Setting goals is hard, and it is even harder to reach them. As individuals, we struggle to do so, despite our efforts being directed to achieve a few things for ourselves.
As organizations, it becomes infinitely more complicated than this. There are goals ranging from corporate objectives to individual targets, with the intention to improve balance, sales, productivity, technology, and skills, among others. These goals are all expected to bring the organisation forward cohesively.
In every organization, you see the evidence of how hard this is, because members
feel doubt about where they need to go to be successful or
experience that the goals lead the organization in what they perceive to be the wrong direction, or
experience that they can only influence goals very indirectly from their position, or
find themselves in conflict with other parts of the organization, etc.
These examples all lead to hesitation that reduces the joined force of the organization. Imagine if we had a way to avoid this waste.
In product development, we have learned that autonomous cross-functional teams focusing on users create the most value. The methods we use have undergone significant development over the last three decades, and it is well described how a single team should work to achieve great results; however, it has proven not to be easy or straightforward. On the contrary, many organizations are struggling to maximize value creation. Especially at scale, where many teams work on the same offerings, previous approaches have proved insufficient.
In this article, I will share how a different perspective on team structure design can overcome the typical barriers to optimizing value creation through the right team topology.
I will
challenge your beliefs on how your development organization creates most value for you and your customers.
teach you how to design a team structure optimized for value creation,
possibly also surprise you how this approach also simplifies the way the organization works.
“In preparing for battle, I have always found that strategies are useless, but strategizing is indispensable” might be a frank reformulation of the famous quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower1. Still, the truth of the increasingly complex business environment is that plans and strategies are invalidated faster and faster. Few CEOs nowadays honestly think that their 5-year or even 3-year strategy is going to last.
Nevertheless, many CEOs nowadays have forgotten that “… strategy has two equally important aspects, interrelated in life … The first of these is formulation; the second implementation … in real life, the processes of formulation and implementation are intertwined. Feedback from operations gives notice of changing environmental factors to which the strategy should be adjusted. The formulation of strategy is not finished when implementation begins. A business organization is always changing in response to its own makeup and past development. Similarly, it should be changing in response to changes in the larger systems in which it moves and in response to its success or failure in affecting its environment.” Andrews 1971 2
20 years later after Andrew’s book, i.e., 30 years ago, the management thinker Henry Mintzberg3 further discussed the difference between the intended strategy and the realized strategy created by responding to internal and external changes (see figure to the right). He argues that only a small proportion of the realized strategy is deliberate while the emergent part increases over time.
Every part of running an organization has become more complex over the last thirty years, which means that organizations must continuously strategize to transform changes to emergent strategy.
In its simplest form that means that the strategy-process changes from a perceived linear stage-gate process to a continuous iterative strategizing process as illustrated below:
The first consequence of thinking like this is that a strategy is never new – it is rather an improvement of what was already there. If you think about it: Was there ever a new strategy except when the founders of the company first met ‘in the garage’? Whatever followed that day was adjustments to an existing strategy, organization, products, adjusted customer focus, etc. No matter how radical a new strategy seems, it always contains a continuation of an existing business.
Another consequence of replacing long strategy-periods with continuous strategizing becomes clear as strategy iterations are getting shorter, i.e., the strategy is adjusted more often due to changes/feedback: The people who’re strategizing must be closer to daily business to shorten the feedback loop. The easiest way to get the feedback into the strategy loop is to involve people from the organization who are in the feedback loops with customers, namely those who are in continuous contact with them directly or through IT-systems.
The top-down multi-year-strategy-process was easy to understand, but it has become irrelevant.
The ambition of this article is to make it very concrete how strategies can become more like a living organism than a static document, and make it clearer how strategizing involving large parts of the organization continuously and rapidly can adapt the strategy relevantly. This should be an indispensable capability of every organization.
