John Styffe is organizing a group in Zurich and I have started a Leadership Breakfast in Washington (together with the American University Business School).

Q. Is that why you are in Washington?

A. The driver was that the building I live in is being renovated and we had to go somewhere for 6 months. I had both personal a professional reasons for choosing the DC area. Steve Denning, the visionary behind Radical Management lives nearby. I want to work with him to make Radical Management a widely accepted approach for doing Stoos across the organization. So I plan to work on three things:

Create a course with Steve Denning around Radical Management and doing Stoos
Work on the WIKISPEED project - both on actually building cars and on helping this crowd-sourced project become a viable company that continues to live its Stoosonian values.
Develop the Stoos Community in Washington, DC.

#Stoos, the Yellow vMeme, and the Coming Management Evolution

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:59:07 +0000

Last weekend I had the good fortune of joining twenty other forward thinking souls in #Stoos, Switzerland, to put our heads and hearts together. Our focus: accelerating the transformation of organizations—and especially management—in the 21^st century. The problem might be summed up as mechanistic, monetized thinking which values money per se and control at the expense of people, planet and net value creation (see the summary mind map of the ‘mess we’re in). Those in the Agile world will recognize this as the thinking that on the one hand loves agile results (faster, cheaper, higher customer satisfaction), but on the other is less than thrilled to implement agile philosophy, especially when applied to organizational and management topics. The overall summary of our gathering was written up in a short communique, or see the YouTube highlights reel.

#Stoos got me to reflect, both before and after the weekend, about why the long awaited transformation of management has not yet come to pass. Surely the complexity of issues facing companies (not to mention societies) is great enough to warrant a different, more networked, more values-oriented management paradigm to emerge. As the #Stoos communique opines, leadership should include “the stewardship of the living”. Yet, clearly that is SO not happening.

As Sumantra Ghoshal wrote in 2005, bad management thinking is destroying good management practices. Viewing things as I do from a developmental perspective, I don’t think the majority of the leaders in our world have developed themselves enough to lead from these new models; nor do our organizational cultures support these new ways, even when a given individual ‘sees’ the need.

How do we understand this gap?

Let’s begin with a research-based development model that encompasses people, organizations and even whole societies. Based on the work of Clare Graves and developed by Don Beck and Chris Cowan, Spiral Dynamics reveals eight value memes (vMemes) that encapsulate world and human development all the way back to prehistoric times. Each stage (or wave) represents more complex thinking (and behaving) than the one before. Movement between stages is ‘forced’ by life circumstances, when a given set of problems is no longer solved satisfactorily by the previous collection of values and ways of thinking. A listing of the five most relevant vMemes, with their mottoes (from John Marshall Roberts’ Igniting Inspiration) is:

Heroic Thinking (Red) – “Express one’s self, to hell with the consequences, lest one suffer the torment of shame.” Red is like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Absolutist Thinking (Blue) – “Sacrifice self now to receive later reward.” Blue is absolutism of any kind, where there in only one right way and immutable laws (e.g., fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, etc.)
Individualistic Thinking (Orange) – “Express self for what self desires, but in a calculated fashion so as to avoid bringing down the wrath of important others.” Orange is the core of capitalism or corporatism, but also individual freedoms (US Declaration of Independence).
Humanistic Thinking (Green) – “Sacrifice self now in order to gain acceptance now.” Green is relativism (as opposed to Blue absolutism) and holds views such as mankind is a family and all are equal. Green thinking developed the idea of consensus and holds it to a fault. It is an underlying part of much of Agile.
Systemic Thinking (Yellow) – “Express self for what self desires and other need, but never at the expense of others, and in a way that all life can continue to exist.” Yellow is found in environmental sustainability, quantum theory, integral psychology, and other innovative technologies (including some aspects or manifestations of Agile).

The kind of management transformation many of us want comes out of the Yellow vMeme, yet the heart of the corporate world is thoroughly Orange, with hints of Green that show up in some HR practices, consensus and collaboration oriented teams and cultures, and generally more enlightened organizations. People don’t (and especially organizations) don’t develop from one level to the next overnight. We develop when our value and thinking system begin failing us in dealing with our life circumstances. The fascination with materialistic gains and outward success (Orange) gives way to dissatisfaction and ‘wanting something more (often in mid-life) to move people from Orange to Green. The inefficiency of consensus oriented decision-making and wanting more creative expression for oneself drives Green into Yellow.

We as coaches can facilitate people’s development, but we cannot drive it. And talking more persuasive, or louder, will not move anyone along the path. Communicating with someone within their own values scheme, not wanting them to be different, is a good place to start.

To learn about the use of Spiral Dynamics in a business context (specifically applied to the food industry), read John Mackey’s blog of his keynote given to his Whole Foods tribe. If you are interested in joining in the ensuing conversation from #Stoos, please join the Stoos Network on LinkedIn.

#Stoos: The past is no longer a proxy for the future

Peter — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:11:00 +0000

Deb Hartmann interviews Rod Collins, author of Leadership in a Wiki World:

Or you can watch it on youtube...

Videos on the #Stoos Gathering

Peter — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:21:00 +0000

@jaycross has posted an awesome video on youtube which provides some insight into what we talked about, the first draft of the statement, and how we worked together at #Stoos.

