Transformation is a continuous activity that allows organizations to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing world, transforming is not just going from a current state to a new state. As a transformation agent you guide sustainable change that allows people to be more effective and learn how to change for themselves.
You will be familiar with organizational design concepts that will help client organizations achieve greater business agility.
Organizational Change
Organizations are complex and changing them is an even more complex proposition. An empirical and informed approach to the change process improves the chances of success of a transformation. This approach may sometimes be talked about as a continuous journey or a process of organizational evolution.
Successfully helping an organization with change needs a certain level of emotional intelligence (see Self-Mastery) and skills in areas such as:
- Introducing Change
- Context for change – Taking the current context & future possible context of Organizational Design and explaining the reasons we need/want to change or not change (for example if there is no appetite).
- Complexity conscious – helping your client understand that organizations are complex in nature, so change should be empirical and people-driven rather than plan-driven.
- Culture awareness – helping your client understand the culture of the organization so that they can introduce appropriate change.
- Navigating Change
- Empirical change: establishing methods for transparency, inspection and adaptation
- Facilitate change events & activities – from launching a single team to guiding a full organization redesign.
- Ownership – Involving people impacted by the change in designing and implementing change.
- Safe to fail experiments – establish a safe environment where the expectation is that some experiments will fail.
- Working with organizational tensions to navigate change.
- Sustaining Change
- Create sustainable change: aid the organization to learn how to create and navigate change on their own
- Build internal capacity: Grow agile coaching capability in others
- Help change go viral: help create an environment where positive change can spread
- Learning culture: seek ways to help people build learning into to the way they work
- Deprecating ways of working and process: Remove those that no longer serve the people.
Competency Level Definitions:
1 Beginner
1 Beginner
Introducing Change
-
- List at least three emerging global challenges and how each makes our world more complex, unpredictable and/or volatile.
- Illustrate how a healthy agile approach supports the complexity and uncertainty of work.
- Describe the nature of complex systems.
- Discuss at least two ways to help the team with responding to impediments.
- Identify at least three common organizational impediments outside the scope of a team that impacts effectiveness.
- Describe how transparency, inspection and adaptation can support change.
- Describe the role continuous learning plays in sustaining change.
- Discuss how introducing change will require organizations to stop or adapt existing ways of working.
2 Advanced Beginner
2 Advanced Beginner
Introducing Change
- Explain the importance of discovering an organizational culture that supports shared accountability with teams.
- Explore at least one tool or technique to identify, understand and influence the culture within an organization.
- Explain how to approach an organizational change in a complex system.
- Explain the importance of taking a systemic view, helping stakeholders understand the whole system.
- Demonstrate how an effective approach to change should be flexible and adaptive to different situations.
- Apply at least two techniques to effect change outside of the team in order to help them be more productive.
- Experiment with at least one large-scale, participatory meeting format to facilitate/kick-off people-driven change.
- Explain the role building capability in people has on transformation sustainability.
- Discuss how to foster the courage in leaders on all levels to continue change.
- Describe a learning culture.
3 Practitioner
3 Practitioner
Introducing Change
- Analyze how change might be approached differently based on existing organizational culture, and the influence that culture has on speed, risk, and receptiveness to change.
- Analyze how change might be approached differently based on the system’s complexity.
- Facilitate a clear understanding of an organization’s unique and compelling reasons for being agile.
- Describe how organizational change impacts people and list three benefits of involving them in the change process.
- Compare at least two systematic methods for helping organizations improve.
- Analyze your approach to a complex intervention that addresses the root cause(s) of an organizational dysfunction.
- Demonstrate at least two tangible examples of how you changed the culture of your team or organization.
- Coached multiple groups to design/conduct people-driven change using large-scale, participatory meeting formats.
- Discuss transformation sustainability and give two approaches to developing organizational agile capabilities.
- Evaluate an experience with supporting the work of multiple teams in an organization and make improvements.
