Peter Stevens Blog

How many middle managers and agile coaches have asked themselves this question: Why is the C-Suite clueless? We try so hard to get their attention, but they just won't listen. I think I am connecting the dots on why they don't listen.

Overwork is surely part of the problem, but it's deeper than that. Management has always been accustomed to communication by broadcast; listening and reacting have not been its strong suit. Before globalization, that wasn't much of a problem, because the customer didn't have many alternatives. But today, customers can easily go elsewhere, the complexity has risen, and the job of management has gotten much harder.

Today, I believe Management is in denial. It is in denial because it is being told by the marketplace: "you suck." Management focuses on improving the quarterly results, lowering the cost, and with it the quality to the point where lemonade doesn't have any lemon juice in it. And then they wonder why people chose to buy elsewhere.

Denial is a grief response, a normal response to bad news that you cannot change. You don't like the message, so you try to ignore it, until the message is so strong, like a lost lawsuit or impending doom, that it cannot be ignored.

Today, management needs to get out of denial and get on with fixing what's broken. An interesting case came to light at the Scrum Gathering in Atlanta: Domino's Pizza.

Domino's Pizza was (and is again) a successful fast food chain. They became famous for delivering you a pizza within 30 minutes. 10 years after being sold to a holding company, they had fallen to last place in customer approval ratings and were threatened with extinction. Their crust "tasted like cardboard" and the sauce "like ketchup." Their share price hit a low of $3/share. Whether management noticed what their pizza tasted like is unclear, but they did notice their share price: they had come to the brink of disaster and realized that they had change. So step 1 was to admit that "we suck" and step two was to do something about it (watch this 4 minute video to see this in action):

What did they do? They created a clear line of sight from all levels of the the organization to the customer. They reacted by listening to their customers and creating products that were dramatically better than before. They admitted their mistakes in public and promised to get better. They did it quickly.

They were successful. I stopped by Domino's at ATL Atlanta Airport and found the pizza to be quite OK. (OK, it's still fast food. The Pizza DOC at Molino Frascati in Zurich is still among the greatest pizza I've ever had, followed closely by the pizza at Northlake Tavern in Seattle's U-District, but that's like comparing F1 racers to anything off the production line.) In any case, their stock price has also more than recovered, having just set a 7 year high around $40.

So if your organization is having problems, how can you fix it?

Admit that you suck. Once you've admitted it, you can move on and start getting better.
Recognize that you and everyone in your organization is doing a good job. The best they can, under the circumstances. This isn't about blame, it's about getting better.
Do something about it! Start right away.

What should you do for step 3? That depends! Here are some places to start:

Within your management team figure out what your priorities are and what they should be. Radical Management can help here. So can a Temenos Retreat.
Understand what your customers are telling you: Create a clear line of sight to your customers at all levels of the organization.
Start implementing improvement immediately. Figure out what your biggest impediments are to customer satisfaction and start fixing them. Scrum can help here, even if you are not doing IT.

Many years ago, Ken Schwaber, the co-inventor of Scrum, became famous for telling people, especially top management, 'You suck, and that makes me sad.' It's a challenge to get better. It's a challenge, but you can do it if you want to.

Joe Justice, CEO of WIKISPEED to participate in next monthly mash-up

Joe Justice, CEO of WIKISPEED will participate in Steve and Peter's next monthly mashup.

Both Steve and I have written about Wikispeed (The Car the Scrum Built, Wikispeed: How A 100 mpg Car Was Developed In 3 Months). I think Wikispeed is the harbinger of dramatic changes in how we do business!

You can sign up here! And be sure to include your questions for Joe, Steve or myself when you sign up! We look forward to talking to you!

Does Your Agile Transition Provoke a Grief Response?

Radical Management principle number 4 says that communication must change from top-down directives to adult-to-adult discussions. Why is this so important? And how can you tell if your agile transition is really transitioning "agile-ly"?

Glen Alleman, author of the Herding Cats blog, recommended that I look at Peter de Jäger's webinar on The Art of Communicating Change. Given Alleman's critical perspective on Agile and Stoos, I wondered, could there be something about Management in general and Change Management in particular that I've missed?

De Jäger starts by explaining that people react to change differently depending on whether change is voluntary or involuntary. Examples of voluntary change include deciding to learn a skill, getting married, or accepting a new job. People change like this all the time. Although it takes time to learn the skill or adjust to being married, most people do it willingly.

An involuntary change is a completely different matter. This change comes from outside: examples include getting laid off, being diagnosed with cancer, having people pulled off your project or the deadline being moved up; somehow they all feel like death. Involuntary changes provoke a grief response. This response can, in turn, provoke severe resistance to the idea or change under discussion.

According to Kübler-Ross, a grieving person goes through 5 steps on the road of acceptance:

Denial
Anger
Negotiation
Depression
Acceptance

de Jäger proposes 7 questions to help organizations get through these 5 stages. What he does not do is challenge the notion that top-down communication is the best/only way to effect change. Top-down communication causes the grief responses, because people are hit with changes without being consulted.

Is your Agile transition provoking grief responses? Look for signs of denial, anger, depression or passive resistance. Are participants trying to negotiate away key pieces of your agile framework? This is a sign that your roll-out is too top-down. You need to get people on board. You need to get more buy-in.

The AIDAA Approach

de Jäger does hint at a better approach during the Q and A session (around 47:20 into the Webinar). The best change agents give people the problem and let them come up with the solution. What does this sound like? It sounds like Scrum. The product owner comes to his team with a problem and the team solves the problem.

The big difference between this approach and a command-and-control approach is, when and how is the change discussed? Top-down means, management communicates a decision and people have to deal with it. Adult-to-adult means, you discuss a problem together to find an optimal solution.

In the last year, I have coached three separate agile transitions. In each case, we followed a pattern of building awareness and interest (and hopefully desire). In each case the transition moved forward without the passive resistance so typical of Agile transitions is large companies. Why?

The decision on whether to move forward was pushed one level down from the person asking me to introduce Scrum. In two cases they said yes, in one case they said no. In that case, the middle management team proposed a way forward that they believed in, so this too has been a successful transition to a happier, more productive constellation.

Applied to change leadership, I call it the AIDAA approach. AIDA is a term from marketing: Awareness - Interest - Desire - Action. A purchase decision requires a step-by-step build up. Action (purchase) is the final step when buying a product. When implementing a new process, Ability is also required, so I add an extra "A": AIDAA.

By delaying the decision until after everyone understands answers to Why, What-does-it-mean-for-me, and 6 other questions that de Jäger raises, you transform the change from an involuntary change to an voluntary change. So you do not provoke a grief reaction (or just very small one). This completely changes the dynamics of the situation and increases your chances of a successful transition.

Want to talk about this some more? Join Steve Denning and myself at our next free monthly mashup webinar, e.g. Steve and Peter's Monthly Mashup, May 17.

Three Simple Hacks to Improve Management

Why doesn't the C-Suite understand Agile? Agile improves performance, profitability and customer delight. Why don't they get it? Why won't they even take the time to look at it? This dilemma has puzzled Agilists for as long as there has been Agile. Software developers have long been confronted with a similar problem. Here is a look a their solution and three simple hacks which may help managers improve their performance and their company's competitiveness.

I think there is a simple explanation for this: Top managers simply don't have time to think deeply -- about Agile, or anything else. They are overwhelmed, overworked and under extreme pressure to perform. They have no time or energy for creative thought. And since they have to deliver results every quarter, they can't risk doing anything new. If they were software developers, they would be doing death march releases every three months.

To understand the problem, let's look at the act of getting a meeting to discuss Agile with a top manager. You're the Agile coach; how does it go?

1. Schedule the meeting

You (with the brilliant new idea): I'd like a meeting with you to discuss an awesome new approach to software development.
Manager: How does that affect me? I'm responsible for finances, not software. Besides, I'm totally booked! No time.
You: I understand, but this is really important. It's about the future of our company.
Manager: Well, in that case, I can squeeze you in for an hour on Friday.
You: Thanks!

2. At the meeting

Your Manager has invited six additional people, mostly his direct reports, to the meeting. They all come and you all wait for him to arrive - about 10 minutes late. In the meantime, the other six people have all opened their laptops, and now are working on their emails and things. Of course they stop when the top manager arrives, but as soon as the meeting begins, their attention is divided between what is being discussed and what is happening on their computers.

The first thing the top managers says is, "I have to focus on our financial results for this quarter, so cut the chase. What do I absolutely have to know?' Now you are flabbergasted and not quite sure what to say, but your try to deliver your points faster to the assembled notebook-readers. Five minutes before the end of the meeting, the manager has to leave for the next meeting...

Everywhere the same pattern!

Sound familiar? Of course it does. We've all been there. This could be a Dilbert cartoon. But it is daily life. Of those 7 people, five of them should not have come. All these people are seriously overloaded. They are taking on more work than they can accomplish, and trying to multitask as a means of working harder. So they are not doing anything well.

We've hit the limits on our ability to work harder. Management multitasking is evil. It kills performance. It kills the ability to innovate. And this eventually kills even the biggest companies.

I've been in the computer business long enough to remember working on the first timesharing minicomputers and mainframes. Back in those days, multi-tasking seemed like a great invention. The machine had lots more capacity than needed (or so we thought), so it could share that capacity among many users. Great in theory, but the users needed far more, which slowed performance dramatically down to a crawl. The same thing is happening in every large organization that I have come in contact with.

We have to do less.

Today, multitasking is used on lightly loaded notebooks, PCs and tablets to give their single user great performance: Dazzling graphics, snappy interfaces, sound and video are all possible because the devices can now do far more than is required of them. Does this sound like Apple? Apple works this way. What would it be like if your company gave your customers great performance?

Unfortunately, we cannot upgrade our brains with a faster processor. Would be nice, but I don't think I'd do it even if some doctor offered it to me. So we have to do less and make that which we do count more.

So the alternative is to get rid of all the bloatware that is occupying your brains and focus on what really matters!

We need slack.

If you are working towards a new product release, how far before the deadline are you willing to try out something new? My experience is that 3 months is a pretty typical answer. If there are more than three months left, people are willing to try things out. Less than three months, people want to focus on the release. How is management like delivering products?

We need to get better at delivering results to Wall Street.

If a software team is not doing well with a monthly iteration, what should you do? Shorten the iteration. Ron Jeffries popularized this approach and any agile coach will tell you it's true.

Management of public companies have to publish financial results every three months. They are always three months away from a release, so they are always under pressure to perform. Always frozen by the release which is three months in the future. What should management do?

How to get better management?