@deborahh conducted a series 7 or 8 of interviews which are now appearing one by one on youtube. Here is the #Stoos final statement, read by Simon Roberts:

Follow the Stoos Network Channel on youtube for more videos!

#Stoos and the Prime Directive

Peter — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:54:00 +0000

When I read some of the postings on twitter about the #Stoos Gathering, I wish I could shout to everyone, "Stop! Remember the Prime Directive. Everyone wants to do a good job! Everyone did and is doing the best job they can under the circumstances."

"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

"At the end of a project everyone knows so much more. Naturally we will discover decisions and actions we wish we could do over. This is wisdom to be celebrated, not judgement used to embarrass."

The Retrospective Prime Directive

My wishes on the community at large: Ask constructive questions. Be patient. Contribute.

The world won't change in a day. We're all volunteers with a day job. And remember the prime directive. It makes genuine improvement possible.

Stoos Gathering - Initial Thoughts

Roy Osherove — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:10:57 +0000

This past weekend I was honored to be part of what I hope will be the beginning of a transformation in management culture. The start of a tipping point. It was the Stoos Gathering. that site contains a statement that represents one of the things we all agreed on. and that was pretty difficult.

We were twenty one very different individuals, form four continents, many different countries, and sometimes very different cultures of communication and leadership.

In that single room, I believe we had no less than 15 different "ways" of doing things. The most powerful realization was that mostly people were not aware of each other's work. From Radical Management, Spiral Dynamics, Elastic Leadership, Beyond Budgeting, Management 3.0, Scrum, XP, And many other ways of work - we had to find a common ground.

We had to find something that we can all agree on. and stoos wa the first step to doing that. I think that's way there was so little that we can call "conclusions" as a result - we had discovered how big the problem really is.

To begin to change management culture (which has remained the same for decades) we need to find common ground, and the stoos network was a good start.

We also agreed to meet again , and to take other actions that will be detailed by others who documented them. But mostly it is about affecting the tipping point - of how to get the people on top, the people on the bottom and those in the middle - to change how they do things.

From CEOs to knowledge workers.

That is a big task, and it's supposed to be scary.

Until we get more material out there, you might want to register to the linkedin group here to get more news.

Invitation to a cool event (later known as #Stoos)

Peter — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:35:00 +0000

So began our efforts to bring together an interesting group of people. Now that the Stoos Gathering is history, the Stoos Network is getting started, and many people have questions about Stoos, the network and what is behind it, I thought I would offer some insight as to how it came to pass and how we, the initiators, perceived the event.

Can I really say "we"? I hate to say "I" because this was a team effort. Without all four of us, Jurgen, Franz, Steve and myself, Stoos would not have happened. And it's not about us. It's about catalyzing a change. (In chemistry, a catalyst is not changed by the reaction it enables). So I will write "we" as as a 'Team we' because this was a team success. I will use "I" when I am very specifically referring to my own opinion. Having said that, this is the story as I experienced it and as I remember it.

Here is the invitation-template that the four initiators used as a basis to invite people:

Invitation to a Thought Leaders Weekend on Leadership,
Agile and Realizing Human Potential

Ten years ago, a group of 17 thought leaders met in Utah with a simple idea: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” This collection of simple ideas became known as the “Agile Manifesto” and changed forever software development and the relationship between Business and IT.

This search also revealed the need for better ways to manage organizations and unfold human potential.

Steve Denning, Jurgen Appelo, Franz Röösli and Peter Stevens are pleased to personally invite you to a spontaneous weekend in the mountains. Our goal is to bring together a group of (no more than) 20 (thought) leaders from around the world in business, IT, and human development. We have a nice hotel, ski slopes, a spa, and a conference room. 20 cool people and 2 days. What will come out of it? I hope you will join us to create something wonderful (or just have a good time)!

About us:
Steve Denning is the author of The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management
Jurgen Appelo is the author of Management 3.0 and initiator of the Agile Lean Europe Network
Franz Röösli is Professor for Management at the FHNW, Director of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table and Co-author of ‘The Leader’s Dilemma’
Peter Stevens is an independent Scrum Trainer and Coach and Initiator of the Lean Agile Scrum SIG of the SwissICT
Who are we inviting?

In general, we are trying to get a diverse group of people from many countries, who have substantial influence in their context and who understand agility and its relationship to business. Some are researchers and authors of books that are considered to be in the vanguard of their fields. Some are pioneering practitioners, i.e. active or former C-Level managers or coaches and trainers. Twelve countries are represented in the list of invitees at the moment. In general it will be a group that all of us will be proud to be associated with.

And... if you think there is someone we should invite, please let us know! In particular, we would like to invite some people from the Asia/Pacific region.

How did we choose the people we invited? A rather random process of identifying people we knew, had enough stature, and who we thought or hoped would be intrigued enough to decide to come. We wanted people not just from North America, but from around the world. We wanted a mixture of men and women. We wanted not just IT people, but people from other fields who are doing compatible work. Above all, we wanted people with passion!

Why 20 people? It seemed like the right number. Big enough to get the necessary diversity yet small enough so that everyone could get to know each other and come to a conclusion effectively. That the hotel was willing to block 20 rooms for us was probably an important factor as well. We actually had acceptances from 24 people, but a few had to change their minds for various reasons, and the final number was 21.

