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 even more complex. An empirical and informed approach to the change process improves the chances of success of a transformation. This approach is a continuous journey, 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, 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 complete 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 in learning 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 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 volatile.
- Illustrate how a healthy agile approach supports the complexity and uncertainty of work.
- Describe the nature of complex systems.
Navigating Change
- Discuss at least two ways to help the team respond to impediments.
- Identify at least three common organizational impediments outside a team’s scope that impact effectiveness.
- Describe how transparency, inspection and adaptation can support change.
Sustaining 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.
Navigating Change
- 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 to help them be more productive.
- Experiment with at least one large-scale, participatory meeting format to facilitate/kick off people-driven change.
Sustaining Change
- Explain the role that 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 to approach change differently based on existing organizational culture, system complexity, and the influence this has on speed, risk, and receptiveness to change.
- Implement organizational change referencing a known change framework or technique to benefit from industry-level expertise.
- Facilitate a clear understanding of an organization’s unique and compelling reasons for being agile.
Navigating Change
- Describe how organizational change impacts people and list three benefits of involving them in the change process.
- Analyze your approach to a complex intervention that addresses an organisational dysfunction’s root cause(s).
- 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.
Sustaining Change
- Discuss transformation sustainability and give two approaches to developing the ability to own sustainable changes
- Evaluate an experience with supporting the work of multiple teams in an organization and identify potential improvements.
- Grow agile coaching capabilities in others, including transformation, some core skills and self-mastery.
4 Guide
4 Guide
Introducing Change
- Lead an organizational change in a way that allows adjustment based on inspection of that change.
- Implement context-sensitive adaptations using appropriate techniques from various change frameworks.
- Plan and contribute to a significant or high-profile organizational change.
Navigating Change
- Demonstrate competency in successfully recognising and applying three change frameworks.
- Demonstrate success working with senior leaders to foster improvement at the organizational level.
- Explain various approaches for creating an organizational change strategy leveraging agile principles.
- Demonstrate the ability to remove organizational impediments by changing the environment or the organizational structure.
Sustaining Change
- Create a self-sustained culture of continuous learning
- Enable senior leaders to support teams in removing systemic impediments.
- Identify and remove deprecated ways of working that slow down or hinder people’s ability to change.
5 Catalyst
5 Catalyst
Introducing Change
- Create a tool, technique or practice that helps introduce change to organizations and share it with others.
- Appraise several documented case studies you have created for different types of organizations on how you introduced change.
Navigating Change
- Create a tool, technique or practice that helps navigate change in organizations and share it with others.
- Mentor people who are leading change initiatives.
Sustaining Change
- Evaluate multiple change programs in which you have been involved at least one year after leaving the organization and share the results with others.
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 more adaptable, resilient, outcome-focused, and people-centric. 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 resilient, adaptable way, focused 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: the organization is designed for the delivery of value 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, well-being, 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 motivation are balanced and aligned with 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 face today’s world and market challenges.
Organize Around the Delivery of Value
- Describe how the agile principles change an organization’s approach to delivering value.
- Describe what is valuable, recognizing that there are different types.
People Advocacy
- List at least three ways 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 at least three benefits and drawbacks of feature and component teams.
- Explain how an organization’s structures, policies and measures impact its culture.
Organize Around the Delivery of Value
- 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.
People Advocacy
- 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, and describe how they impact organization culture and create value.
Organize Around the Delivery of Value
- Describe an organizational design that enables multiple teams to work on the same product.
- Contrast at least two patterns when applying Product Ownership across multiple teams.
- Facilitate growth of understanding of what is value and what products are.
People Advocacy
- 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
Organizational Operating System
- Demonstrate the ability to design structures to help organizations become the most straightforward ecosystem required to achieve their mission.
- Evaluate, where appropriate, different scaling frameworks to help organizations identify the right patterns for their context.
- Recognize and connect interdependencies that unlock teams’ reflection, learning, and growth.
Organize Around the Delivery of Value
- Apply and promote a waste-intolerant mindset to enable teams to operate as an interactive network focused on continuous and sustainable delivery of customer value.
- Identify three factors to introduce and cultivate in an organization, and describe how each enables and enhances agility and value delivery.
People Advocacy
- Implement an organizational structure that puts people at the center of decision and strategy making.
- Demonstrate experience in fostering a purpose-driven mindset at all levels of the organization.
5 Catalyst
5 Catalyst
Organizational Operating System
- Promote awareness of how organizational design decisions affect ways of working.
- Share new patterns of safe or experimental organizational design change at leading industry-level events.
Organize Around the Delivery of Value
- Create structures and policies that systemically optimize flow and value creation at all levels of the organization.
People Advocacy
- Reflect on the impact of organizational design patterns on culture, mindset and ways of working.
- Implement organizational structures centered on human well-being and pluralistic thinking.
- Design resilient structures which allow the client to develop flourishing resonant leadership styles through changing circumstances.
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.