Here are three simple hacks to improve management:

Meeting-free afternoons. Give yourself some slack. Just block the afternoons, leaving you available for short term issues and deep thinking.
No notebooks at meetings. If the agenda isn't worth 100% of your attention, then you shouldn't go.
Publish financial results monthly instead of quarterly. By doing it more often, a) You get better at it, so it becomes easier to do. b) You increase transparency, which increases trust between you and your investors. c) The consequences of a bad month are smaller than a bad quarter, so you decrease the need to manage the expectations, and your own stress level will be lower and more constant, giving your mind more freedom to consider new things.

OK, this last one seems counter-intuitive and might not qualify as a simple hack. Simple means, it does not require legislative approval, because three monthly reports can easily be consolidated into a quarterly report.

However it is very consistent with the experience of software teams - they are better able to manage the stress of releases when they release more often. They are also better able to improve their quality when they release more often. They have a more trusting relationship with their stakeholders. They have better releases.

As a manager, improvement starts with you. What would it be like if you could get your level of stress under control, so you could really focus on making your company a better place?

My Experience Building Deep Trust

How would a company function if its top leadership trusted each other deeply and truly shared a common vision for the future? This question burns in my mind as I ponder the impact of the retreat I attended last weekend.

I met Siraj while making contact with the Washington DC Agile/Scrum scene. I had offered to help him make high quality photographs of his collection of "influence maps." Having just moved to the DC area, and having time on my hands, I thought that some small acts of service would be a good way to get to know and integrate into the Agile community here.

An influence map is both a discovery tool and an information radiator for reflecting on and telling the story of your life. It was fascinating what I could learn about people I had never met just by looking at their maps.

There was always something mysterious about Siraj. As his name suggests, he is of Indian origin, but he grew up in Middle East and studied in a Jesuit school. His life has always been driven by the questions, 'Why am I here?' and 'Whats next for us?' So when he invited me to attend a weekend retreat on change leadership based on these influence maps, I was intrigued and just had to come.

His model for influencing change is called The Influencers Mantra, and the monthly retreat to learn this model is called Temenos, which is the Greek word for "container." Just as you can't control your heartbeat, you can't control the container. But you can influence your heartbeat (and many other reactions) by controlling your breathing. Temenos is about how to influence containers of people like a marriage, a partnership, or a company.

A Temenos has a simple format:

Warm-up on Friday evening - a fancy word for dinner (and maybe some wine) and otherwise getting to know each other.
Saturday and Sunday were the formally defined parts of the workshop,
Cool-down Sunday night - another fancy word for dinner (and maybe some wine) and enjoying the afterglow of an intense weekend together
Monday morning departure

Siraj's model of influencing change is based on simple premises:

Any group of people, like a company, a partnership, a team or a marriage is a container.
A container is not a soldier to be commanded, it is a woman to be wooed. It is also a raging fire which will will burn you if you take the wrong approach. Having been burned several times and having wooed an organization once or twice, I recognize the truth of this statement!
Listening and Observing are the keys to influencing the container.

So most of the time in the workshop is spent listening and observing: 1) Understand yourself and each other by creating and sharing influence maps. 2) Create a clean slate to start afresh. 3) Understand your and each others' Personal Vision. 4) Working as a group, create a compelling shared vision for moving forward. 5) Supplication.

Influence maps and Mandalas are both visual representations (or information radiators, as Agilists would call them). The Influence map represents your life to date, and the Mandala represents either your personal vision or the shared vision of your container.

The workshop follows this approach:

Check-in
Introduction to The Influencers Mantra + Temenos
Influence Maps - draw and share the story of your life
Clean Slate - recognize and forgive the failures of the system and your own failures to the system
Personal Vision - draw a Mandala and share your vision for moving forward at a personal level.
Compelling Shared Vision - create a Mandala for the container / organization / group
Supplication
Theory - Personalities of Influencers or Archetypes and Forces of the container or patterns in the change process
Check-out

By the end of the Personal Vision exercise, we understood ourselves and each other so well, that we could talk to each other about anything, without fear or insult! I call this state Deep Trust. It's amazing. It is the perfect state for creating a compelling shared vision for the future.

Supplication was perhaps the hardest to grasp. "Supplication" is the process of bowing down in prayer. It represents a humble attitude towards the organization. I use the analogy of wooing a woman. I remember the night I met my future mother-in-law. There were only two chairs in the room, one for her and one for my future wife, so I literally sat at their feet! It seemed a bit a odd at the time, but it helped create a lasting, positive impression. In the successful change initiatives that I have coached, I have taken a similar approach, offering information, while encouraging those doing the change to figure out the best direction without telling them what the answer should be.

I came home exhausted, but full of energy and enthusiasm for this approach (and for my own future vision). I started making changes right away in my life and in how I deal with people; these were also noticed immediately. The approach seems to resonate. Everybody I talk to about it seems to get really excited: Connecting with your friends, colleagues, co-workers and even family members seems to be a deep need for many people. And I still ponder the question, what would your company be like if your top leadership deeply trusted each other and truly shared a common vision for the future?

Agile is the Vanguard of the Transformation of Management

Recently I wrote on ScrumDevelopment:

Agile is the vanguard of a general change in management, beyond "just" software. At the moment, it is seldom on the radar screens of today's MBA trained managers.

Two responses arrived almost simultaneously:

"No. People like Deming, Goldratt, Ohno, (and several others...) are the vanguards of general change in management (to the extent that there is yet much of a change)" - Kurt Häusler

"Well said Peter!" - Srinivas Chillara

I really do believe Agile is the vanguard in the transformation of management.

There are two levels to Agile - one is about engineering practices, the other is about values. Let's leave the engineering practices aside for a moment. In this context I am referring to Agile as a management framework.

What management principles does Agile implement? Servant leadership, delegation, intrinsic motivation, high trust cultures, PDCA, and much more. These are all things that one routinely encounters in an Agile project and exactly what the management gurus have been saying we should do. It is not that Agile invented these things, but Agile is where these things are being systematically applied, where there is a large body of knowledge on how to do it, and where there is a lot of experience on what happens when you do it.

Agile represents the one of the few communities where these principles are systematically applied. Take Scrum, for example: Product Owners and Scrum Masters are servant leaders. Sprint Planning operates at level 6 (of 7) on Jurgen Appelo's authority scale. The framework implements PDCA in two to four week cyles.

What other framework could qualify? Maybe Lean. Kanban I think has a strong claim. It leads you away from command-and-control, even though it can co-exist with it. But many people consider Kanban to be as much an agile framework as a lean one. Is there any other framework which can a) make this claim, and b) is widely applied?

All these modern management ideas are being implemented right under the noses of and often in the face of apathy or active resistance from classically trained managers. Steve Denning documented this thoroughly in his recent post. If you read a college textbook on management, you don't learn about Agile, or Scrum, or Kanban. Maybe a little bit about Lean. This has to change.

So yes Agile is on the vanguard. Not by talking or teaching at prestigious business schools, but by actually doing all the things management gurus have been saying managers should do for the last 50 years. Rod Collins, former CEO of Blue Cross Federal Employees Division and author of Leadership in a Wiki World believes the next generation of top managers will come from the agile ranks, simply because these are the people who 'get it':

Agile, Lean, Scrum, Kanban - all are examples effective approaches to organization in a complex, networked world. None of them are compatible with the hierarchical, command-and-control management approach that was perfected by General Motors in the 20's. More fundamentally, thinking is not compatible with following orders.
Beyond Budgeting - rethinking finances as the guiding instrument of corporate planning and control. BTW Professor Franz Röösli, Chair of the BB Roundtable, was an initiator of the Stoos Gathering.
Radical Management - a rethinking of management based on agile principles. Strongly influenced by Scrum, The Ultimate Question (delighting the customer as the ultimate goal of an organization), and the Innovators Dilemma (why established companies often fail to respond to disruptive innovations). RM adds storytelling as a change leadership tool (which, when I started employing it, has done wonders for the acceptance of Scrum in the agile transitions I have coached).
Stoos - a movement to catalyze a widespread change in management by building a common identity and networking between compatible approaches. People who identify themselves with Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Radical Management, Beyond Budgeting and others were all present at the first Stoos gathering.

Where do we go from here? A number of Stoos events are planned, most notably the Stoos Stampede and the StoosXchange. A number of Stoos Satellites have formed around the world to build local communities. Having said this, most of the resonance is coming from the Agile community. Franz Röösli and I will attend Gary Hamel's MIX Mashup. Our immediate goal is to get Agile on management's radar screen.

If you're not already a member, I'd encourage you to join the Stoos network. Summon the future! Catalyze a change for the better.

[Update 20.Apr/11:44 EDT]: I expanded the section on agile principles to give some examples of what management principles Agile implement. Also invited people to suggest other frameworks which might qualify. ]

[Update 20.Apr/12:10 EDT]: ...and I updated the section again to be more inclusive of Lean and especially Kanban. Stoos is about what compatible frameworks have in common, not about the rivalries between them. ]

Surviving Disruptive Innovation

Steve Denning recently wrote that disruptive innovation is a disease which has destroyed company after company. A number of comments challenged his use of the word "disease." What is a disruptive innovation? Is it a disease, are you getting it, and what can you do about it?

The term disruptive innovation was coined by Clayton Christensen in his book 'The Innovator's Dilemma.' A disruptive innovation occurs when a new technology is developed that is lower cost and qualitatively inferior to existing approaches -- measured along the criteria of the existing market -- but offers other unique advantages to a new market. The new technology innovates faster than the established technology and eventually replaces the old technology at a lower cost, destroying the established players.

So calling the problem a "disease" is pretty close to the mark. The disease is not disruptive innovation per se, but the inability of established companies to react to it properly. Perhaps calling the "Disruptive Innovation Syndrome" would be a better word.

I have been in the IT business long enough to remember:

Minicomputers displacing mainframes to the stratosphere
Unix Workstations displacing minicomputers and forcing them out of existence
Intel PCs doing the same to UNIX workstations
Linux/Intel Servers doing the same to UNIX servers

and the list goes on. Today were can observe

SSDs are starting to displace hard disk drives
Tablets are displacing netbooks

For an established player, there are many challenges to adopting a disruptive technology:

Innovative ideas originate at the lowest levels of the organization. Without an innovation culture, these ideas do not filter up to the top-level decision makers.
New, low-cost technologies do not have an obvious market. Getting a go from top management to invest is difficult due to the risk and uncertainty of a small, new market.
The new technology is unlikely to contribute significantly to the bottom line or growth of a large organization in the first years after introduction.
Investment decisions are not made just once at the top, but on a daily basis by middle management over the life of the project. It's called 'allocating resources' and established customers with well known needs are a lower risk than uncertain new markets. So products for established customers get the best resources.
The company's marketing "value network", i.e. its sales channels, marketing approach, and cost-structure are oriented toward existing customers. A company often literally does not know how to identify new customers or how to sell to new markets. Because margins and volumes are low, it is not financially interesting to do so.

