New Ways of Working
Why talk about “New Ways of Working” in the first place?
It is best answered by ‘Murmuration’, see the video below….
“Complicated behaviour can be caused by relatively simple individual patterns”. W. Brian Arthur, Pioneer in the science of complexity theory
The video shows thousands of starlings doing the same thing: staying as close as possible to those around them, resulting in complex figures.
“Individual actors react to economic situations created by others. This changes the situation, causing other actors to change their strategies again”. This creates a world in which individuals, banks, companies, and investors are always adapting to the situation around them. It’s a world where “Adaptive strategies and actions are constantly being ‘tested’ for survival.”
In order to survive, individuals and organizations need to keep evolving and adapting their strategies to their changing (economical) context. Organizations incapable of changing quickly enough will cease to exist.
That is why in the world of rapidly evolving business models, adapting to ‘New Ways of Working’ has become a matter of survival for organisations of all shapes and sizes.
The team at Corporate Rebels visited 150 pioneers, rebels and revolutionaries — made up of organizations, entrepreneurs, academics and business leaders (see map below) who change the status quo of frustrating workplaces.
Insights from meeting and speaking with these leaders resulted in 8 trends and practices that were crucial in transforming ways of working in their various organisations covering Government, IT, Services, and Manufacturers. Those trends prominently highlight a transition of patterns from what is considered traditional ways of working into what is increasingly being called ‘New Ways of Working’.
- From ‘Profit’ to ‘Purpose & values’
- From ‘Hierarchical pyramid’ to ‘Network of teams’
- From ‘Directive leadership’ to ‘Supportive leadership’
- From ‘Plan & predict’ to ‘Experiment & adapt’
- From ‘Rules & control’ to ‘Freedom &trust’
- From ‘Centralised authority’ to ‘Distributed decision making’
- From ‘Secrecy’ to ‘Radical transparency’
- From ‘Job descriptions’ to ‘Talents & mastery’
You can read about the trends in detail here along with reference case studies.
The trends listed above echo the generally promoted principles of agility that most of us have possibly come across — focus within an organisation on a culture value generation, avoiding waste, promoting trust and transparency.
The music company Spotify promotes, for example, the following culture within its Engineering practices. What has become known as the Spotify Model has been the subject of research and discourse in reputed research journals for example here about balancing employee autonomy, accountability and here about agility at scale.
To summarise, the Spotify Model promotes the following patterns:
Agile Principles over Scrum Practices
Servant Leadership over being a Master. A leader’s job is to communicate what problems need to be solved and why. The squad’s job is to communicate with each other and find the best solution. Different squads follow a self-serve model and enable each other.
Be autonomous but don’t sub optimise -alignment enables autonomy
Follow a community approach over organisational structure
Cross-pollinate practices over standardisation
Enable an internal open-source model
Small but frequent releases. Decouple releases. Utilise release trains with feature toggles to reduce technical debt and optimise feature releases.
Focus on motivation. Value people. Trust is more important than Control. Agility at Scale requires Trust at Scale.
Practice Continuous Improvement. An experiment and fail friendly environment, where failure recovery is valued over failure avoidance. Limit the ‘blast radius’ by a decoupled architecture and gradual release of new features. Minimise the need for big projects.
A healthy culture fixes broken processes — value delivery is more important than plan fulfillment. Adopt a waste repellent culture.
Value innovation over predictability — provide for ‘hack time’ and organise ‘hack week(s)’ to make “cool things” real. People are natural innovators.
If we distill the patterns, we would see them correlate to the 8 trends that we saw earlier.
Use Case: Agile Transformation at ING Bank (https://agilebusinessmanifesto.com/agilebusiness/agile-transformation-at-ing/)
To sign it off here is a nice article that reinforces some of the principles and patterns discussed earlier with examples from the industry. Digital transformation is not about technology — it is about understanding the underlying business’ strategy, trusting and leveraging the knowledge of the insiders, engaging with customers, optimising existing processes, and overall bringing in a start-up culture.