What did we expect to come out of the event? We had no idea! Not quite true. We thought if we got the right group of people together, something wonderful might happen. Or maybe not. There have been counterexamples, and the Snowbird Lodge gathering which produced the Agile Manifesto was actually the second meeting of group which had known each other since much longer.

In particular, we did not say, 'we want to produce a manifesto'. In fact, at least one of us felt that we should most definitely not produce a manifesto. My own wish was that 10 years from now, people would look back on this event a catalyzing moment which triggered a substantial improvement in how companies are run. (#myview, as we later used in twitter to qualify personal opinions).

As we got closer to the event, we thought that a good result would be for the group to come together and commit to working together in the future. A "concrete result" would be too much to ask for given the short time and that people didn't know each other.

What unexpected things happened? Lots of things:

People decided to come! The event was scheduled on very short notice at the edge of Christmas vacation. Many people would have vacations or time with their family high on their agenda. It's not a cheap time of year to travel. There were a lot reasons for saying no. But when we had 12 confirmations, including ourselves, we realized this was really going to happen.
The shift from would-you-please-come mode to I'm-really-sorry-but-we-can't-invite-anyone-else mode. We had a soft limit of 20 and a hard limit of 24 people. We had to turn down some people who asked to come or did not invite people who we would have loved to have present. Very painful, at least for me. (And I am *very* thankful for the understanding that affected people have shown!)
A wind and snow storm on Thursday before the event. Many of us had very turbulent arrivals in Zurich. Fortunately only one person had to delay his arrival til Friday morning.
That some people wanted us to fail. It's been evident in some recent tweets and one of the participants even received an email with the exact words "I hope you fail." I don't understand this.
The tension between doing work in the room, building a team (or perhaps a tribe) and communicating to the great wide world. This would have been easier had we already known each other, trusted each other, and known the constraints that each of us has - particularly the those present from top management or under non-disclosure agreements have to be very careful about what they say in public, especially when a camera is running. There were many issues and we decided to limit communications to the outside world so we could establish safety in the room and move on to talking about the "real stuff".

Most importantly, people left their egos at home. My nightmare scenario was a room full of big egos. But there was no pontificating, no-one trying to dominate the podium, and respectful conversation at all times. Really my best case scenario! I think I speak for everyone when I say, it was truly a pleasure to work with you these few days!

My goal is to provide some more background about the gathering in another article or two. In real life, I am moving to Washington DC in 14 days, so I hope I can do this before I leave (between the boxes).

Communiqué from the #Stoos Gathering

Peter — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 21:17:00 +0000

It was intense team work, all the way to the end, but the Stoos Network is now online:

Statement from #Stoos gathering online: tmpurl: http://stoosnet.squarespace.com/ realurl: http://www.stoosnetwork.org/ #ourview

Join the #Stoos Network on linked in: http://linkd.in/stoosnetwork !

What will it take to transform management? Look to the Polio Eradication Model.

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjiv Augustine) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 06:47:00 +0000

In a few days, I'll be leaving behind the balmy weather in Chennai and heading to #Stoos in Switzerland. Our Stoos Gathering attendees will be deliberating on the issue of accelerating the transformation of management. We'll likely be asking questions like, "How can we accelerate the transformation of management away from creaky, dysfunctional models of the past and towards modern, dynamic in the present?"

Or "How can we catalyze widespread change in management to better meet the challenges of our turbulent times?"

Some days ago, I blogged about some of the models under consideration, and indicated that all of the approaches are essentially humanistic and systemic. So, whether we consider slightly older models like Jim Highsmith's Agile Project Management model or the Declaration of Inter-dependence; or more recent ones like Jurgen Appelo's Management 3.0 and Steve Denning's Radical Management, I believe the required transformation from current management state to future state is less about the mechanics, and more about the fundamentals.

How can we transform from older industrial-style management with its mechanistic command-and-control to newer "light-touch" humanistic management with decentralized or distributed control? In the agile world, we have certainly seen many companies initiate and sustain agile management and agile development transformations. The Forrester Group reports more and more organizations have initiated agile transformations world-wide. In my last blog post, I referred to this as creating a playground of productivity. In response, @stevedenning points out that the bigger question is, "How can we sustain the transformation?" I've spent the last few days in preparation for #Stoos: reviewing available models, reviewing the comments surrounding the Stoos gathering and perhaps most important, doing some personal reflection and retrospection on that very question.

While mulling the question, and perhaps enabled by my current surroundings, I recalled a very successful worldwide movement: the Polio Global Eradication Initiative. I first learned about this initiative when, on a flight to India some months ago, I sat next to a gentleman from Boston who was leading a U.S based team of volunteers from Rotary International. The goal of the initiative is to completely eradicate this often fatal and always debilitating disease from the earth.

Rotary International is one of the four spearheading partners in the initiative, and it is heart-warming to see volunteers from all over the world fund their own way, and team with local organizations and volunteers to help vaccinate children in the remaining hotspots.

The key partners: the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) have mobilized thousands of volunteers, and managed and coordinated and managed their efforts in alignment with clear strategy with four pillars:

Routine immunization
Supplementary immunization
Surveillance
Targeted "mop-up" campaigns

The results are impressive. Per UNICEF, over the past 20 years, there has been a 99% reduction in polio cases.