So most companies simply choose not enter disruptive markets. The task is too daunting! And in the few cases that they do, it is very difficult road and most attempts are not successful.

What does it take to combat this syndrome?

Christensen argues that the technology itself is not the problem. It's the value network around the company which traps the company into its business model. The most successful approach he has observed is creating new business units which are independent of the existing business units and proportional in size to the target markets. IBM took this approach launching their PC business -- and went on to lose the market when it brought the PC division back into the fold, building closed, IBM-only devices which were slower and more expensive than their competition.

Apple takes a variation of this approach due to the extreme secrecy within the organization. Apple behaves like multiple start-ups which are in many ways unaware of each other, preventing much politics between the departments.

Steve Denning argues that companies need to have much more room for innovation. They need to adopt a culture of continuous innovation. The focus on the bottom line is counterproductive in the face of disruptive innovation.

What should you do? I don't believe these approaches are mutually exclusive. If you emphasize creating happy customers over the bottom line, then you know there are times to develop new customers and that a short term drop in profitability is a small price to pay for the long term survival and growth of the the company.

You need to create space to explore disruptive technologies. You need to recognize that much learning is involved and some attempts may fail. You need to identify new markets and new marketing approaches. You need to accept that the new approach will initially have lower volumes and probably always will have lower margins than your mature, existing products.

Once you decide that one product is a potential winner, you need to ensure focus. This means shielding the people and budgets from the pressures of your mature high-volume products. If you say 'A', and expect to get to 'Z', then you need to say, B, C, D, etc. until you get to Z. So if you are going to develop a disruptive product, you need to have top people working on it and you may not pull them off the new product development to support your cash cow.

Does the new venture have to be a separate business unit? A priori no, but there is a lot of practical experience which suggests this is a good idea.

Radical Management and #Stoos Workshops, Webinars and Events and Communities as of Q2 2012

Agile as a management framework may be one of the best kept secrets, but the word is getting out. Here is a list of events where you can find out, learn and exchange information about

Radical Management, the approach for making the entire organization agile, and
#Stoos, the movement to catalyze a change in management

Workshops

USA-Washington, DC, May 21-23, Making the Whole Organization Agile, 3-day workshop with Steve Denning and Peter Stevens, Info and registration
USA-Seattle, WA, June 26-28, Making the Whole Organization Agile, 3-day workshop with Peter Stevens, Info and registration, hosted by SolutionsIQ
NL-Amsterdam, July 5, Seminar on Radical Management, 1-day workshop with Steve Denning and Peter Stevens, Info and registration, hosted by Zilverline

Radical Management, #Stoos, and related gatherings

BR-San Paulo, May 28, Radical Management Brazil
DE-Frankfurt, StoosXchange, June 8-10
USA-San Francisco, CA, MixMashUp, June 19 (by invitation)
NL-Amsterdam, Stoos Stampede, July 6-7

Interactive Webinars

Peter & Steve's Monthly Mashup

Radical Management Related Communities

Stoos Network - homepage, linked in
Stoos Satellites in

Copenhagen
Lausanne
New York City
Sao Paulo
Washington (see also Washington Leadership Breakfast )
Zurich

Twitter Tags

#Stoos - for anything related to the Stoos movement
#rmweb - for Q&A on Steve & my webinars

Have I missed anything? Please comment or tweet to @peterstev and I will keep this list up to date.

Join Steve and Peter's Monthly Mashup

Making the whole organization agile.

Join Steve Denning and Peter Stevens for their web-based MONTHLY MASHUP* call-in show on MAKING THE ENTIRE ORGANIZATION AGILE. It's for:

Agile leaders and coaches wanting to convert the entire organization to Agile,
Business leaders needing to understand Agile management or achieve continuous innovation,
Public sector leaders seeking the agility to ?do more for less?, and
Entrepreneurs wanting to grow their startups without losing agility.

Fed up with hierarchy and bureaucracy? Want your organization to be more agile? In this interactive call-in show, share with us your biggest challenge in making your organization more agile and we?ll brainstorm with you to see what can be done about it.

Learn about the issues that others are facing and what you can do about the issues you face.

We?ll discuss what's involved in acquiring the breakthrough capabilities involved in making the entire organization agile.

Got a question for us to answer 'on the air?' Email me peter at sierra-charlie.com or tweet it with #rmweb.

Got a problem? Like to learn more? This is your opportunity! BTW - it's free!

Register for Steve and Peter's Monthly Mashup

*What's a mashup? A mashup is a creative combination or mixing of content from different sources. You, me, Steve, the web, other participants...

Dates for upcoming monthly mashups:

Executive Education Workshop: Making the Entire Organization Agile

Mastering the Paradigm Shift to Radical Management^sm
May 21-23, 2012 in Washington DC

20 F Street NW is a
few blocks from the US Capitol
Photo courtesy alexabboud

Today?s white-water environment requires the entire organization to be agile. With the abrupt, unpredictable and simultaneous shifts in markets, customers, communications, technology, competitors, talent and regulatory frameworks, the entire organization must be nimble to survive, let alone prosper. In this three-day workshop (May 21-23, 2012 in Washington DC), you will find out how to accomplish the necessary paradigm shift in your organization.

The biggest secret in management today

Just over a decade ago, a set of major management breakthroughs occurred. These breakthroughs enabled software development teams to achieve both disciplined execution and continuous innovation, something that was hitherto impossible to accomplish with traditional management methods.

Over the last decade, these management practices, under various labels such as Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Lean, have been field-tested and proven in thousands of organizations around the world. Radical Management^sm distills, builds on and extends these principles, practices and values so that the entire organization can now achieve to apply the magic combination of disciplined execution and continuous innovation.

What will you learn in this workshop?

In this intensive, interactive three day Executive Education workshop, you will learn how to get beyond the rigidities of traditional management and acquire the breakthrough capabilities involved in making the entire organization agile. You will learn how to implement the elements of Radical Management^sm as an integrated whole so as to get extraordinary results for your organization, your customers and your workforce.

How will the learning take place?

You will receive both the theoretical grounding in the diverse principles and practices of Radical Management^sm and the hands-on experience of applying them to your organization. Learning through exercises, simulations, lectures, case studies and group discussions, you will emerge with a deeper understanding of the conceptual framework of Agile software development and Radical Management^sm and an enhanced capacity to make the necessary paradigm shift happen in your organization.

Who is right for this workshop?

Offering a career-changing experience for anyone dissatisfied with rigidities of traditional management, this leadership workshop is for:

Agile leaders and coaches wanting to convert the entire organization to Agile,
business leaders needing to understand Agile management or achieve continuous innovation,
public sector leaders seeking the agility to ?do more for less?, and
entrepreneurs wanting to grow their startups without losing agility.

Who is giving the workshop?

The workshop is given by:

Steve Denning draws from his award-winning book, The Leader?s Guide to Radical Management, his path-breaking work in leadership storytelling and long managerial background as a director at the World Bank.
Peter Stevens draws on deep international hands-on experience in Agile and Scrum transitions, extending the breakthrough principles of Agile management from software development to the entire organization.

Eventbrite - Making the Entire Organization Agile

This workshop is taking place on May 21-23, 2012 at 20 F St. NW in Washington DC. Sign up here now http://radical-management.eventbrite.com/ and/or call Peter Stevens at 240-472-5615 to get more information and a special pricing deal (quote code SD1)

What are the workshop objectives?

In this workshop, you will learn how to take the breakthrough lessons of Agile software development and apply them systematically so as to transform the entire organization.
You will learn how organizations like your own that have figured out how to get continuous innovation, and deep job satisfaction and delighted customers, and do this sustainably, as the permanent way in which the organization runs, all at the same time

You will learn how to extract what is valuable in 20^th Century management while supplementing that with the new leadership practices that are needed to operate successfully in the tumultuous world of the 21^st Century.
You will undergo a voyage of discovery, in which you will learn and embody a way of thinking, speaking and acting that is radically more productive for customers, employees and the organization. You will accomplish this by learning how to operate in a world of no-tradeoffs: how to get outsized outcomes for the organization along with inspired workers and thrilled customers and stakeholders.
You will learn how to accomplish these gains while creating authenticity in the workplace, both for you, for the people you work with and for, and for the people who work for you and for the organization?s brand.
You will learn what?s happening in other organizations along with the broader global movement for management change, epitomized in the Agile Manifesto (2001) for software development and the Stoos Gathering (2012) for general management.
You will learn how to get beyond instances of agility that are usually short-lived. You will learn how to expand oases of continuous agility, particularly in software development with the advent of Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Lean and eliminate the conflicts with the general management practices within the firm as a whole.
To make the entire organization agile, you will learn than new management tools. You will learn how to put in place together the right strategic goals, the right managerial roles, the right way to coordinate work, the right Agile values and the right way to communicate.
Understanding and implementing the comprehensive array of changes involved in making the entire organization agile will help you master the paradigm shift in management that is needed to create continuous innovation, delighted customers, passionate employees, and extraordinary shareholder returns.

These shifts require more than learning a few new tools or processes. They constitute a basic change in the way think, speak and interact with each other.

What participants say:

?Loved the exercises and activities?
?Really enjoyed the ideas behind it. I learned so much.?
?The high interaction and the moderation tools?
?It was great to have such variety in the different kinds of learning ?I learned through leadership storytelling how to inspire desire for change?

Scrum and 5 Principles of Radical Management

Scrum is at the vanguard of a major shift in the management paradigm. The new paradigm is called Radical Management, based on Steve Denning's book of the same name. What is this shift and how does Scrum fit in?

This shift is due to a fundamental change in the marketplace. Due to globalization, customers now have incredible freedom about whom they choose to do business with. In order to keep customers, companies have to do more than just keep their customers satisfied. They have to delight their customers!

This shift impacts the five dimensions of management: Purpose of the Company, Role of Management, Accountability, Basic Values, and Communications.

Purpose of the company

Old: Maximize profits or shareholder value (or more recently, maximize management compensation)
New: Delight the customer
How Scrum does it: The product owner represents interest of the users, customers, and other stakeholders to the team doing the work. The product backlog is a list of items which bring value to the customer or value, sequenced according to their value to the customer or user. Customer value must be produced every 30 days in a potentially shippable form.

Role of Management,

Old: Manager as controller
New: Manager as enabler
How Scrum does it: Scrum defines two leadership roles, the ScrumMaster and the Product Owner. Both are servant leader roles. The Product Owner defines the value to be produced for the customer, prioritizes the work and accepts the work. The ScrumMaster helps both Product Owner and Implementation Team work together more effectively, by eliminating impediments and helping the team improve.

