The Second Dimension: Levers
In Part one we discussed the first dimension of an organisational capability model. A principle to prioritise / focus on Organisational outcomes, over Product, over Efficiency. If you haven’t read this then I recommend going to the link below first.
Part 1: the first dimension can be found here
Now clearly none of the elements above can be neglected, in fact none will work without the others, but the reality is every organisation has a culture and structure, every organisation has a service / product it provides and every organisation has some level of efficiency even if it is awful! So the key is to understand each dimension of your organisation, and then pick and prioritise improvement.
The Second Dimension
As I went through all the literature in my collection there were several other core concepts that clearly stood out to me. However these concepts were all ways to act upon the three outcome pillars. These core concepts I picked out were leadership of an organisation, the organisational systems and the practices and processes being used by the employees. These became the second dimension to consider when looking at how your organisation is working.
A great business needs:
Great leadership to inform the vision for its people, products and processes
Great systems to support and reinforce the vision, culture, and outcomes.
Great practices and processes from the latest and greatest in the industry to stay competitive, relevant and to deliver the services and outcomes with the lowest cost / time burden.
Our second dimension — leadership, systems and practices are the ‘how’ of creating, working and acting on each of the ‘what’ pillars of our organisation. The second dimension provides the mechanisms through which we find ways to make our efficiency, products/services and organisational structure better. This clearly leaves the ‘why’ missing which is already the subject of too many books to name but the Why, Purpose, Mission or whatever you prefer to call it is specific and personal to your organisation and the model is about how we can be great at achieving that. Onwards …
The Second Dimension: Leadership, Systems, or Practices?
The challenge question is: “which should we spend the most time on improving” Pick the order you would put these in (obviously they are all important):
Improving leadership of the organisation, services and efficiency
or Improving the systems used for the organisation, services and efficiency
or Improving the practices for the organisation, services and efficiency
If we expand these concepts a little it might help:
Leadership
The way in which leaders interact with and influence their organisation, examples:
How do leaders speak about productivity and efficiency.
The way leaders interact with staff, when they speak to them (only in a crisis?) and the frequency with which they communicate. Examples could be, if leaders speak as adults or treat staff as children (transactional analysis).
How does the leadership communicate and interact with staff when they are considering organisational or system change.
How leaders remunerate themselves in comparison to other staff.
How leaders deal with criticism, targets met and targets missed, do they empower, trust, chase scapegoats, or micromanage and change the systems in place.
The way in which leaders gather information for decision making and how they communicate their vision and intent within the organisation.
How the leaders learn and communicate their learning.
Systems
These are organisation wide or organisationally controlled standards or patterns which departments, teams or individuals are expected to adhere to. Many times these are implicit, not explicit within the organisation. These all significantly affect the way the organisation operates. A small selection of systems examples would be:
People ones: The time recording expectations; the hiring process; how to get training; the promotions, incentives and appointments processes; the external communications and participation and intellectual property rules. But also how are people treated when they bring issues to light, even as far as whistle blowing.
Environment ones: Where are the offices and what are the office rules
Delivery ones: The way we run projects or manage services, the way we assess risk and prioritise work.
Techy ones: The tools and technique choices a developer can make, the code review process and rules to release code to production.
Practices
These are specific ways in which people solve the problems given to them or the requirements imposed upon them by the system. Sometimes these are tools or techniques, other times they are ad hoc actions that are simply the easiest way to work within the constraints of the organisation. Examples are:
How is estimation done and how are timelines determined within teams or projects.
The team habits which are visible and displayed by a team and what individual habits are tolerated good and bad.
How are specifications written, and what analysis methods, testing practices, UX and coding practices are used.
The length of time team members wait for help.
The frequency of communication and effectiveness of collaboration. The way communication happens in a team or between teams.
The frequency our staff speak to our customers / users and how controlled it is.
The ways a team measures its success or productivity.
Which of these 3 macro aspects has the most influence on your outcomes of your Organisation?
I hope those 3 categories made sense and you were able to pick the order in which you would prioritise. Again, we have had a few surprises when looking at leaders’ answers compared to their reality.
We asked “Do you spend most of your time working to manage or improve the leadership, the systems or the practices of your teams?”. Most managers said they spend the majority of their time trying to improve daily practices. These seemed to fall into a few categories:
Resourcing. Issues such as timesheeting compliance, getting more staff, allocating staff and resources from one project to another.
Managing risk: Trying to diagnose why delivery is taking so long and making quick priority decisions.
Staff attitude and skills.
Tooling.
All these things that our leaders are spending so much time focussed on, I would see as symptoms and not the root causes. Most effort appears to be spent on practices to make up for deficiencies in the systems of the organisation, not making the organisation better! This would mean they are constantly giving paracetamol for the headache and not finding out why we have repeated headaches. As an example if we have two situations:
Is it more likely that either:
an employee deliberately gave themselves too much work so they needed to skimp on quality to deliver on time
or
is it more likely that the organisations prioritisation process allowed for the demand from sales and product management to be pushed onto the employee backlog.
Which symptom came first? Which root cause is triggering this relationship? I would argue staff don’t deliberately miss deadlines or ignore security or put bugs in their code unless there are systems at work which make these the clear and easiest choices to make.
In Out of the Crisis by Dr. W. Edwards Deming the grandfather of Lean thinking claims that 94 percent of variations observed in workers’ performance levels have nothing to do with the workers. Instead, most of the performance variations are caused by the system, of which those people are only a part. People can’t perform better than the system allows, which he explains in his book The System of Profound Knowledge. That only leaves 6 percent to special causes outside of the system — user error. He describes that the most effective way to improve and avoid these problems is not to blame others or even yourself, but to improve the system.
I am convinced that even if it is not 94% for knowledge workers like software developers, the system is by far the bigger trigger / root cause and so I would prioritise systems over practices.
For me, the question of where does leadership fit into the model was obvious. The organisational systems don’t design themselves! The architects of the systems are the leadership of the organisation.
So, the model should be leadership over systems over practices:
It raises the interesting question of, why, in our assessments, the majority of a manager’s daily effort is being allocated to resourcing, tooling, managing risk, prioritising, staff attitude, skills? All this practice management can be minimised by focussing on the managerial and leadership capabilities to create targeted, effective systems. I will go through some of the common ways we can help our managers escape this trap and skills to teach all new managers in the articles to follow.
So we must make sure our leaders are highly educated in the art of designing the right systems to get the right emergent practices from their teams.
This finishes the second key dimension to consider when assessing your organisation and gives us this final prioritised diagram
Again we have looked at a priority order which although fairly obvious, does not often get used in reality. Have a serious think about the time and effort being spent in your organisation and your teams. Is this effort on the lowest priority practices or on the leadership, people and organisational systems that drive the biggest gains.
Next installment: Deeper into the Organisational outcome dimension
If you’d like to talk to me and the team at The Adjacent, we work with leaders looking for the parts of organisations that should be prioritised to enable and shift the overall organisational effectiveness. We identify strengths and weaknesses using our model and work with leadership and teams to unpack these and devise improvements from small tweaks to large programmes.