I think we have a lot to learn from this model that brings public and private organizations; and governments and individuals together to work towards a common goal.

My thoughts on using the polio eradication initiative as a model for a global movement to transform management coming up in the next blog post.

Toasting Management in #stoos? Anstossen or anstoosen?

Peter — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:17:00 +0000

In ten days or so, barring bad weather or last minute emergencies, some 22 thought leaders, idea farmers, managers, agilists, community leaders or otherwise interesting people will get together in Stoos to catalyze a change management. It turns out, Stoos is a pun in German, which I'd like to explain.

Stoos is the name of a community overlooking Schwyz and located at about 1'300m above sea level, with ski slopes up to about 1950m. In German, it is often referred to as 'der Stoos' (the Stoos) as if it were the name of mountain, but I don't think that is case.

I don't know why Franz Röösli chose this hotel. We wanted a ski location (in honor of the gathering which produced the Agile Manifesto being held at the Snowbird Lodge in Utah). It needed to have a conference room, be willing to block rooms for 20 people, and be reasonably easy to get to for international travelers. It was the only alternative he proposed, but it looked good, so here we are.

Stoos is very similar to another German word: 'stossen' which means 'to push'. A variation of stossen is anstossen (this would be a preposition in English, but in German its part of the verb). Anstossen has many interested meanings for our gathering:

to poke
to kick off (something)
to toast (or to drink to) something

So what will do in Stoos? We may poke management, but we want to change management, not bury it. Certainly we will start with a toast to tomorrow's management. Here's mine:

To common sense! May it displace the Pointy Haired Boss as the leading representative of management! #stoos #toastmgmt

How would you toast management in the 21st century?

Towards an 'Agile Manifesto' for Leadership at Stoos?

Peter — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:41:00 +0000

The Agile Manifesto has been the basis of a shared identity for software developers for over 10 years. A diverse group of people - the thought leaders of the 'lightweight project management' movement - got together it the Snowbird Lodge in Utah, identified some common beliefs, gave themselves a name, and (inadvertently?) started a movement. At Stoos, we want to catalyze a change for the better in management. What would an 'agile manifesto' for business look like?

As Steve Denning and I prepared the Radical Management Gathering in Zurich, we felt that future radical managers would want training and recognition -- they are doing something important! -- but didn't feel certifications was the right way to do.

The concept was simple: Recognized and Committed. A participant who attended the gathering and committed to the principles became a 'Recognized and Committed Radical Manager'. Recognition came from attending the gathering - there could be other ways to become 'Recognized' in the future - and committed meant that the individual had signed an affirmation of his/her belief in and commitment to the principles.

We toyed with the idea of formulating the principles as a 'Radical Management Manifesto' but decided that a 'me-too' manifesto wouldn't really help anyone. So although our text was inspired by the Agile Manifesto, they were 'just' principles and did not mimic the manifesto too closely:

The principles of Radical Management represent a process of ongoing discovery and include:
Goal: A shift from the goal of making money for shareholders (“shareholder capitalism”) to delighting customers through continuous innovation (“customer capitalism”).
Role: A shift in the role of managers from controlling individuals to enabling self-organizing teams.
Accountability: A shift in the way work is coordinated from bureaucracy to dynamic linking, in which those doing the work have a clear line of sight to those for whom the work is being done and can see the impact of what they do.
Values: A shift from a preoccupation with efficiency to a broader set of values that will foster continuous innovation.
Communications: A shift from top-down commands to horizontal, peer-to-peer, adult-to-adult communications.
Radical managers espouse these principles and their supporting practices. They recognize that the principles are interlocking and need to be implemented in an integrated fashion.

Should we produce a manifesto at #Stoos? What are the alternatives? And what should we call ourselves? Unlike the lightweight methodologists, we don't even have a collective name for what we do (AFAIK). And if not a manifesto, what is something simple that everybody can understand which will make it clear what we're about?

More ideas on How To Start Global Managment Warming in #Stoos

Peter — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The interest is great, and feedback equally so. Today feedback from:

Sigi Kaltenegger on whether a big gesture will be helpful
Scott C. Schuck on learning through visual experince
Gerhard Andrey on 'Kill you job title!'
Kurt Nielsen on managers as deep experts in planned economic behavior, on managers who see themselves as being 'above work', and on middle managers who are not interested in the customers

Sigi Kaltenegger (@sigikaltenecker) wrote:

I am still wondering if a big “revolutionary” or “radical” gesture is helpful in winning over managers. On the one hand, this gesture is perhaps too much of the same in terms of “heroic management”, where you are supposed to be the solution hero for every problem. On the other hand, remembering Maestro Senge´s “People don´t resist change. They resist being changed”, I doubt that a revolutionary approach shows appropriate respect to managers today.

As to the expected outcome of the Stoos Gathering, I would be happy to learn more about:
getting in touch with managers and helping them to start their own learning journeys (e.g. by clarifying what´s in it for them in the short-term as well as a long-term perspective);
starting with the change from where they are right now, appreciating that there are many things to build on and continue;
practical ways of building trust and fostering relationship, while addressing critical aspects of current management practices;
the essential combination of self-confidence and humility on the side of the potential helper (coach/consultant/you name it)

Scott C. Schuck wrote:

Nearly all remedies I've read rely, primarily, on logical, rational (Newtonian/linear) – largely the same approach that is inadequate in facing the impending chaos.In the "new" reality – Quantum processes – organic and interdependent which self-organize when under minimal constraint.

