| REFLECTIONS | WHAT WORKED AND DIDNT WORK - bdemirjian/apbr2 GitHub Wiki
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CULTURAL
CONTEXT
It is November 2019 I have just joined Endurance International Group, a 4.5k person hosting holding company. Using my new "employee" status, I decided to experiment some ideas I had recently learned about relating organizational cultures. The Westrum Topology as described in the book Accelerate, is palatable to my leadership in the right place and in the right way.
APPLICATION
In cataloging observations and making inquiries into failure modes, various trends reveal themselves. I choose to take the risk of making memes of these trends. To secure feed-back I mounted these on the main route to the restrooms, that the R&D teams would take. NOT the route executive row took to the restrooms. Feed-back is simply by adding a tally mark to that meme you have witnessed in the last quarter.
Westrum Topology Panels
Pathological
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Pathological (power-oriented) organizations are characterized by large amounts of fear and threat. People often hoard information or withhold it for political reasons, or distort it to make themselves look better.
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Bureaucratic (rule-oriented) organizations protect departments. Those in the department want to maintain their “turf,” insist on their own rules, and generally do things by the book—their book.
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Generative (performance-oriented) organizations focus on the mission. How do we accomplish our goal? Everything is subordinated to good performance, to doing what each of us are supposed to do.
FINDINGS
Data Collection Methods
Data is crowd-sourced from volunteer participants. They used the dry erase marker to add tally marks near the meme they recognize. Weekly recording and clearing of votes to avoid bias.
OUTCOMES
The results were unflattering of leadership, they were "tagged" as Pathological in many of their decisions. Leadership chose to run an experiment in a single business unit for the next quarter, they wanted to see how far down the hierarchy we could push decisions. The agile and product teams were tasked with developing, implementing this experiment.
HALTED EXPERIMENTS
The merger of endurance group international and web.com changed the context. The impact of Covid-19 upon our co-located environment further changed the context. Other less pronounced changes, such as losses of agile champions, and elevation of traditionalists pushed the context to the point where my immediate supervisors advised cancellation. I agreed and we moved to seek other opportunities.
SCALING
CONTEXT
Post merger of two 2,000 person plus tech organizations forming a combined force a year later of 3,500. The new leadership team self-identified as a mix of short-term thinkers and medium-term thinkers. Most of these business units requested road mapping planning sessions each quarter. The new organization consists of a number of people who were very recently elevated into these positions due to the merger.
Stratified Systems Theory
This theory provides a potential floor for | How Leadership of Your Organization is Planning
We chose to consider it a kind of reverse-lookup on how far out in time teams are effectively planning and able to respect said plans. The limits of this thinking are:
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Organization | Mission and Goal Volatility Influences how far in time we can effectively plan.
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Leadership | Incentive Programs As long as leadership incentives are aligned with the Goals, we positioned for success.
APPLICATION
As one of only two enterprise coaches, I worked with my counter-part to track those business units that requested road mapping and then followed up monthly to evaluate how they maintained their road map with the reality on the ground. We then used this information and compared it to the self-identified short-term thinker leaders and found a strong correlation.
OUTCOMES
We, the enterprise coaches, now are selective in and how we apply our road mapping expertise to optimize the outcomes. The other business unit leaders are currently respecting this position.