Accountability

Old: Bureaucracy and blame
New: Dynamic Linking (I prefer 'direct linking') in which the people doing the work have a clear line of sight to the beneficiaries of the work.
How Scrum does it: Inspect and adapt is a core principle of Scrum. Scrum provide numerous occasions at the personal, team and product/project level. Sprint Planning - what should be produced in this iteration? Sprint Review - what was produced, does it meat expectations, and what corrections are necessary? Daily Scrum - what is preventing us from achieving our goal for this sprint. Sprint Retrospective - how can we improve how we work so that we can be more productive? Release Planning (if appropriate) - how do we meet our goal of delivering something valuable to the customer?

Basic Values

Old: Efficiency and Cost Cutting
New: Sustainable values
How Scrum does it: Scrum does not micromanage individual people and tasks but rather gives teams complete problems to solve until done. Sustainable pace is assured by giving the team doing the work the authority to decide how much work it can take on.

Communications

Old: Command and Control (or more precisely detailed command and control)
New: Adult to adult conversations
How Scrum does it: To plan work, the Product Owner and Scrum Implementation Team come together as equals. The Product Owner has jurisdiction over priorities and acceptance criteria, and the team has jurisdiction over estimates, how much work they can accept in a sprint, and how to do the work. With the help of the ScrumMaster, the team and P-O meet and plan the work for the next increment. Neither the Product Owner nor the ScrumMaster has detailed command authority over the team or each other, but through their defined roles, they guide the team to a successful outcome.

Like Radical Management, Scrum must be implemented more or less in its entirety, otherwise it will disintegrate over time. Scrum is surely not the only way to do Radical Management, but it implements the principles quite thoroughly and, in my experience, is an excellent place to start.

Are you delighting your customers? Is your company agile enough for the 21st century? Join Steve Denning and myself at our web-based monthly mashup call-in show on Making the Entire Organization Agile.

Want to talk about Radical Management?

Are you doing anything after work on Thursday?

Last month, Steve Denning and I held our first online conversation on how to make your company fit for the Creative Economy, otherwise known as Radical Management. This discussion raised many interesting questions from our participants, many of which are answered here. We are pleased to repeat this event in the future, the next time on March 22.

Would you like to join Steve Denning and myself for a free, web-based conversation on at 17.00 Central European Time (12:00 noon US eastern time)? Steve and I have written a lot on our blogs about what's necessary to thrive in the emerging creative economy: continuous innovation, inspiring workplaces, and a focus on delighting customers. Now Steve and I will be hosting a conversation on Thursday. You can dial in on the web or by phone. Got a question? Tell us when you register, and we'll address it during the webinar. Like to learn more? This is your opportunity! Find out more...

Why I like Zipcar better than Enterprise

Last week, a customer engagement took me to northern New Jersey. I took Amtrak's (almost) high speed Acela train to Newark, NJ and then got a Zipcar to drive to my final destination. To reserve the car, I went to the website and picked a model based on features, real-time availability and price. On arrival, I went to the Zipcar lot, found my car, put a smartcard on the windshield and drove away.

This is so completely different than renting from the classical car rental agencies. You can reserve a car online and it may look cheap, but the 'rental price' is only part of the story. Quasi-insurances like LDW, CDW, SLI, PAI, PEC (whatever they mean) or additional devices like GPS or EZ-Pass can easily double the daily cost of the car. If you have to talk to an agent when you pick up your car, you'll have to defend your wallet while at the counter. All you want is your car, but they want to sell you as many unneeded and overpriced services and/or upgrades as they can. And let's not forget, whichever fueling option you choose, you'll get ripped off. Either you buy gas you don't use (prefueling) or you pay egregious rates for them to fill it up afterwards. It's a horrible experience. The purpose of rental car company is to separate you from your money -- and making a car available is what they do for the privilege.

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Today, Enterprise rent-a-car is the #1 car rental company. It was the case study that launched Fred Reichheld's Ultimate Question and Net Promoter Scores. It led Steve Denning to identify Customer Delight as the ultimate goal of every company.

Oddly, Steve never included Enterprise in his case studies, saying, "I've not been delighted." Now I understand why.

While researching a case study based on Zipcar's reaction to my suggestion, I stumbled on this article about Enterprise: 9 Confessions From A Former Enterprise Rental Salesman. Despite their emphasis on customer satisfaction, Enterprise's fundamental business model is about extracting money from their customers.

I was really shocked to learn that Enterprise rent-a-car works this way too. How could the company which launched the Net Promoter Score be so disrespectful of its customers?

What is the difference between Enterprise and Zipcar? Enterprise has a transactional relationship with its customers while Zipcar has a continuing relationship with its customers.

If your focus is purely on the transaction, then 'there is no tomorrow.' So you extract as much money from your customer as you can. If your focus is on the relationship, you treat your customer with a different respect -- and your customers also treat you with a different respect!

How does this play out at Zipcar? I join for a small annual fee. For a similar annual fee, I can purchase an insurance waiver, so liability and collision damage are covered. I may commit to a certain monthly usage. If I do, I get lower rates and/or more flexibility in meeting my usage commitment. They expect that I leave the car clean and with at least 1/4 tank of gas (which gets paid on their company credit card). Some cars have E-Z passes built-in, for which there is no extra charge nor do they apply a service charge to any tolls paid on my behalf.

I have been using Zipcar now for 2 months and have had no unpleasant surprises nor I have ever felt that I have to defend my wallet against Zipcar. The only thing that wasn't so great was getting from Newark Station to the nearest Zipcar was not so great. It's not that close to the station and in a pretty run down section of town. Walking there made me at bit nervous.

What should Enterprise do? They are probably tempted to ignore Zippcar - it's car sharing, not car rental right? It's a classic disruptive innovation. Not really a threat at the moment.

But Enterprise has a bigger problem. Their system is corrupt. They claim customer satisfaction is most important. This is a lie, because what they really want to do is bring in money. Since there is a conflict between what the company says it wants and what it really wants its sales agents to do, the real priorities eventually win out. Yes, the branches get good numbers, but can you trust the numbers?

What should Zipcar do? Their response to my suggestion to put a BMW near my home seemed really out of character (even though they said yes very quickly after I tweeted it), but their business model is sound. Stay true to your values!

Zipcar should become more attractive for their members' business and vacation travel needs. For instance, they could partner with airport hotels and parking facilities so that travelers can get easy access (shuttles) to Zipcars at airport and Acela locations. How about Zipcars at your favorite beach hotel? Their model of constructive, long-term, constructive customer relationships could be really disruptive to the rental car business in a few years...

What should you do for your business? Which of these models is more sustainable? Which one would you like your business to resemble? How would your company be different if it looked like Zipcar and less like Enterprise?

P.S. If your business does not resemble the one you want it to be, you might check out our Innovative Workshops on Radical Management over the next few months...

Dimensions of Power: What can you influence, and how much?

How much power do you have in your organization? What dominates decisions in your company? Doing what's best or political considerations? How strong is the influence of the people doing the work vs the top managers?

I recently asked a project leader at a large organization about the weight of politics vs. substance in decision making. His response: they are of about equal importance. I wasn't really surprised. In fact, in all the years I have been coaching Agile teams, I have only once heard "It is the power of the argument rather than the positional power of the speakers which drives decisions."

OK, I work a lot with dysfunctional companies (who want to get better), but how many companies can claim that politics are substantially less important than substance in decision making?

What about the people in these organizations? The higher in the hierarchy you are, the more power you have. Does that mean as a mere employee that you have no influence? And what can people in high places really do with their power?

Certainly an influential manager can accelerate a career or make employee's life miserable, but often I get the impression that that is the limit of their power. Substantive decisions often require someone even higher up to or a lot of consensus building.

I have some theories, but before I publish them, I'd like to hear your experiences. What can you influence or decide? What can your managers decide (or not?) How important is politics in your decision making process?

Please comment or respond to my quick poll, How much influence do you have in your company?
Or better still, do both!

An innovative workshop on radical management

In these three days (March 19-21 in Washington DC), you will discover how to use radical management to thrive in the 21^st Century creative economy and the world of continuous innovation.

If you?re a business leader?

have you ever wondered how your firm could not get beyond merely satisfying your customers and clients, but delight them? And not just once or twice, but consistently day after day, year after year? Have you ever wondered how your firm is going to survive and thrive as the world economy goes through a fundamental phase change?from industrial bureaucracy to a creative economy of continuous innovation?

If you?re an Agile or Scrum coach?

have you ever wondered what it would take to make the entire organization Agile? Have you ever considered how to get your Agile/Scrum teams the support from top management that they need to be sustainable? Do you know how to powerfully communicate the essence of Agile to senior managers and inspire them to support your teams?

If you?re a public sector manager?

have you ever wondered why you keep facing across-the-board cuts, and keep being asked to watch ?do more for less?, only to see this turn into ?less for less?? Have you ever wondered how you could break the seemingly unchangeable cycle of cost/benefit tradeoffs?

If you?re an entrepreneur in a startup?

have you ever wondered how you can grow the firm without it succumbing to deadly drag of traditional management and turn the workplace into a dreary grind? Are you concerned that the fun of launching a new business will eventually have to stop and that your dreams will turn into the world you were trying to get away from?

If you?re a middle manager,?

have you ever wondered why your great innovations and improved ways of doing things don?t seem to have any lasting traction? Have you ever wanted to know how to get your bosses on board with what you?re doing and get the whole organization in sync with your innovations, rather than be forced to trim your ideas to fit the bureaucracy?

If you?re a management consultant or executive coach

have you wondered how you could light a fire under your clients and get them to break out of defunct management practices? Have you ever wondered how to inspire your clients to avoid the lethal disease of disruptive innovation and spark their organizations with continuous innovation and high profitability?

Then just imagine...

Having three days of immersion in highly interactive workshop that not only answered these questions, but also embodied a process of experiential learning that is tailored precisely to the very issues that you want to learn about?
Having one-on-one conversations with some of the world?s leading experts in the new world of creative economy that is emerging?
Working on a new game plan with practical actions to respond to your goals, in collaboration with other like-minded innovators, with everyone?s mind on fire, and striking sparks from each other?s thinking?
Having access to the best ideas in the world about these issues and seeing how they relate to the the best ideas from the finest thinkers, including Peter Drucker, Clayton Christensen, Gary Hamel, Roger Martin, Ranjay Gulati and many more?

Is this possible?

This workshop is taking place on March 19-21, 2012 in Washington DC. Sign up here now http://radical-management.eventbrite.com/ and/or call Peter Stevens at 240-472-5615 to get more information and a special pricing deal (quote code SD1). Note: Other sessions will take place in April and May.

What the workshop isn?t

Well, let?s be clear.