This is best learned through visceral experience. The path forms only when we walk along it.

The best exposition of this new view is Margaret Wheatley's "Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World".

Perhaps the best "fallback" approach is that of the "World Cafe'" It's sort of a 'structured path to openness", i.e., emergence. (David Issacs &Peter Senge endorse this process).

Good Luck!

Gerhard Andrey (@anderageru) wrote:

I had an issue: "Kill your job title!" ;)

At my company, this is always an issue and out in the real world I encounter some trully amazing jobs titles. ;-) Of course, sometimes these titles are justified, but often they are not really consistent with modern times or simply reflect the most traditional (aka encrusted) structures.

In our company, we don't really have a creative solution to the problem. But at least a pragmatic one. Since there is are no hierarchies are, you're in business development, software development, operations, administration, or even management. There is no Head Of This .. or CxO. In management, we call ourselves partners, which of course something indicating the ownership and still certain hierarchy reflects.

A real discussion about how job meaningful descriptions could defined without hierarchy would very exciting. Because so much begins with naming...

Kurt Nielsen wrote:

Being a former CEO of a small IT-company, I often get involved in Executive discussions in Scandinavia as a consequence of my Scrum training and Coaching. I share the same frustration about why management as a profession is not moving. I do not have a final statement on the matter, the jury is still out. But here are some bullet points, that might serve you in your gathering as points of attack.
The institutions that train also the new generations of managers, that is typically those with a combination financial and legal background, will in general not deal with this new radical management. I believe that the reason is quite simple, they have all been trained in complicated domain (not the complex as per Dave Snowden's definition), they are deep experts in planned economic behavior, I have often said that they have not discovered that the Berlin wall came down in 1989. It is a huge threat to their whole existence if things cannot be planned upfront. I tried to get into one of the universities here in Denmark through the former CEO of Bang & Olufsen, who lectures there. I knew him from my work with Bang & Olufsen. He said after a while, that it was a lost case. The faculty would not be able to make such a mental quantum leap. Things can be planned and budgeted, it is only a matter of getting you act together and do more analysis and control. So they believe they are in the complicated domain, when in fact the world is in the complex most of the time - very dangerous.
The really scary thing is that it is also this sort of people we have elected as politicians, dabbling in resolving the financial crisis. Treating serious illness with chopped up wings of bats and cog-webs.
I ran a training program in Scrum together with the Danish "Center for Management". During the debrief after the course, they were quite positive, but as one lady-boss noted "It is a bit operational, we normally don't get down to the level were work actually is done". I am not joking here or making it up. I suddenly realized that the people educated in management disciplines really believe they are above the work, that they are fundamentally doing something more lofty and intellectual than "work". It is deeply Tayloristic point of view. The elite creates the rules and frameworks for the common man, who is to dumb or lazy to figure anything out for himself. Then the door is open to the patronizing negligence, we often meet.
That brings to the darkest side of the force. Many of students in my Scrum classes report the same issues of being unable to engage management in the prioritizing and taking responsibility for business value. As several have said "Management thinks it is great if we, the lower levels, learn to work more disciplined and produce more results. They have however no sympathy for the argument that the same rules apply up through the organization.
I have often found that the main problem is with the middle managers, not the executives, they normally have a very clear view of creating value (if their company is worth anything). Middle management however often do not have what i think is called "a clear line-of-sight to the customer", hence their own power-circles look like the center of the universe to them. One chief of IT I had an encounter with, refused to do anything that would challenge his position as head of a cost-center. he did not want to take on responsibility for generating value, he just managed resources.
So I think that what you should focus on are the progressive CEO's and the media. I know a few aggressive ones that are not afraid of speaking up, and the story can easily be brought to roll in the media, if we have celebrity value. It can happen, I have just been involved in transforming a medical supply company, but there was a very decisive top man, who wanted this to happen.

Again, thank you for the feedback! We will be taking all the input to Stoos with us and create information radiators so these ideas can be shared with all participants.

Ideas on How to Start Global Management Warming in #stoos

Peter — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 11:23:00 +0000

Our call for help in preparation for the #Stoos Gathering has spurred much discussion throughout the web (see also here and here). Today feedback from

Andreas Schliep on role models
Don Reinertsen on not whining and why he gave up on his slide rule
Roman Pichler on Scrum Start-Ups
Tom Mellor on the role of Business Schools

Andreas Schliep (@andreasschliep) wrote simply:

"Managers need positive role models, role models who have taken a different, new way, and were successful with that approach."

Don Reinertsen (@DReinertsen) wrote (modestly):

"I am not sure that I can really contribute a lot to the event other than to encourage you push forward on the hard issues. Having been on both the sending and receiving side of "why can't management change," I'd offer two thoughts:
It is convenient for us all to externalize the obstacles that are holding back change. I have found it easiest to both obtain and to give support when the party requesting support has already done everything in their own control first. Otherwise, it just seems like whining.
I think it might be useful to examine the situations where management has changed quickly and decisively and what conditions were present when this happened. There are plenty of fast changes occurring, if we choose to observe them. When people tell me that ALL new technologies meet resistance to change, I tell them how quickly I exchanged my beloved slide rule for a calculator, and why."

