August 2023 – James Osborn

Requiring a uniformity of process caps the highest potential of your teams.

Process protects us from making mistakes, and can lift every team to a good level. Forcing this is what stops us finding the truly great performances.

We sometime fall to uniformity when we find it hard to measure the outcomes that teams are driving. Measuring adherence to a process is often easy. It’s easy to count the number of widgets that are being created, and it’s easy to see if we’re all doing it in the right way. It’s not always easy to determine if we’re doing the smart things that actually achieve the outsize results.

A classic example of a mistake is to enforce Scrum, or any other particular flavour of agile. The more tightly it’s enforced, the less likely you’ll get a 10/10 team performance.

Instead, go back to the Agile Principles. The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organising teams. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.

An overly rigid process hinders this adjustment. It doesn’t recognise the unique context of the team, and that’s where the potential is capped.

By all means, if your org needs certain things reported, or activities that must be done for legal reasons then you can require that of the teams. Beyond those must do things, you should instead encourage your teams to experiment and find out what works best for them.

The goals of leadership in this model is to share the things that are working, and also the things that aren’t. Giving access to the tools that can support, and taking away the noise that breaks focus.

It’s imperative that you don’t just allow each team to meander through the path to excellence!

So forcing a process can take you up to good, coaching teams and sharing the best outcomes widely will help you achieve greatness.

There’s a common pattern as anything moves through a maturity curve of people being less open to risk.

Wen something is new and exciting, we can do lots of new and exciting things. When organisations are small, it’s easy to make a change, and one reason is we’re still open to the risk of it not working out.

As things mature, people get more used to ‘how they are’. Big orgs become more focused on maintaining what’s working, and that means taking fewer risks.

It’s harder to drive change, and in an ever faster moving world, that lack of flexibility soon becomes a major risk itself.

It’s important to identify these situations, and then look for ways to counteract the change. We don’t invite anarchy into a large organisation, but we must stay open to the desire to change.

To help frame these thoughts, imagine some of the inventions of the last couple of centuries. If cars were invented today then they wouldn’t be allowed out on the road. The risks we accepted then were far different to those we accept today. Similarly, improvements to cars are always having a higher bar to entry, we’re less willing to tolerate smaller risks, but things we have accepted for a while carry on being thought of as ‘fine’ to the general populace.

In a growing organisation, the same thing happens. Existing policies and practices are accepted, but changes get harder to make. We put people in place who are rewarded on the basis of successfully operating these processes, and often incentivise risk reduction rather than value capture.

Some of this behaviour is vital! The larger the org the higher the chance of an internal bad actor. We need to protect against this. We have changing legal responsibilities that we must meet. We have grown due to being successful, and it makes sense to protect that success.

Too much however, is dangerous. We have to be able to adapt when circumstances change. We need to be confident in taking some risks when the situation is ambiguous or opportunity is at hand.

So what can we do?

Beg forgiveness – A strategy that’s high risk in and of itself. If you are right it’s all likely to be good, but be ready to accept some consequences, especially if you realise some of those risks!

Seek support – Find someone more senior who agrees with your approach, and get them to sign off on it. Processes often exist to make decisions without needing to involve an important person. Get that backing to step around the process and get moving. Build trust with smaller things, and this approach will even work for some significant changes.

Change the system – Hardest option, but biggest long term payoff. It’s easy to put something in place to prevent a risk occurring, it’s harder to remove or streamline it. So, taking on that task might not be easy, but getting rid of an outdated practice will let everyone move faster.

As organisations grow, they can be less receptive to change. Smaller risks become less allowed.

If you see this happening, use some of these techniques to free up the capacity to change. The world moves on, you need to move with it!