- Grow agile coaching capabilities in others, including transformation, some core skills and self-mastery.
4 Guide
4 Guide
Guide level guidance will be provided in a future update.
5 Catalyst
5 Catalyst
Catalyst level guidance will be provided in a future update.
1 Beginner
2 Advanced Beginner
3 Practitioner
4 Guide
5 Catalyst
Introducing Change
-
- List at least three emerging global challenges and how each makes our world more complex, unpredictable and/or volatile.
- Illustrate how a healthy agile approach supports the complexity and uncertainty of work.
- Describe the nature of complex systems.
- Discuss at least two ways to help the team with responding to impediments.
- Identify at least three common organizational impediments outside the scope of a team that impacts effectiveness.
- Describe how transparency, inspection and adaptation can support change.
- Describe the role continuous learning plays in sustaining change.
- Discuss how introducing change will require organizations to stop or adapt existing ways of working.
Introducing Change
- Explain the importance of discovering an organizational culture that supports shared accountability with teams.
- Explore at least one tool or technique to identify, understand and influence the culture within an organization.
- Explain how to approach an organizational change in a complex system.
- Explain the importance of taking a systemic view, helping stakeholders understand the whole system.
- Demonstrate how an effective approach to change should be flexible and adaptive to different situations.
- Apply at least two techniques to effect change outside of the team in order to help them be more productive.
- Experiment with at least one large-scale, participatory meeting format to facilitate/kick-off people-driven change.
- Explain the role building capability in people has on transformation sustainability.
- Discuss how to foster the courage in leaders on all levels to continue change.
- Describe a learning culture.
Introducing Change
- Analyze how change might be approached differently based on existing organizational culture, and the influence that culture has on speed, risk, and receptiveness to change.
- Analyze how change might be approached differently based on the system’s complexity.
- Facilitate a clear understanding of an organization’s unique and compelling reasons for being agile.
- Describe how organizational change impacts people and list three benefits of involving them in the change process.
- Compare at least two systematic methods for helping organizations improve.
- Analyze your approach to a complex intervention that addresses the root cause(s) of an organizational dysfunction.
- Demonstrate at least two tangible examples of how you changed the culture of your team or organization.
- Coached multiple groups to design/conduct people-driven change using large-scale, participatory meeting formats.
- Discuss transformation sustainability and give two approaches to developing organizational agile capabilities.
- Evaluate an experience with supporting the work of multiple teams in an organization and make improvements.
- Grow agile coaching capabilities in others, including transformation, some core skills and self-mastery.
Guide level guidance will be provided in a future update.
Catalyst level guidance will be provided in a future update.
Organizational Design
As a transformation agent you grow knowledge that will support an organization’s transformation to become a more adaptable, resilient, outcome-focused and people-centric organization. We do this by taking a system view, helping clients design experiments introducing them to new organizational principles and patterns. This affords your business the freedom and flexibility to achieve its purpose. No matter what the future brings.
- Organizational Operating System – knowledge of approaches that could help organizations better achieve their goals and support the culture you want to create:
- Decision making – how power is shared and how decisions get made.
- Structures, policies and metrics – how we organize ourselves and work together in a way resilience, adaptability, focusing on outcomes.
- Innovation – how we learn and discover new ideas.
- Roles and teams – how we take responsibility for getting work done.
- Organize Around the Delivery of Value: How an organization is designed for the delivery of value that is aligned with healthy decision making no matter the complexity of the organization.
- People Advocacy – organizations are made up of people and they are the center of everything we do.
- Create policies that include all people and allow for diversity of thinking.
- Advocate for people’s growth, wellbeing, and create space for peoples self care.
- Purpose – what’s the change we want to see in the world, even beyond making money.
- Motivation – ensuring that extrinsic and intrinsic factors of motivation are in balance and aligned to the organization’s goals.
Competency Level Definitions:
1 Beginner
1 Beginner
Organizational Operating System
- Identify at least three challenges an organization might face when undertaking an agile approach beyond a single team.