And BTW he's right, I needed no convincing to give up a slide rule (or even an adding machine) for an HP-25!

Roman Pichler (@romanpichler) wrote:

"I believe that organizing an agile development effort as a start-up and growing a new agile organization around it offers the best chance of establishing the new way of working."

See his thoughts on the Scrum Start-Up on his blog.

Tom Mellor (former Chairman of the Scrum Alliance) wrote on Linked in:

I hope you, Steve and the others explore ideas about how to transform the management education provided by colleges and universities. It seems to me that at the heart of current traditional management thought is a strongly embedded educational curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate levels that will continue to emphasize the traditional philosophies for a long time. MBA programs are especially aggregious about this and their cohort executive programs often promote group think about it.

When I am asked why more universities and colleges do not explore and promote modern, knowledge worker-based mangement philosophies and tenets, I simpy reply "Why should they? They are dependent upon sustaining the status quo." Couple that issue with the premise that many of the teaching professors have either never worked in the modern environment or have not worked in it for some time, then it is difficult to penetrate that fortress. I keep my eyes out for modern ideas in things like the Harvard Business Review, but I haven't seen much.

It will be quite difficult to change management cultures in organizations where most of the people in those positions are "classically trained" in management. I have limited experience with this, but the 8 years I have been trying to influence it in my company without much penetration is telling to me.

There must be a compelling, acceptable reason for management to transform. Steve puts forth some of these in his book, but convincing established management of their veracity has been like trying to [perform a non-trivial challenge].

Tom summed up the feeling of many people around the world when he wrote: "I will be very interested in hearing what comes out of this gathering. I do feel it is a noble endeavor and may spawn further work and discussion, which is needed. I wish I could attend. I wish you all the best."

I wish you could be here too! Thank you all of you for your feedback! I will ensure that this is prominently displayed during the gathering.

Do you have more ideas on how to encourage global management warming? Leave feedback here!

#Stoos Looking for a Simple Framework for Applying Radical Management

Peter — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:41:00 +0000

"Scrum has been so successful because it is a simple framework that is easy to teach and easy to follow. A framework for general management needs this same simplicity."

This morning, fellow Scrum coach and evangelist Mischa Ramseyer and I were brainstorming on how to accelerate the transformation of management for the #Stoos Gathering. Mischa's words echoed my own long held beliefs. We have seen Scrum succeed over and over, mostly in software development contexts. What are the deeper patterns that can be applied to all management situations and how can we distill them into an easy-to-teach, easy-to-apply framework?

What would be the characteristics of this framework?

It would be simple. The rituals can be followed easily.
It would be based on the same values and principles as Agile, Scrum and Kanban. In particular trust, transparency and respect.
It would focus on achieving customer delight.
It would ensure a clear line of sight from those doing the work to those customers or users benefiting from the work.
It would incorporate checks and balances, so that when the organization comes under pressure, the system can correct itself.
It would define cadences to ensure that all important activities are performed regularly.
It would ensure the impediments are visible and handled effectively.
It would be modifiable, scalable and enhanceable to fit a wide variety of situations.

We came up with two repeating cycles, an operational cycle and a strategic cycle. Each cycle represents a time frame; shorter time frames repeat within the cycle. During the cycle various rituals take place, e.g. planing or a functional review. The operational cycle covers the monthly-daily time frames while the strategic cycle extends from quarterly to weekly time frames.

In each cycle, the customer is portrayed in the middle, together with the teams doing the work, regardless of whether the customer is physically present, because producing positive outcomes for the customer is of key importance.

The operational cycle

The operational cycle is about getting work done and creating outcomes which customers will value. It consists of three set of rituals, monthly, weekly and daily. Each is represented as a circle. A team and their customers are at the center of this cycle.

Monthly - for planning and measuring outcomes and results (customer delight/NPS, functional review and operational retrospective)
Weekly - for ensuring the culture and relationships are alive and well
Daily - rituals for organization and encouraging teamwork, such as daily stand-ups, updating the information radiators.

Information radiators (such as Kanban or Scrum boards, Impediment lists, Happiness Index) should broadcast key information, e.g. pending work, work in progress, or staff and customer satisfaction.

The organization should measure and evaluate customer delight at regular intervals. We believe integrating this in to the monthly cycle both for operational and strategic cycles will often be appropriate, but this may be context specific.

We did not really define roles, but someone must be responsible for making impediments visible and escalating them should they not get resolved. To ensure no conflicts of interest and an effective flow of information, that person should not normally be the same person who brings work to the team or who represents more powerful institutions in the organization.

We also believe that a team-based approach is more effective than mere collections of individuals. Teams work together to achieve common goals, share information with each other, and compensate each other's weaknesses, so the whole is stronger than the sum of the individuals. This is especially true in leadership roles.

The strategic cycle

The strategic cycle is about making the company an effective place to get work done and to innovate for the customer.

The strategic cycle also consists of three sets of rituals, represented on circles over a somewhat longer timescale. Together with the management team, the company's customers are again at the center of this cycle.

