I'm a fan of Simon Wardley's thinking - he did an excellent Google Firestarters talk a few years ago, and I drew on some of his work in my first and second book. His approaches to understanding situational context and strategy with Wardley Mapping are exceptional. The doctrine have been described as value-based ideas and 'what we choose to believe are universally-applicable principles' in an organisation (for example putting users first, being open to challenge, and one of my favourites - use appropriate methods). In his post/chapter on the subject from a few years ago Simon set out a whole series of doctrine which are useful in helping leaders to better deal with change and complexity and avoid some of the classic mistakes that can come from a lack of context, situational awareness or nuance in how you set out to transform the organisation or create a strategy. The post also includes a good list of critical biases which are surprisingly common in business but which can also get in the way of good understanding and strategy creation, and also a table which sets out a phased approach for applying different doctrine (click on the below image to make it larger or better still check out the original):
Simon suggests that teams can score themselves against the criteria set out in the table to make an honest assessment of where they are. There's a really useful online version of the table where you can do that here. The four phases set out in the table are broadly:
- Stopping self-harm: focused on awareness, preventing further damage to the business, things that you need to do before you start to do any kind of radical change - includes doctrine like situational awareness, using a common language, challenging assumptions, knowing your customers, using appropriate methods
- Becoming more context aware: focuses on moving forwards and using and applying the context and includes thing like ways of thinking (FIRE - Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, Elegant), managing failure, using appropriate tools, managing inertia, iterative strategy, distributing power, bias to action.
- Better for less: which is about constant improvement and optimisation, and includes elements like autonomy mastery and purpose, accepting uncertainty, being humble, a bias towards the new, taking responsibility, inspiring others.
- Continuously evolving: focused on creating an organisation that can withstand shocks and changes (what I've described before as the 'antifragile organisation'). This is about designing for continuous evolution, deploying the pioneers, settlers, town-planners idea, understanding transience and exploiting the landscape.
The phases are important since if we try to create radical change without establishing the fundamentals it will simply fail. Agile coach Steve Purkis has visualised Simon's phases in a particularly useful way which emphasises the need for communication and development before you get to scaled structures and leading. I'm including the visual here for completeness (again, click on it for a larger version) but the original is here:
All of this aligns nicely with the approaches that I set out in my first and second books and my point about how we need to take a staged approach to transformation but also to be adaptive with how we implement change programmes. In other words we need to BE agile about how we SCALE agile.