This workshop isn?t a quick fix.

It isn?t some flaky new idea that hasn?t been tested in actual experience.

It isn?t more of the same old command-and-control management, repackaged under a different label.

It isn?t some vague subjective pie-in-the-sky chimera that can?t be measured.

What this workshop is

It?s a journey in which you learn about how organizations like your own that have figured out how to get continuous innovation, AND deep job satisfaction AND delighted customers, AND do this sustainably, as the permanent way in which the organization runs, ALL AT THE SAME TIME

It?s undergoing set of experiences that involving fundamental rethinking of what it takes to get things done in the tumultuous world of the 21^st Century organization: the world will never look the same again.

It?s a voyage of discovery, in which you will learn and embody a way of thinking, speaking and acting that is radically different from the traditional command-and-control bureaucracy that is pervasive in organizations today.

It?s discovering how to operate in a world of no-tradeoffs: how to get outsized outcomes for the organization along with inspired workers and thrilled customers and stakeholders.

It?s about creating authenticity in the workplace, both for you, for the people you work with and for, and for the people who work for you.

It?s a way of getting in touch with the broader global movement for management change, epitomized in the Agile Manifesto (2001) for software development and the Stoos Gathering (2012) for general management.

The workshop is taking place on March 19-21, 2012 in Washington DC. Sign up here now http://radical-management.eventbrite.com and/or call Peter Stevens at 240-472-5615 to get more information and a special pricing deal (quote code SD1). Note: Other sessions will take place in April and May.

The principles: five fundamental shifts

This radical management workshop explores five fundamental shifts in management principles, each of which is based on many years of research and experience:

A shift in the firm?s bottom line from maximizing shareholder value to customer delight (in public sector organizations: it?s a shift from outputs to stakeholder outcomes)
A shift the role of managers from controllers to enablers.
A shift the coordination of work away from cumbersome bureaucracy (plans, reports, meetings) to agile linking of real work to customer outcomes.
A shift from solely economic value to the values that will grow your organization: transparency, continuous improvement and sustainability.
A shift communications from top-down commands to conversation.

A different way of measuring organizational performance

It involves a shift in measuring organizational performance from outputs to outcomes:

Measuring customer delight on any scale from one customer to a million customers, and using the measurement to enhance organizational results.
Measuring the goal of individual work teams in terms of customer delight, through user stories
Measuring the forgotten dimension of organizational performance: time.
Measuring organizational performance in real time through social media.

Although no single one of these shifts in itself is new, doing all of them together is requires a fundamental change in the way most organizations are led and managed. It?s not rocket science. It?s called radical management.

Because each of the shifts in management principles is reinforced and supported by scores of well-established management practices, the transformation is down-to-earth, practical and doable in your workplace.

Because none of the shifts individually is new, what you will learn is robust, Each is supported by years of experience and research.

How the workshop will unfold

The conduct of the workshop embodies the principles, practices and values that are being taught.
It?s a lively combination of presentation of the principles and practices along with their history and theoretical justification, an exploration of practical examples of the experiences of actual organizations and interactive exercises and conversations that will enhance experiential learning and discovery.

The participants learn from each other as well as from the instructors so that the workshop becomes a voyage of co-creation and mutual learning.

The workshop is designed to inspire learning in the deepest sense, enhancing your capacity to respond with complexity, compassion and authenticity to the daily dilemmas you face.

This workshop is taking place on March 19-21, 2012 in Washington DC. Sign up here now http://radical-management.eventbrite.com/ and/or call Peter Stevens at 240-472-5615 to get more information and a special pricing deal (quote code SD1). Note: Other sessions will take place in April and May.

Who?s giving the workshop?

Steve Denning

Steve Denning is a globally-recognized thought leader in leadership, management and innovation. His book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Re-inventing the Workplace for the 21st Century (Jossey-Bass, 2010 was selected by 800-CE0-READ as one of the best five books on management in 2010.

Steve?s blog on Forbes attracts around half a million page-views per month. Read it here: http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/

Steve?s article, "Rethinking The Organization" was as the Outstanding Article of 2010 in the journal Strategy & Leadership. His article, "Masterclass: The reinvention of management" was selected by the editors of Strategy & Leadership for the Outstanding Paper Award for 2011.
From 1996 to 2000, Steve was the Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank where he spearheaded the organizational knowledge sharing program. In November 2000, Steve Denning was selected as one of the world?s ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders (Teleos).
Steve has written five other business books, including The Secret Language of Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2007) and The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (Jossey-Bass, 2^nd edition, 2011). He now works with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia on leadership, innovation, business narrative and most recently, radical management.
Web: www.stevedenning.com

Peter Stevens

Peter Stevens is an independent management trainer, coach, writer and community builder. His focus is on helping organizations thrive in the 21st century. Building on proven frameworks like Scrum, Radical Management, Management 3.0, and Kanban, he provides coaching and training to help you and your team manage and execute effectively while building products which delight your customers.
He writes the Scrum Breakfast blog and has been a regular contributor to the website: AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com. His popular articles include 10 Contracts for Your Next Agile Software Project and Explaining Story Points to Management.

Peter started his career as a Software Engineer at Microsoft in 1982. He is the initiator of the Swiss Lean Agile Scrum Interest Group and works closely with leading Scrum trainers and coaches in Central Europe. Presently he is on sabbatical in Washington DC supporting the Wikispeed project and spreading the word on Radical Management.

The workshop is taking place on March 19-21, 2012 in Washington DC. Sign up here now http://radical-management.eventbrite.com/ and/or call Peter Stevens at 240-472-5615 to get more information and a special pricing deal (quote code SD1)

What specifically will you learn in this workshop?

Why 20^th Century management fails

Why today?s business imperatives lie outside the performance envelope of today?s bureaucracy-infused management practices.
Why the rate of return on assets and on invested capital is today only a quarter of what it was in 1965
Why the workplace feels like a Dilbert cartoon.
Why only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her work
Why executive turnover is accelerating
Why the topple of rate of leading firms is accelerating
Learn why ?efficiency at any cost? went wrong
Why maximizing shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world
Why economies of scale contain hidden productivity traps.
Why reliance of ROI/NPV ratios is dangerous
Why your IT service provider is not delighting you
Why ?shared value? doesn?t fix capitalism
Why ?bad profits? can kill your business
Why innovation happens ?despite? the system, not because of it
Why continuous innovation is impossible with traditionalmanagement

How traditional management killed manufacturing in the USA
Why managers have the most hated jobs in the workplace

Thriving in the 21^st Century creative economy

Why the customer is now the boss.
Why continuous innovation is the only path to survival
Understanding and defeating disruptive innovation
Why the difference between goals, results and values is critical
Why a firm can have only one goal.
Why organizational resilience depends on shifting from an inside-out mindset (?You take what we make?) to an outside-in mindset (?We want to solve your problems?).
Learn why and how manufacturing is coming back
Learn why every organization is a software organization
Why laughter is the acid test of radical management
Why leadership is more than getting to the top.
Why little guys beat the giants through disruptive innovation
Busting the iron triangle of tradeoffs between firm, workers and customers.
Learn how to draw on the power of pull, rather than push
How to get beyond individual management fixes and innovations don?t stick and get enduring improvement
How to run established organizations with the energy of a startup
Why HR is a key driver of the C-Suit

The new bottom line: customer delight

How to instill innovation throughout the organization
How to give everyone in the firm a clear line of sight to the customer
What are the different mental models of innovation and why only one is best
How to identify your core customers and stakeholders..
How to get beyond temporary spikes of innovation and inspire sustained gains in productivity.
How to stop your brand from unraveling
How to craft a compelling goal for any organization, so as to inspire intrinsic motivation.
How to meet customers? unrecognized desires.
How to aim for the simplest possible thing that will delight.
How to delight more by offering less.
How to generate more alternatives for generating delight.
Why defer decisions until the last responsible moment.
How to avoid mechanistic approaches.
Why focus on people, not things.
How to give the people doing the work a clear line of sight to the people for whom the work is being done.
How to lock in customer loyalty with business platforms
How to lock in customer loyalty with new business models.
How delighting the customer works in business-to-business situations
How to read comparative data on delighting customers: why firms do best

Why excellence, beauty and authenticity are making a comeback

The role of managers in creative economy

How to create workplaces that enable the full capacities and provide deep job satisfaction
How to create self-organizing teams
Focus on creating clear lines of sight to the customer and the removing impediments
Why individual management ?fixes? don?t stick
Why treat employees as ?assets? or ?human resources? fails
Acquiring the courage to lead deep change.
How to transfer power to the team
How make the transfer of power conditional on the team?s accepting responsibility to deliver.
How to recognize contributions of the people doing the work.
How to make sure that remuneration is perceived as fair.
How to focus teams on customers and stakeholders and what is value for them.
How to identify the principal performance objective for the primary stakeholders.
How to defer decisions as late as responsibly possible
How the client participates in deciding priorities
How to be clear who speaks for the customer
How to provide coaching to encourage good team practices.
How to systematically identify and remove impediments to getting work done.
Why not to interrupt the team in the course of an iteration.
Why the team must work sustainable hours.
Why problems must be fixed as soon as they are identified.
Why managers must go and see what is happening in the workplace and in the marketplace.
How to make the entire organization agile.
How to combine disciplined execution with customer delight
How to give everyone in the organization a clear line of sight to the customer

Coordinating work without bureaucracy

How to make the entire organization agile.
How to combine disciplined execution with customer delight
How to give everyone in the organization a clear line of sight to the customer
How to organize work in short cycles with direct customer feedback.
How to make even chunky, seemingly indivisible work amenable to an agile approach.
How to systematically deliver value to customers sooner.
How to apply a scientific approach to innovation through the thinking of lean startups
How to create meaning in work and meaning at work.
How to spell out goals of each iteration before the iteration begins.
How to define user stories to define the goal of each iteration
Why the user story as the start, not the end, of a conversation.
How to keep user stories simple and record them informally.
How to display the user stories in the workplace.
How to discuss user stories with the client or client proxy.
How to find out more about the client?s world.
How to know when the story has been fully executed.
How to focus on finishing the most important work first.
How to ensure that user stories are ready to be worked on.
How to let the team decide how to do the work

Instilling the values of radical management

Put in place the values to extraordinary firm performance and personal authenticity.
Learn how to give voice to your values
Learn how to be radically transparent
How to reinvigorate the lost spirit of community
Why team estimates how much time work will take.
Why the team decides how much work to undertake.
Why the team?s velocity is important
Why the team members stay in contact with each other on a daily basis.
Why retrospective reviews at the end of each iteration are key
Why informal visual displays of progress are highly desirable.
Why impediments should be identified on a daily basis.
Why priorities for work must be set at the beginning of each iteration.
How to establish a clear line of sight from the team to the client.
Why accountability is two-sided
Why teams must have the opportunity to excel.
How to align the team?s interests with those of the organization..
How to calculate the team?s velocity.
How to get to the root causes of problems.
How to share rather than enforce improved practices.
How to foster the formation of horizontal communities of practice.
How to remain systematically open to outside ideas.
How to instill the need for continuous improvement