Quarterly: Each quarter the company should improve: "from version 1.0 to v1.1." Planning & Review are focused on making the company more effective, more sustainable, better loved and generally better.
Monthly: Ensure optimal conditions for doing work and continuous improvement. Measure and react to essential feedback (e.g. NPS, Happiness Index, Financials, unsolved impediments)
Weekly - like in the operational cycle, ensuring the culture and relationships with the company are alive and well

The monthly cycle is where the strategic and operational cycles overlap. The information radiators, especially the stuck-impediments list, ensure that essential information is available for all who need to see it.

How do these cycles scale? The cycle diagram itself is intended as an information radiator. What does your company need to do to be successful? The planning and review meetings, artifacts and tools that we defined should provide the basis for an effective Plan-Do-Check-Act culture, but they may not be sufficient for a particular situation. So you can move rituals from one circle to another or add additional rituals as appropriate. You can also create longer or shorter time scales and define the relationships between them.

Looking for Resonance

What is your reaction to this approach? What resonates with you? What makes you think 'this will never work!' Beyond #stoos, I will be teaching a Radical Management course with Steve Denning and would like to integrate a simple approach to doing Radical Management into the course. What would you add? What would you take away?

Large-Scale Management Transformation: How Can We Create a "Playground of Productivity?"

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjiv Augustine) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:05:00 +0000

Something that has come up in discussions around the Stoos Gathering is the pivotal question, how does one create and sustain large-scale management transformation? The #Stoos participants have been engaging in lively discussions, and I thought it would be good to mull the topic as well.

So, I began looking back at some of the most successful transformations I've witnessed, two key factors emerged: a true business need and a willingness to experiment. From our archives, I found this post with my answers to 5Qs on Agile. Don't miss Bud Phillips' amazingly prescient conversation with our own Bob Payne on sparking and sustaining management change. I really like Bud's rhetorical question, how can we create a "playground of productivity?"

Want to Transform Management? Help Me Prepare for the #Stoos Gathering

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjiv Augustine) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 07:42:00 +0000

On January 6-7, 2012, I will be in Stoos, Switzerland as part of a gathering of management enthusiasts. Organized by the core team of Jurgen Appelo, Steve Denning, Peter Stevens and Franz Roosli, we have a lofty goal: we are seeking to accelerate the transformation of management. As Steve Denning and Jurgen Appelo posit, the pace of change in the world of management has been – glacial. So now, there is much interest in catalyzing that process to accelerate change in this area.

In preparation for the gathering, Jurgen has prepared a short list of models, and others are adding their thoughts. Before we can begin looking forward, I want look back in Agile tradition to make sure we are taking the past into due consideration, and that we can build on and synthesize different models.

In my own book, Managing Agile Projects, I shared my three guiding management principles for agile teams and projects:

Foster alignment and cooperation
Encourage emergence and self-organization
Institute learning and adaptation

Most everyone familiar with agile methods is likely able to trace things back to the seminal Manifesto for Agile Software Development. However, lesser known, but perhaps a "nearer neighbor" to the world of management is the Declaration of Inter-Dependence. In 2005, several of us within the agile movement were convened by visionary leader Jim Highsmith and hosted by David Anderson in Redmond, WA and emerged from that gathering with these six management guidelines that constitute the DOI:

We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus.
We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership
We expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation and adaptation.
We unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference.
We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness.
We improve effectiveness and reliability through situationally specific strategies, processes and practices.

©2005 David Anderson, Sanjiv Augustine, Christopher Avery, Alistair Cockburn, Mike Cohn, Doug DeCarlo, Donna Fitzgerald, Jim Highsmith, Ole Jepsen, Lowell Lindstrom, Todd Little, Kent MacDonald, Polyanna Pixton, Preston Smith and Robert Wysocki

Alistair Cockburn's later commentary and explanation capture the thoughts of that group best, in my opinion. The DOI has certainly been my touch stone as I've applied Lean Thinking along with agile values and practices since then. I've found it especially useful when applying agile methods at the enterprise level, because of its lean-infused thinking and language. For example, phrases like flow of value, situation-specific strategies, and environment to make a difference help ensure that we simultaneously take both a humanistic and systemic approach to management.

That humanistic and systemic approach underlies the approaches postulated by both W. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker, upon which we have built the foundations of modern agile management. Tellingly, at the core of Lean Thinking are these two fundamental principles: respect for people (humanistic) and continuous improvement (systemic).

Even if these principles are not yet manifested in a widespread fashion globally, there are certainly brilliant pockets of adoption world-wide. In North America and Europe, I've witnessed the power of agile methods to drive tremendous results, including some monumental agile adoptions. I'm now on vacation in India, and one model that has caught my interest here is the one practiced by Vineet Nayar at HCL Technologies, "Employees First, Customer Second." Definitely sounds like a humanistic and systemic model, doesn't it?

Finally, over the past year, since I was introduced to the concept by Jeff Sutherland, I've been captivated by the notion of wise leadership, as proposed by Takeuchi and Nonaka. Takeuchi and Nonaka recommend the quality of phronesis as the quintessential quality of wise leaders, and pinpoint these six abilities of a wise leader:

Wise leaders can judge goodness
Wise leaders can grasp the essence
Wise leaders create shared contexts
Wise leaders communicate the essence
Wise leaders exercise political power
Wise leaders foster practical wisdom in others

Earlier this month, as 2011 drew to a close, I was privileged to attend a remarkable event in Milan, Italy hosted by the PMI's Northern Italy Chapter (PMI NIC). Organized by Tiziano Villa and Walter Ginevri from PMI NIC and bringing in Victor Carter-Bey and others from the PMI Global, Tiziano later remarked that we were able to create a "ba," or place where relationships are forged and interactions occur as participants try to create new meaning.

