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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11 © 2015 Ken Power Three factors shape patterns and form the conditions for self-organization in human systems
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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
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kenpower
[email protected] http://kenpower.ie/
With some graphics by
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