Communications: command to conversation

Learn how to trigger your organization?s creativity
How to communicate meaning through leadership storytelling
Generate broader and deeper connections that are energizing.
How to challenge the system and win
Understand how electronic and face-to-face meetings interact
Learn the new management vocabulary for the 21^st Century
Show others how to make something of their lives
Generate genuine connections in your organization
Learn how to use the power of social media
How to fix bad managerial habits in yourself and others
Why, when everything is urgent, nothing is urgent
How to jumpstart the transformation of management
Learn how to discover the core of leadership stories within you.
How to acquire a leadership voice
Learn how to lead conversations that engage
Learn how to generate cascades of activity, setting off chain reactions of more conversations
Make connections with the Stoos community and other management reform movements

Measuring performance in the creative economy

Why it?s still true that only what gets measured gets done
How to use analytics creatively
How to get beyond traditional ratios (ROI, NPV)
Why progress must be measured in terms of value delivered to clients.
How NPS can measure client delight and continuous innovation.
How to extend NPS (Net Promoters Score) to employees
How to understand and use relative and absolute NPS
How to avoid the pitfalls of NPS
How to decide frequency of using NPS
How to interpret NPS results
How to embed NPS thinking throughout the organization
How to measure time taken to deliver value to customers
How to measure client delight at the working team level.
How to measure client delight in real time through social media
How to deploy user stories to articulate work goals and measure whether goals have been achieved
When and how to measure team velocity
Why team velocity is important

How the workshop will unfold....

First day morning Orientation and ice-breakers Jumpstart storytelling to introduce each other Remembering customer delight What?s wrong with traditional management Presentation Interactive exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations	First day afternoon Principles of radical management Presentation Interactive exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations Principle of customer delight Presentation Interactive Exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations
Second day morning Mmanagers: enabler of self-organizing teams Presentation Interactive exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations Coordinating work: linking to customer delight Presentation Interactive exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations	Second day afternoon From value to values: Presentation Interactive exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations Coordinating work: linking to customer delight Presentation nteractive exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations
Third day afternoon Application to the participants? situations Case study Interactive exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations Principles of radical implementation Presentation Interactive exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations	Third day afternoon Coping with constraints on implementation Case study Interactive exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations Linking with other organizations & movements Case study Interactive exercise Participants? learnings & celebrations

>What you?ll take away from this workshop

A certificate of recognition and commitment to radical management.
An autographed copy of The Leader?s Guide to Radical Management
A copy of Steve?s award-winning articles from Strategy & Leadership: "Rethinking The Organization" (2010) and "Masterclass: The reinvention of management" (2011)
Advance chapters of Steve?s next book: ?Phase Change: Thriving In The Emerging Creative Economy?
PDFs of around 1,500 pages of Steve?s articles and commentary
Skills, techniques and approaches that you can apply in your organization tomorrow
An action plan for your organization

There are still some spaces left for the workshop on March19-21, 2012.

The smartest thing you can do in the next five minutes?

Sign up here now http://radical-management.eventbrite.com/ and/or call Peter Stevens at 240-472-5615 to get more information and a special pricing deal (quote code SD1)

What other experts say about radical management & the creative economy:

We owe our existence to innovation We owe our prosperity to innovation? We owe our happiness to innovation? We owe our future to innovation? Innovation isn?t a fad?it?s the real deal, the only deal. Our future no less than our past depends on innovation.

Gary Hamel, What Matters Now (2012)

Steve Denning is one of today?s most acute and creative critics of traditional management thinking. You would ignore the ideas at your own peril. He shows how to re-invent management based on a more accurate and effective understanding of how humans work best together.

Larry Prusak, Working Knowledge (1998)

Steve Denning goes to the root of the management issues confronting companies today. Focusing on seven core principles, he lays out a pragmatic roadmap for shifting the corporation from a focus on scalable efficiency to a focus on delighting the customer and each other, while achieving even higher levels of productivity. In the process, he creates a space where we all can more fully achieve our potential.
           John Hagel, Co-Chairman, Deloitte Center for the Edge,
             Co-author of The Power of Pull (2010)

I?ve spent the last 35 years of my professional life bushwhacking my way towards what I now know, thanks to Steve Denning, is the nirvana called Radical Management. It is a place where delighting customers is the religion and creativity, passion and learning are revered. Denning?s Radical Management is the antidote to the greatest disease in the workplace today, mental resignation due to lack of purpose. Radical Management should be required reading for anyone entering the work force or looking to reignite their inner bushwhacker!
           Sam Bayer, CEO, b2b2dot0

The Deadliest Sin of Change Leadership

InfoQ just published a wonderful interview with Sanjiv Augustine and Arlen Bankston on the 7 deadly sins of agile adoption. While I agree with everything Sanjiv and Arelen said, they missed the deadliest sin of all. Without getting this one right, you condemn your initiative to failure. Here's why I don't talk about change management and my own list of 7 deadly sins of the change process.

I like their list of sins - I've seen all them, and have probably committed a few them in my day (but that's OK - we learn from our mistakes and try to do better next time):

Inappropriate scaling
Lack of organizational change management strategy
Lack of demand management - funnel projects to portfolio management, then bring projects to teams
Lack of engineering discipline
Siloed or tiered implementation
Lack of tool sophistication
Outdated HR policies

What did they miss? They missed a the fundamental reality of change: People don't mind changing. Most people want to learn and grow! But they hate being changed! People need to be an active contributor to the change.

What does this mean for the change agent? S/he cannot manage the change. Management implies control, like with strings on a marionette. As a puppeteer, you can make the marionette dance, but as soon as you stop pulling, what happens? The marionette stops dancing. If your change initiative is to be successful, you need your people to want to dance. In other words, you have to leave the destination open, without forgetting the purpose of the trip, so people can adopt your vision, make it their own, and carry it forward as "our" vision.

You are catalyzing the change and leading the change, but you are not managing the change. The change should take on a life of its own. This is why I call it change leadership.

Here is my list of change leadership sins:

Not activating the people involved to co-create the change
Considering the change process to be a defined route from A to B.
Change leaders themselves investing insufficient time and presence in the transition
Training people to apply a framework before creating desire for the framework
Focusing on practices without embracing the underlying values and principles
Trying to apply the change too quickly with too little support from experienced practitioners of the new approach
Relying too heavily on external coaching to fix leadership failures at the operational level.

Number 1 is the deadliest sin of all. If you do not activate the people involved to co-create your change, your change will fail. How can you activate them? Invest time and effort in the marketing process. Engage in adult to adult conversations, rather than issuing top down directives. Leave the outcome open (even if the vision is crystal clear). Get the people to figure out how to realize the vision themselves and give them room to adapt it to their needs.

How can you tell if you change initiative is going well? Ask the concerned people the Net Provider Score question: On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend a friend or colleague to apply our approach? If your net promoter score is negative, you will probably fail. If it is +50% or more, you are probably in good shape. The closer you get to 100% the more likely your change is going to be a lasting improvement!

Skip the Budgeting Process?

There was one last question at our webinar on Radical Management that still needs answering.

Dan DiCamillo asked: Have you found a suitable replacement for (or a pitch to delay) yearly budgeting and planning, to give a little breathing room to start customer delight based practices?

I passed this question to Franz Röösli, Director of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable and co-Initiator of the Stoos Network. This is his response:

Very interesting, in my view the question indicates the relatedness and interplay that exists between Radical Management and Beyond Budgeting (BB).

It is not easy to answer the question without having any context. Furthermore I would suggest to the person to get familiar with Beyond Budgeting (e.g. via the The Leader's Dilemma) to really be able to relate his question in the light of the BB model. That is not done with a few sentences (just as you needs some time to really get an understanding of Radical Management).

Nevertheless, as a very short but certainly improper abbreviated answer I would like to mention that BB companies do not have this fixed yearly budgeting and target setting process. That?s why they have the breathing room to create customer delight by their very systems design. So going BB could be an answer to solve the problem that this persons is seeing to start with Radical Management/customer delight . (That?s another reasoning why the two concepts (RM and BB) have such a strong fit and do support each other in my view).

So here is the trade off: flexibility and the ability to respond to new challenges and opportunities vs. predictability. An management model which emphasizes predictability suffers from long lead times and high overhead costs.

If we were talking about physical inventory, it would be pretty obvious that having stuff sitting in a warehouse is bad thing. It costs money, rots, gets damaged, gets lost or stolen.... The market tastes can change, and so the risk of having to write off the investment in stuff increases. With intangibles, e.g. new product designs, new software, and other intellectual property, it's harder to see the waste because the inventory doesn't require any new space. But it still costs money, binds resources, and makes the company inflexible and unresponsive.

A phase driven development framework compounds the problem, because the way people are allocated to projects tightly couples projects to each other. Changing course after a project has started could mean throwing away work in progress for a zero return on investment. Not good.

So here is a radical approach to budgeting and financial controlling:

If you need a total number for R&D expenses, plan that on a yearly basis, but don't go down to the level of budgeting individual projects. Be prepared to revise that number up or down once or twice per year.
Focus on just a few projects at once. Prioritize primarily by sequencing, not by resource allocation. You'll be much more productive.
Plan your projects so that you get a minimum useful version of whatever you're creating within a few months. Strive never to more than one month away from a deliverable state there after.
Never forget that customer delight is more important than the output itself. If you can't deliver something monthly, how can you delight your customer on a monthly basis?
Bring stakeholders together as it becomes clear that capacity is available. Answer the question, 'what should we do next?' Another way to phrase this is, 'what is the most valuable new capability that we should have three months from now?'