As we usher in the New Year, I am now looking forward with eager anticipation to the trip to Stoos, and I'm hoping we can create a similar "ba" that helps accelerate the pace of management warming.

To reiterate the #Stoos gathering organizers' call to help transform management, please help us by sharing your thoughts in less than 100 words, either via the comments box below or by email at sanjiv DOT augustine AT LitheSpeed DOT com.

Thank you, and Happy New Year!

Achieving Phase Change: Why is it so difficult to change management

Peter — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 08:42:00 +0000

In preparation for the #Stoos Gathering, we have been asking 'Why is it so difficult to change management? While we are not the first to ask the question, it has once again stimulated much discussion (@jurgen's blog, @steve's blog, or on the ScrumAlliance Linkedin group).

Back when the #Occupy movements were getting started, Steve Denning wrote, "What do the occupiers want? Phase Change."

People increasingly sense that things aren’t going to get better unless something big is done, some fundamental change is made in our financial structures. It won’t be small-time rejiggering—a tiny cut in this tax, a minor reduction in that program—that will get us out of this. Like Oliver Twist, they intuit—however incoherently and inarticulately—that we need a phase change, a change in which everything is different.

Phase changes follow patterns regardless of physical or social makeup. They entail a change from one level of order to another. Phase changes are everywhere in nature: from ice to water, from water to steam, from iron to magnet, from seed to flower, from birth to life.

What does it take to make a phase change happen? Energy. Lot's of energy. Let's look at what it takes to change ice into liquid water:

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia

It takes only 1 calorie to raise the temperature of 1 gram (= 1 milliliter) of water by 1 degree C, but it takes 80 calories to transform 1 gram of ice into one gram of liquid water, and the temperature is still 0C! If the water were liquid at 0C, those 80 calories would raise the temperature to 80C!

We have seen examples of social phase change, most recently the Arab Spring. Figuratively speaking, the temperature is still there very cold, and the societies may yet refreeze, but there is now movement in these societies.

And what of management? Most management structures are still pretty inflexible, pretty frozen. But every Scrum team or Kanban project is part of the thaw. Every radical manager is a source of energy, helping his/her company to warmer spring.

Help us catalyze a phase change at the #Stoos Gathering: when have you experienced phase change? What made it happen? And how can we apply that to transform management?

#stoos: Global Management Warming Starts in Switzerland

Peter — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:08:00 +0000

W. Edwards Deming wrote decades ago that bonuses are bad for business. But most managers around the world are still using them.

Peter F. Drucker said ages ago that knowledge workers cannot be subordinates of managers. But managers still treat their staff as subordinates.

Dan Pink spoke on TED about motivation: what science knows and business ignores. Research tells us again and again that performance appraisals don’t work. But many companies keep relying on them as their primary evaluation technique.

Why? Why is management frozen and inflexible? Why is management changing so slowly?

10 years ago, the Agile Manifesto ignited a world-wide revolution in software development. Granted, the agile movement is still a work-in-progress. But we have made a lot of progress!

However, it seems the Arctic Ocean will have melted before we see traditional management replaced with a more functional paradigm. The rate at which it happens now is certainly not the same rate as the adoption of Scrum and Kanban. And companies are dieing as a consequence.

Is it too slow? Yes!!

Can we heat it up? Well, let’s talk about that…

The Stoos Gathering

Steve Denning (@stevedenning), Jurgen Appelo (@jurgenappelo), Franz Röösli (@roeoesli), and Peter Stevens (@peterstev) are bringing together a group of 20 thought leaders from around the world in Agile, Lean and Business leadership. It will be a 2-day gathering in Stoos, Switzerland on January 6-7, 2012. Our goal is to discuss how to accelerate the transformation of management around the world.

“We are looking to energize organizations in ways that make them better for the organizations themselves, better for the people doing the work, better for those for whom the work is being done, and better for society as a whole. And we want to understand how we can speed it up!”

Ideas for improving organizations have been around for decades. And yet, very little has happened. Change in business management is happening at a glacier pace. Can we help accelerate the transformation of the way organizations are run? Can we heat things up? Is there something that everyone can subscribe to and that will energize the movement for global change?

Is that something a repeat of solutions past solution? Surely not! Will it build on experience from around the world? Most definitely! Can you be part of it? Absolutely!

Help us prepare!

We are looking for your thoughts on how to energize and catalyze a global movement for organizational transformation. We recognize that all thought leaders have their own brands and flavors of management, but at the same time we see all our efforts as part of something larger.

Something global.

Something warmer.

Can you help us?

Please give us your input, in less than 100 words, here on my blog, or on Steve’s blog, or on Jurgens's blog, or via email. We will make sure your information is prominently radiated during the discussions in Stoos. Help us to stimulate our brains and contribute to a positive outcome of the Stoos Gathering.

Let’s generate some global management warming!

Send us your input and follow #stoos to stay involved.