The key role of leadership in adaptive organizations
Key takeaways:
Most organizations never get the desired results from a reorganization
The 3-day offsite “reorg” is almost guaranteed to be a costly failure
A better approach is adaptive, continuous adjustment
Use open techniques from Team Topologies to shift and adapt the organization
“Hi, we’re going off-site with our leadership team and we’d like you to join us and help redesign our operating model during those 3 days.”
We receive this kind of requests almost weekly, with minor variations on ‘3 days, 3 weeks’ or - if we’re lucky - ‘3 months’. Our answer always being: “no”.
Of course, the answer is a bit more nuanced than that, so let us use this article to bring some awareness to the complexity of that question. We hope it can shed some light on the difficult situation many leaders face today and the real solutions they actually need from us.
Frequently, changes are hurriedly imposed from the top down without proper communication, leaving employees confused about the reasons behind the changes and how they should adapt. Leadership, in turn, often lacks clarity about the desired outcomes, priorities, and next steps. This misalignment leads to leaders managing change in isolation, without coordinating with their peers.
Leaders are flooded with top-down directives to "manage" change, leading to change fatigue, confusion, and demotivation within their teams. They find themselves pulled in multiple directions, feeling pressured to solve every problem and please everyone. The outcome is a leadership team perpetually stuck in ‘transformation’ cycles, battling constant - perceived - resistance, assuming a controlling role, and ultimately failing to achieve the desired results.
Furthermore, given the current pace of change, continually reinventing your operating model is impractical. By the time a new design is implemented, it is often already outdated due to ongoing internal and external changes. These big changes, top-down and disruptive changes are extremely damaging to employees. They often feel like passive recipients of change, leading to confusion and an inability to contribute effectively. They must navigate new responsibilities, team dynamics, and reporting structures, often without a clear understanding of the purpose or expected outcomes.
So when leaders ask us to ‘help design a new structure for their organization’ in the shortest possible time, we don’t feel very keen on contributing to the chaos. Instead, we ask them to invite us along during one of those off-site days and take them on a journey to uncover how leadership can create an environment in which constant change can emerge.
Adaptive Organizations: Sensing, Sharing, Solving
The reason why many organizations don’t get the desired results from reorganizations and (digital) transformation, is because they haven’t clearly defined their vision. Why do we need to change? What are the outcomes we want to see? During our workshop, we can confirm that ‘why?’ seems to be the most difficult question. And more importantly, how can you - as a leader - translate this need to your role in leadership and to your teams?
Aligning on the intent behind the change is crucial. Because ‘change for the sake of change’ doesn’t make any sense and will never make people feel engaged. A clear purpose, vision and translation to each person's role is absolutely essential for success.
Leaders of successful adaptive organizations recognize that the path to value creation lies in talent development and growth. They empower their teams to make informed team design decisions which allow the organization to adapt successfully in a constantly changing world. Creating an environment that supports this can seem daunting at first, often being met with the question, “where do we even start?“
Our recommendation is to begin by introducing and using a shared language for organization design that helps to optimize for a faster flow of value and enables leaders and team members to:
Sense challenges that are blocking or inhibiting the flow of value.
Share those challenges in a format that everyone understands.
Solve those challenges by collaborating with purpose and intent.
Following this ‘sense it, share it, solve it’ approach helps to move towards more effective team interactions that result in faster value delivery whilst making teams happier by managing the cognitive load of people on the teams.
During our leadership workshop, we don’t only focus on bringing alignment and exploring ways in which their role can enable true adaptivity. We also put them to work. With Team Interaction Modeling, they use the Team Topologies shapes and interaction modes to visualize the current state of their department or value stream. By doing so, they identify where awkward interactions are happening. Where are teams collaborating without real purpose, where can we spot hand-offs and time spent waiting?
By modeling their current state, leadership will gain shared insight into the blockers to flow and possible causes of high cognitive load for teams.
Very often, these aha-moments lure managers into their fix-it-mode. They immediately start discussing ways to solve the problem. We actually love when that happens because we get to take them outside of their comfort zone once again. Before thinking about ‘future states’, we ask them to take a moment to reflect on ‘team evolution’. How can you enable evolution towards unblocking flow? What would the teams need in order to explore more effective ways of working? Those steps in between are even more important than a possible ‘solution’, because these states will give you all the information you need to validate the direction you’re heading. They are needed to ensure cognitive load doesn’t increase during the transitions and people are fully supported and informed.
Of course we also spend some time on visualizing what a desired state could look like. But we also point out the many assumptions made along the way.
In the end, it’s clear that any design made without the involvement of the people who are actually doing the work, is destined to fail. Leadership will become aware of where they can support the teams in gaining the needed vocabulary, practices and tools but also the safe space to start using those. To start enabling change to be continuous and ultimately, be the innovative and adaptive organization you desire to be.
Is your organization operating in a high-paced environment?
Do you feel the struggle to keep leadership aligned on desired outcomes and people motivated to achieve them?
Before we step into this leadership workshop, we spend some time together in a 2 hour , free discovery session to make sure that we too are aligned with your needs and understand exactly your expectations and desired outcomes.
About the authors:
Erica Engelen, TTVP
Erica is a Business Agility Coach, driven by a deep passion for both people and technology. She is an early adopter of Team Topologies and experienced how easy it was to establish a common language with organizations based on the concepts in the book. She has vast experience in supporting organizations in increasing their agility, resilience, and innovative power by using Team Topologies alongside other practices covering the sociotechnical system.
Working in technology for over 20 years – and especially her experience in Open Source organizations – shaped her holistic approach to business agility. True agility necessitates simultaneous improvements on technology, structure, culture, and the work itself if you aspire sustainable and impactful results.
Rich Allen, TTVP
Rich has been developing software and helping organisations implement lean and agile ways of working for over two decades. Specializing in the application of Continuous Improvement practices he helps businesses to uncover bottlenecks, highlight opportunities to optimise for flow and introduce ways of encouraging feedback in a culture of continuous learning. Rich is also co-founder of the Developer South Coast technology user group in the UK which has been helping developers discover and learn about new technologies for over thirteen years.