Questions and Answer from our Webinar on Radical Management

Yesterday, Steve Denning and I hosted a discussion about Radical
Tom Mellor asked: Robert Quinn in his book Change the World
Peter Stevens: Deep Question! When I work with command and
Furthermore, I think Storytelling plays an important role. Telling
I also teach Jurgen Appelo's Management 3.0 course. This is about
Adrian Leu asked: Doing something innovative in IT in
Peter Stevens: Three big questions here! 1) What to do with
Your last question, How do I sell it to stakeholders, is a big one.
Change like this cannot be sold. The people have to buy it, or more
I usually get involved when a champion has gotten enough awareness
This is a very short answer to a very long question, but I hope it
Margaret Clark asked: How to deal with it when leadership
Peter Stevens: Hmm - this could be a lot of things. Where are
Some people seem prefer to becoming a statistic rather than changing
Christy Wendell asked: Since IT Managers ""hate"" their jobs
What does deep demotivation prophecise
Daniel Timberlake asked: How can you encourage collaboration
Peter Stevens: Good question! Everybody has influence -- few
Chuck Phipps asked whether it makes sense to go stealth to
Peter Stevens: This is a common pattern in IT, in which agile
Joel Bancroft-Connors asked what is middle management's place
Peter Stevens: Middle management most definitely has a role!
The tools of middle management will change, in some cases
Kim Fehring asked: Working remotely/having team members in
Working remotely is a challenge - the people don't see each other
Alicia Korten asked: What to do to make the workplace more
Steve Denning wrote that wrote "[deep change] requires letting go of control. It means facing the unknown, walking naked into the land of uncertainty. We spend most of our lives striving to avoid that prospect. When faced with the choice between uncertainty and conformity, we usually choose conformity." How do we help our firms choose deep change?
control managers, they are often afraid of losing control, because they are also accountable. So I think part of the process is helping managers understand that how their control is going to change, that results will still be important, and how accountability is different but still present. For instance in Scrum, accountability is achieved through the Daily Scrum and the Sprint Review, the latter often with stakeholders present, making what has happened transparent to all. This gives people important assurances that they are not engaging in dangerous 'Blind Trust'
stories can convey a vision of the future, guide people to solutions (or perhaps just reassurance) by considering similar solutions in the past. Listening to stories can help people understand each other and identify commonalities between they are and where they are going. I am particularly fond of the 'Remembering Heaven' exercise: by remembering and sharing success stories from the past, the future you are proposing no longer looks so strange to them. Storytelling improved the effectiveness of my Scrum coaching enormously!
giving middle managers tools for dealing with their departments in a radical or agile world. For example, his Delegation Poker game is very helpful to managers who want to understand their roles and how they should interact with other people. So in summary, I think the big issue is taking away the fear of change - as people start to see how the pieces fit together and what they have to do, the new world no longer looks so strange, comfort levels rise and people become more willing to try out and accept new ideas.
healthcare in UK very often hits the problem of badly implemented, legacy systems for anything that needs to have a larger cover than just localized solutions. Is a radical solution the best one to apply? How do you sell this to the stakeholders?
your old, difficult to maintain IT systems? 2) How to manage the process of whatever you decide to do to fix them? And 3) how do you convince your stakeholders to do the right thing?. The first question is really a question for your IT people. They are the experts. I would trust them to come up with good alternatives. On how to manage the process: Several radical approaches, most notably Scrum and Kanban were developed in an IT context, so chances are good a radical approach will work well in this context. The introduction itself needs to be 'radical' - that is with the consent, desire and participation of all the people involved. If you're getting resistance to some change, you have not gotten the necessary support from the people implementing that change. In this case, you need go back a few steps and do some marketing of your ideas.
I've been planning to write a blog entry on it for some time and people have written books on the subject! There are many patterns for making change happen, 'Fearless Change' by Rising and Mann has an excellent collection (though it does not include storytelling!). Steve has several books on Leadership Storytelling.
precisely, buy in to it. So you have to market it. AIDAA - Awareness -> Interest -> Desire -> Action -> Ability is a useful pattern. Start with Awareness and work forward. A good place to start is with the stakeholders themselves. Get them to tell their stories: what is their pain and why? Ask them about their successful projects in the past. Look for attributes in those stories that you would like to have in the future and ask 'wouldn't it be great if our projects today were like that?' Now you can talk about your proposed solution and get permission to try out a next step.
and interest among the stakeholders that they are willing to listen to an expert. You still have to build awareness, interest and desire among all the people who will be involved, but this is enough to get the ball rolling. I would not go straight into training (Ability) at this point, but continue to build interest and desire until you have something close to consensus that the radical approach is the way forward. Then you can start with the training and the first project. Usually coaching his helpful as well.
gets you started! Please feel free to email me for more info...
plays lip service to innovation, collaboration, yada yada, but doesn't actually do anything.
they in the AIDAA process? It might just be lack of ability, which can be fixed by training and coaching. It might be a lack of lack of engagement and commitment. These are a classic failure patterns. Showing presence and determination are success patterns. If management hasn't really Decided to go this direction, you probably need to back up and build awareness, interest and desire to solve this problem.
course! If an otherwise intelligent and rational manager does something which seems counter-productive, then her bonus probably depends on some consequence of her chosen course. I think your best chance is to find out the real reason why the people involved are doing the rational thing. It might have something to do with the focus on the bottom line rather the delighting the customer. I would work on enlightenment of the people concerned. And consider the answer to the previous question. You are trying to change their mindset, so they need to go through this AIDAA process in their own minds.
... how can the companies that live and die by IT (e.g. video gaming company, service providers, etc.) best manage when 95% of their employees are IT types?
about the future of the company? The consequence of demotivation on productivity and customer service is known to all. Only 20% of workers worldwide a fully engaged in their jobs (and the percentage is much lower in India and China!). Paying attention to staff happiness is an emerging best practice. If you inquire about staff happiness and don't like the answers, you should do something about it!
and influence change when you don't hold all the cards?
people, even at the top, really have control. I would suggest you start by building a community in your company of people who share your ideas and interests. This can be a very informal group at the beginning, meeting at lunch or after work. You can share ideas and experiences with each other. Your meetings can also be a place where newcomers can find out about your approach. I used this pattern when I started doing Scrum. No one had ever heard of Scrum, much less published a job posting for a Scrum Master when I started doing Scrum. So I started the Scrum Breakfast, and every month, people came who wanted to find out about Scrum. This help spread the word, built acceptance for Scrum, and had the pleasant side effect of creating a market for Scrum related services.
get RM in a traditional-management organization.
practices (e.g. Scrum) are applied to improve the productivity. Eventually the Scrum projects run into conflict with the command and control structures of classical management and the day of reckoning comes. A Ford plant in Mexico was the leanest, most efficient automobile plant in the world in the 1980s. But rather than adopting those practices in the rest of the company, Ford chose to bring the plant back into the fold of doing things the Ford way, which was not good for their efficiency nor for Ford's health as a company. Stealth may be the only way to get started. But I would think about your "coming-out": How are you going to deal with your management when they tell you, 'you're doing great work, but we need you to improve your bottom line'. Zappos had this dilemma and ended up 'firing' their board of directors by getting the company sold to Amazon. I would strive to get permission early for what you are doing, even if it is 'just a limited experiment.'
in the new era of self empowered teams?
The purpose of middle management is to hold the company together -- that will not change. Some of the duties will not change either. For example, someone will have to allocate people to teams or projects.
dramatically, because many of the old tools are ineffective or counterproductive. Middle managers will concentrate on achieving outcomes rather than merely producing outputs or controlling inputs. They will look more outward to the customer and less upwards to the boss or sideways to their peers and rivals. They will focus more on managing the system and less on controlling individuals. They will focus on creating an environment where their people can work effectively. When impediments arise which prevent work from being done effectively, they will use their influence and position to get the problems fixed. Most importantly, they will be on the front line of living, promoting, and protecting the radical management mindset within the organization.
different offices is still a struggle. How can we apply all this remotely?
often. It is easy to focus on 'your' view of the problem and it is harder to build trust between the individuals or organizations involved. As working remotely can cover anything from telecommuting to off-shoring, I would ask you to explain your context and we can look for a better answer.
fun, innovative and agile?
denning/2012/02/01/the-acid-test-of-radical-management-laughter/">laughter is the ACID test of Radical Management, and this is so true! In my experience, laughter is the side effect of respectful conversations, a sustainable pace, a focus on results instead of punch-clocks, and the culture of fearless trust that is often seen in radically management teams. Creating the basis for innovation is much harder to generalize. Ideas are very fragile. Few companies have been willing to cannibalize an existing product to go after a new opportunity. (Here are two counter-examples: IBM, who learned the hard way that protecting the System 3X series from their PC's was a bad idea; Apple who risked the iPod to bring out the iPhone. Both of these companies learned the hard way. Here's a topic for a management workshop: "How can we structure our management so that no one person can kill a good idea or keep a bad idea alive?"
I'll be happy to answer it. Or, if you want to get deeper into it, check out our workshop on Radical Management: 3 dates this spring in Washington, DC!
src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4567408997062465825-7513859076239984489?l=www.scrum-breakfast.com' alt='' />

Zipcar smashed my enthusiasm

How should a company react to a customer's suggestion?

Since I am only staying 6 months in Washington, I don't want to buy a car. Renting for the duration is expensive. Furthermore, I live on the border between Washington and Maryland -- we won't even talk about the joys of trying to park when two different jurisdictions are involved in policing on-street parking! But life without a car is difficult in the US. So this led me to choose Zipcar - a car sharing service.

Zipcar is really cool: you pay by the hour or by the day. You have a broad selection of cars parked nearby. Just reserve, walk to the car, swipe you smart card and off you go! Couldn't be easier. And you can even use your smartphone as a remote control to unlock the door. The geek in me smiles from ear to ear.

Now they have many models to choose from, but my favorite model is not close by, so I asked them if they could position one to a nearby parking location. Here is how they answered me:

Dear Peter,

Hi! Thank you for the time you have taken to offer your thoughts and suggestions. We sincerely appreciate this, and do take suggestions and input seriously. While we can not act on every suggestion immediately, we compile them all for future reference and planning. If you have any further suggestions please feel free to forward them to us here at Zipcar. If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Regards, (name)
Zipcar Member Services

What are people thinking when they write answers like this? This is classic Management 1.0 with a lot of sugar coating on top! It's quite friendly, but the meaning is clear: It ain't gonna happen. Ice water. Disappointment.

Now, I have really don't have anything bad to say about Zipcar. But my inner self is saying, 'yet another soulless corporation'. In my eyes, Zipcar's NPS rating has gone from 10 down to 7.

Let me tell you another story: I was an early adopter of Target Process. I had an idea for a feature which I communicated to TP. It was simple and made TP much easier to use (at least for me). They put the suggestion on a site where their customers could vote on the suggestions they liked best, and in each release they implemented a few. In the next release, there was my feature! They may even have skipped the voting process - it was a real win. In fact, in happened so fast, I am not sure they did it for me. But who cares? I spent the next two years telling people about 'my feature' in Target Process and how cool TP was that the reacted so quickly.

A suggestion is an opportunity to delight a customer. A suggestion is an opportunity to win an evangelist.

Since then, I have always encouraged Product Owners to include some 'sweets' for their customers in each release, just so that the customer can proudly point to 'their' features in the product. It does wonders for your customer delight ratings.

