For the past year, I’ve been helping one of my clients with company wide adoption of their enterprise architecture. Their pursuit of this has been long, and filled with challenges. So far, they’ve approached it by utilizing external advisors, communicating rules through the chain of command, facilitating consensus decision making, project manager driven transformations, and creating new lead roles oriented around architecture. Because previous attempts had failed, we realized that the disposition of the system was not conducive to the change they were hoping to make. But it was also not well understood. So as an alternative to conventional wisdom, we Estuarine Mapped adoption of enterprise architecture. Despite the training…
Hands on experience with Hexi Base Kit v.2
A few weeks ago, I received the Hexi Base Kit V2 from The Cynefin Company. It features 120 Hexis, and contains core Cynefin and SenseMaker methods. Last week, I used it with Johan Axelson, Johan Sjöström, and Christian Fredrikson and I wanted to share our experiences with it. I want to mention, as I think is important, that we are all familiar with the Cynefin frameworks, both in theory and application. We approached the exercise from two perspectives: Participants: We aimed to explore and “solve” public transportation issues. Facilitators: We took pauses to reflect on what we would do as facilitators if we saw groups behave as us. First challenge…
Case Study – Overwhelmed Engineering Managers: Causes and Solutions
The Challenge: Role Complexity and Overwhelm Following a reorganization at one of my clients, various formal and informal leadership roles were consolidated into a new position—the Engineering Manager. This role encompassed a wide range of responsibilities, from recruitment and career development to handling expenses, internal mobility, product and value creation, collaboration and processes, and technology. The large scale of the organization, along with technical interdependencies between teams, exacerbated the situation. Within two years, no two Engineering Managers were executing the role in the same manner. As a result, certain aspects were inevitably neglected, affecting team performance, value creation, or quality. The Study: A Comprehensive Analysis Instead of running a…
My hideous bushes, the ladybugs, and the daisies
This is blogpost two in a series of posts originating from the ”Re-Wilding Agile” Masterclass that I took with Dave Snowden. In this post, I look at how we too often destroy symbiotic relationships that have emerged over time and through necessity. And how it is our vanity and ideals about “what workplaces should look like” or “how people ought to collaborate” that is the source of this. I start this post with a story about my garden and its ladybug and aphids. I then relate my story to the work we do as coaches and managers with agile and organizations. I share examples of how managers and coaches actively…
Restoring Evolution
When Charles Darwin studied the animals on the Galapagos islands, he found that finches had adapted to their circumstances and developed distinct traits. Some Finches had evolved to eat seeds, some to spear insects, and eat cactus fruit and seeds. They evolved together with their environment over a very long period of time. Their beaks have high utility in their contexts yet if you moved a Ground Finch to an environment where the main source of food were cactus, that finch might starve, or at least struggle with food. Harvard Medical School and Margaret Bowman Re-wilding Agile For the past months, I’ve participated in Dave Snowden’s training “Re-wilding Agile“. It…