This topic addresses the following: Tame the monster of Enterprise Agility Chaos (how structured feedback unleashes the power of Enterprise Agility)
An executive leader directs their organization with a strategic orientation from the top down; strategic plans, deliverables, and deadlines are part of a common set of business expectations. An agile team responds to deliverables with an opportunistic orientation from the bottom up; responding to change, managing work in process, and value stream flow are a part of a common set of execution expectations. Enterprise Agility requires that the two perspectives converge in the middle where Strategy meets Execution.
From the executive leader’s perspective (top down), an agile team execution may appear to be loosely measured activities that wander and may even devolve into chaos. From the perspective of the agile team (bottom up), the executive leader’s requests may appear to be old-school, non-agile directives. The two perspectives converge systematically (top-down and bottom-up) through structured feedback; in fact, these perspectives not only converge but they also reinforce each other.
By introducing concrete practices for structured feedback, two key guardrail principles are reinforced: alignment and feedback. In the practice of structured feedback, alignment is driven through concreate practices for business value delivery; in concert with alignment, feedback is driven through concrete practices for holistic comparison and adaptation. The two are intertwined in the structured feedback approach. In the end, structured feedback for Enterprise Agility becomes an operational equivalent of combining Middle-Up-Down Management (Nonaka) and Double-Loop Learning (Argyris).
A first level drill-down into the details provides some key insights and action items:
Alignment practices feed two key alignment principles: 1. take something BIG and turn it into something “tiny” that adds a lot of value, keeping the “holistic” system in context, and 2. it’s not enough to combine practices such as Scrum and Kanban; they must be put in the context of business value delivery. The first set of alignment practices deals with scope and increment sizes. The second set of alignment practices transforms from activity-centric practices to value-centric practices. Both sets of practices are captured through application of constructs such as Objective and Key Results [OKR] (Niven and Lamorte) and Minimum Business Increments [MBI] (Shalloway).
Feedback practices feed three (3) dimensions: 1. Voice of Client (Market); 2. Voice of Business (Strategy); and 3. Voice of Value (connects increments [deliverables], consumption [metrics], and strategic objectives [forecast]). These three feedback dimensions flow neatly from Lean Startup (Ries), Lean UX (Gothelf), and/or Solution Life Cycle (Czuchry) constructs.
Here are three key takeaways to help “tame the monster” at the Enterprise level:
- An executive feeling of Chaos is common initially; it inherently emerges from conflicting expectations across an enterprise;
- The Chaos must be tamed for sustainability; the key is to address where Strategy and Execution interact by providing explicitly structured incremental feedback;
- Structured feedback incrementally orchestrates alignment and feedback across multiple dimensions of organizational execution.