- Describe the characteristics organizations need to develop to be able to face today’s world and market challenges.
- Describe how the agile principles change an organization’s approach to delivering value.
- Describe what is valuable, recognizing that there are different types.
- List at least three ways that traditional management changes in the Agile workplace.
- Describe the value of having a clear and compelling vision.
- Describe intrinsic motivation and why it is important.
2 Advanced Beginner
2 Advanced Beginner
Organizational Operating System
- Explain how culture and the way value is interpreted are related, and how that relationship will affect organizational outcomes.
- Guide understanding of at least three benefits and drawbacks of feature teams and component teams.
- Explain how an organization’s structures, policies and measures impact its culture.
- Facilitate at least three techniques for visualizing, managing, or reducing dependencies between teams.
- Describe at least three challenges to creating value flow when applying agile approaches across an organizational system.
- Teach three ways to help a team align their goals with those of the organization.
- Apply at least two patterns for increasing trust and collaboration between multiple teams.
- Identify at least three organizational practices that increase people’s autonomy.
- Teach the value of investing in people’s growth over just training them to do a job.
3 Practitioner
3 Practitioner
Organizational Operating System
- Experiment with at least three techniques to improve inter-team collaboration.
- Apply scaling practices and methods that can be helpful without adding the overhead of an entire scaling framework when necessary.
- Assess organizational structures, policies and metrics, describe how they impact organization culture and create value.
- Describe an organizational design that enables multiple teams to work on the same product.
- Contrast at least two patterns for applying Product Ownership across multiple teams.
- Facilitate growth of understanding as to what is value and what are products.
- Facilitate and nurture the growth of people.
- Apply practices that give agency to people and teams.
- Facilitate the movement of decision making away from management towards the people involved in the work.
4 Guide
4 Guide
Guide level guidance will be provided in a future update.
5 Catalyst
5 Catalyst
Catalyst level guidance will be provided in a future update.
1 Beginner
2 Advanced Beginner
3 Practitioner
4 Guide
5 Catalyst
Organizational Operating System
- Identify at least three challenges an organization might face when undertaking an agile approach beyond a single team.
- Describe the characteristics organizations need to develop to be able to face today’s world and market challenges.
- Describe how the agile principles change an organization’s approach to delivering value.
- Describe what is valuable, recognizing that there are different types.
- List at least three ways that traditional management changes in the Agile workplace.
- Describe the value of having a clear and compelling vision.
- Describe intrinsic motivation and why it is important.
Organizational Operating System
- Explain how culture and the way value is interpreted are related, and how that relationship will affect organizational outcomes.
- Guide understanding of at least three benefits and drawbacks of feature teams and component teams.
- Explain how an organization’s structures, policies and measures impact its culture.
- Facilitate at least three techniques for visualizing, managing, or reducing dependencies between teams.
- Describe at least three challenges to creating value flow when applying agile approaches across an organizational system.
- Teach three ways to help a team align their goals with those of the organization.
- Apply at least two patterns for increasing trust and collaboration between multiple teams.
- Identify at least three organizational practices that increase people’s autonomy.
- Teach the value of investing in people’s growth over just training them to do a job.
Organizational Operating System
- Experiment with at least three techniques to improve inter-team collaboration.
- Apply scaling practices and methods that can be helpful without adding the overhead of an entire scaling framework when necessary.
- Assess organizational structures, policies and metrics, describe how they impact organization culture and create value.
- Describe an organizational design that enables multiple teams to work on the same product.
- Contrast at least two patterns for applying Product Ownership across multiple teams.
- Facilitate growth of understanding as to what is value and what are products.
- Facilitate and nurture the growth of people.
- Apply practices that give agency to people and teams.
- Facilitate the movement of decision making away from management towards the people involved in the work.
Guide level guidance will be provided in a future update.
Catalyst level guidance will be provided in a future update.