strategy – Manage Complexity

05/03/202505/03/2025

Organizational accountability with highly autonomous teams

Dear leader,

You’re always accountable for what your part of the organization does.

This is manifested by law for top management, and in most organizations, this expectation ripples down the leader hierarchy. You are held accountable by the leader above you, and you work to keep your employees accountable to the organization. You wish to know the person you can go to when things are not going according to plan.

Western culture deeply ingrains a focus on individual accountability. Even though we know that few business successes have been achieved by individuals, we tend to celebrate the individual at the top of the organization. When things go wrong, we tend to look for an individual who made a mistake further down the ladder.

We know that it is too simplistic. Any business challenge is a complex combination of market, customers, users, technologies, etc., that all continuously develops. Business success is the sum of many decisions made by accountable people throughout the organization daily.

Organizations worldwide have successfully implemented autonomous cross-functional teams to achieve the needed business agility. Using the diverse skill sets in the team, they cope with the complexity of the multiple dimensions and iterate toward optimal solutions for the customers.

This, however, definitively breaks the illusion of a simple chain of single accountability. At the organization’s lowest level, every decision results from collaboration between a diverse group of people, who collectively balance the many concerns that each represents.

Many leaders experience a glass floor between them and these autonomous teams. They find it hard to enforce accountability like they did before. I previously wrote a little piece¹ about this frustration and gave some examples of how team members are not only focussing on their individual success but also can contribute to the greater good of the organization.

In this article, I aim to illustrate how you as a leader can organize and work with autonomous cross-functional teams and secure accountability not only to local success but also to the organization as a whole. Cross-organizational accountability is necessary if you want customers/users to have a cohesive experience and if you want higher productivity through, e.g., standardization and reuse.

05/03/202505/03/2025

Your glass floor is their glass ceiling

Dear leaders,

Many of you have invested much time and money in new ways of working in your organizations to empower autonomous teams either because you really understand the benefits they can gain in both the efficiency² and value³ of the products they develop. Or because you’ve been under the influence by current trends or expensive consultants like McKinsey or alike, who are now also recommending modern product teams as the way to organize for future challenges. It’s been the same promises that’ve been made during the last three decades – since the birth of Agile.

You bought into the need for more business agility to be able to compete and saw a chance to find a path out of the heavy process that slowed down the organization. But many of you who have moved in this direction have also experienced that the promises made have been hard to fulfill and have not come without significant challenges.

You were also promised transparency, but for many it seems more like a glass floor through which they can observe the organization than insights they can use to understand and act upon. For example, they miss what we perceived as clear requirements and progress of projects in the old days. How did we end here?

We’ve all been surprised that following team empowerment, for example, comes resistance from the teams to the organization’s traditional line of command, i.e., the behaviors of leaders.

Suddenly, teams begin to

question your strategy,
find portfolio planning suboptimal,
request or resist organizational changes,
diverge from enterprise architecture
refuse to accept deadlines,
refuse to be measured,
etc. etc.

When did that become a concern of theirs? That is how leaders control the organization!

12/03/202412/03/2024

Three Decades of Agile

The Agile Manifesto [1], created in 2001, brought about a significant shift in the development of (software) products. The values and principles in the manifesto have since evolved and expanded, and we continue to discover better ways to implement them. Overall, the changes have been positive and continue to benefit the industry.

This article discusses the journey we have collectively taken over the past few decades and predicts what is to come. It also highlights the varying levels of maturity that different teams possess, as well as the obstacles that may impede their ability to create value now and in the future.

This discussion is relevant to every team and organization, whether they face challenges typical of previous decades, current challenges, or future challenges. Those who fail to rise to the challenge risk being outperformed by those who do.

In this article, I will refer to the decades as if they represent clear milestones of progress. However, this is a rough oversimplification of what has happened in the Agile community, as well as for individual organizations and teams.

My intention is not to suggest that organizations and teams struggling with issues associated with earlier decades are old-fashioned or doing things wrong. Each organization and team faces unique challenges and has its legacy to contend with. However, I have learned that referring to 2000s-level teams, from a change perspective, is much more potent than addressing structural team problems. The latter is too easy to ignore or make excuses for.

12/05/202013/05/2020

Strategizing over Strategy

“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. Eisenhower⁴. 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 ⁵

20 years later after Andrew’s book, i.e., 30 years ago, the management thinker Henry Mintzberg⁶ 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.