When you take the time to make a suggestion, what answer would you to receive? Here's what I would like:

Dear Peter,

Thanks for you suggestion! Delighted customers customers are top priority at Zipcar. I have checked on availability, and we can put your favorite car at a nearby location within 30 days. We'll leave it there for three months, and if the demand justifies it, it can stay there permanently. I hope you enjoy the car!

If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Regards, (name)
Zipcar Member Services

You can bet I'd be telling everybody about 'my zipcar' for months there after, and I would be motivated to drive it a lot. If that happened to you, how long would you be singing the praises of Zipcar?

It is anybody listening at Zipcar? Why don't you try that answer again?

Update 28-Feb: Once this article came out on twitter, their DC Office reacted very quickly and with a smile. Within a week, there was a BMW at my nearest location. Thanks, Zipcar!

From a Blame Culture to Fearless Trust

As a manager, you understand the second principle of Radical Management: your role is changing from being a controller of people to an enabler of teams. In my coaching work, I've met many managers who, even though they understand this principle, they get really uncomfortable with relinquishing control.

If I trust my team, how do I prevent them from abusing this trust? How do know I will I get results?

This is a perfectly normal question at the beginning of a transition, especially in large organizations. What is trust? How can you trust your people? And how do create a climate that encourages trust?

Without trust, people have to protect themselves from betrayal and attack. Work is a dreary grind, in which people are constant fear of punishment, and the workplace resembles a Dilbert cartoon with slightly more lifelike renderings of the people involved. In fact, if Dilbert is a favorite subject for decorating people's offices or the coffee corner, then you probably have a problem with trust and fear in your organization.

A company living a trust culture can be a wonder to behold! Happy, motivated staff working effectively with each other, with stakeholders, with managers and even with customers to produce great outcomes! Is your company like this? Stop and imagine for a moment what it would be like...!

Trust means a lot of things to different people. Let's look at the different kinds of trust in an organizational context:

Blind Trust: Don't worry, be happy! It will all work out in the end.
Commitment Trust: I say I will do something and you can have confidence that I will do it.
Confidence Trust: You can tell me something in confidence and can be sure I will not betray that confidence.
Alliance Trust. You and I commit to a course of action and we both have confidence each will stay the course, even in the face of political resistance.
Fearless-Trust: I can admit weakness without fear of attack.

Blind Trust
Blind trust is what every manager is afraid of, and rightfully so, especially when s/he will be held accountable for the results.

It's a common fear that Radical Managers must engage in blind trust. Let's look at how Scrum addresses this issue:

A Team commits to a achieve a "sprint goal" within a defined time box of one month or less. The goal was requested by a special management role, the Product Owner. Only items representing potential value for the customer or user are normally defined in the sprint goal.
At the end of the time box, Product Owner and Team review the results.
The product owner may not change the sprint goal until the time box has expired.

If the team achieves the goal, everyone is happy. If not, it is a learning experience for all concerned. In the future, the team may commit to less (overly) ambitious goals and/or the team will seek to eliminate impediments which limit its capacity.

Radical Management calls this process Dynamic Linking. I prefer the expression Direct Linking because people seem to grasp the essential idea more quickly: The people doing the work have a direct line of site to the beneficiaries of their work. The results are visible in form that the customer can understand after a short period of time. After a learning phase, when the team learns what it can really do in one month, the team should be able deliver what it promises, month after month. The manager can now focus on managing outcomes, not inputs, outputs or coffee-breaks.

Commitment Trust

When I ask groups of managers and team members what trust is, their answers often refer to Commitment Trust. This is more or less the main dictionary definition of trust. Managers want employees to do what they say they will (e.g. show up for work, deliver on commitments on time, etc.) and management's control function is to ensure that they do so.

Commitment trust is closely related to delegation and accountability. As manager, what can you can you delegate and to whom? How much do you need to be involved in creating, validating, verifying the results?

Jurgen Appelo has created an excellent tool for visualizing and discussing delegation as part of his Management 3.0 Training: Delegation Poker. (BTW - I am a Management 3.0 Licensed Trainer). He identified 7 levels of delegation ranging from

Level 1 ? Manager decides and communicates his decision, to
Level 7 ? Manager delegates and does not even inquire about the results).

So given a task, you can identify how much competence you wish to delegate. You can reflect on how and whether you want to develop your staff so they develop the ability and/or earn the reputation necessary for higher levels of delegation. And you can put display a delegation matrix on the wall, making the policy visible, transparent, and easy to adapt when needed.

BTW ? A Scrum product owner works at about Level 6: Manager delegates and inquires about the results.

Confidence Trust
When I talk to individual employees, I am often confronted with Confidence Trust. For instance, "You didn't hear this from me, but...." There is an issue, but s/he is not allowed to mention it in public for fear of the consequences.

There will always be a need for discretion. Particularly discussing about individuals and personal problems requires sensitivity. However if people in your organization rely frequently on confidence trust when discussing what should be factual issues, this is a sign that a culture of fear is preventing a free flow of information in operationally or strategically important areas.

Alliance Trust

Every successful manager understands the importance of Alliance Trust. It's often the only way to get things done in an organization. Build alliances to help each other advance. Build consensus to ensure decisions

Like with confidence trust, there will always be affinities between people and relationships that endure over time. But what decides key decisions in your organization? The positional power of the people involved or the power of the arguments brought to the discussion (especially in context of what's best for your customers)? And when a decision is taken, do the proponents of the road not taken commit to the decision? Or do they wait for the chance to say 'I told you so!'

One symptom of too much reliance on alliance trust is an inability to make decisions or set priorities.

This often manifests itself as constantly shifting priorities in the organization. One faction has the upper hand and gets a decision in their favor, but the losers don't give up. A dramatic event (real or imagined) causes a shift in the priorities and the decision changes. Running projects are canceled and 'resources' are reallocated. This is a nice way a saying that you have wasted a ton of money and a lot time on unfinished work which will never delight the customer or produce a return for the company.

Fearless-Trust
Fearless Trust is like Fearless Change. Fearless change is not about a daredevil's approach to change. It is about change without fear, i.e. taking the fear out of change. A trust culture is about taking the fear (and politics!) of out of work, so people can focus on the real issues.

Only once have I coached a company that had an explicit policy of Fearless Trust, also known as a Trust Culture, before I started working with them. This was the easiest and most delightful transition I have ever had the pleasure to assist. People were willing to learn and try out new things. They were not afraid of the consequences of trying something which might not work out as planned (because they will not punished for trying) so the hurdles to trying out Scrum were very low. They also tripled their productivity almost instantly and made tremendous strides in improving customer delight from the first product release onwards.

The alternative to a trust culture is a blame culture, in which people are held responsible for mistakes. The most immediate symptom of blame culture is whenever anything goes wrong, the first order of business is identifying the guilty party. Those accused focus on deflecting the blame to someone else. The loser gets to fix the problem. I believe that most companies have a blame culture, because this is natural side effect of emphasizing individual performance over team performance.

Why should you foster a trust culture? Simple! In trust cultures people don't waste time and energy looking for guilty parties or defending themselves from attacks. People don't choose CYA strategies over doing what's best for the customer. People can commit to decisions - even those they did not agree with - and hold each other accountable for delivering. (For a deeper understanding of trust cultures and the dysfunctions associated with blame cultures, check out The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.

In my next article on trust, I want to look at how to create a trust culture in your company.

Are there other aspects of trust in an organization that I overlooked? And how have you experienced the flavors of trust in your company?

Video Introducing #Stoos to the Scrum Breakfast

Yesterday, the LAS Coreteam organized its first Scrum Breakfast without me. To fill in the spot left by the thought for the day, Kai asked me a few questions over Skype and edited them into a short video. The main topic was Stoos, but we also talked about this years Lean Agile Scrum Conference and the Scrum Retrospectives. You can watch the video or read the (partial) transcript below.

Q: The last I heard from you, you were getting ready for the Stoos gathering. What was the Stoos Gathering?

A: In January, a diverse group of 21 thought leaders, executives, and coaches from around the world met on the Stoos. Our inspiration was the Snowbird Lodge gathering with produced the Agile Manifesto.

Our invitation went beyond Agile and Lean practitioners to include Business, Leadership and HR communities. This group identified much common ground on how management should be and a tremendous discrepancy between that and how most companies are actually run. For instance, we believe organizations can become learning networks of individuals that create value. We believe the role of leaders should include the stewardship of the living rather than the management of the machine.

We want to facilitate the tipping point - the sustainable transformation of management from the command and control philosophy of the 20th century into something compatible with the context of the 21st century. I believe that Scrum, Kanban and Radical Management are examples of ways to "do Stoos," and other approaches will surely arise.

Q. How can people in Switzerland get involved?

A. Many ways: First join the conversation on linked in and twitter. The group is called the Stoos Network and it has a Linked In group, and our twitter tag is #Stoos (with two o's). Second, create or join and build community in your region to develop and exchange information on doing Stoos -- much like the Scrum Breakfasts. John Styffe is organizing a group in Zurich and I have started a Leadership Breakfast in Washington (together with the American University Business School).

Q. Is that why you are in Washington?

A. The driver was that the building I live in is being renovated and we had to go somewhere for 6 months. I had both personal a professional reasons for choosing the DC area. Steve Denning, the visionary behind Radical Management lives nearby. I want to work with him to make Radical Management a widely accepted approach for doing Stoos across the organization. So I plan to work on three things:

Create a course with Steve Denning around Radical Management and doing Stoos
Work on the WIKISPEED project - both on actually building cars and on helping this crowd-sourced project become a viable company that continues to live its Stoosonian values.
Develop the Stoos Community in Washington, DC.

Call for Speakers - #LASZH 2012

The call for speakers is open for fourth Lean Agile Scrum Conference in Zurich on September 12.

This year's conference features keynote speakers Joe Justice (initiator of Wikispeed) and Roman Pichler (author of Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love)

Under the motto, 'Products, not projects" the organizers, the SwissICT ?Lean, Agile & Scrum? group, once again seek to bridge the gap between C-level executives, managers, project leaders, business analysts, developers, and testers and connect the management perspective with the view from the trenches.

Read the full announcement on the LAS homepage (or in German) or jump directly to the submission form.

#Stoos: The past is no longer a proxy for the future

Deb Hartmann interviews Rod Collins, author of Leadership in a Wiki World:

Or you can watch it on youtube...

Videos on the #Stoos Gathering

@jaycross has posted an awesome video on youtube which provides some insight into what we talked about, the first draft of the statement, and how we worked together at #Stoos.

@deborahh conducted a series 7 or 8 of interviews which are now appearing one by one on youtube. Here is the #Stoos final statement, read by Simon Roberts:

Follow the Stoos Network Channel on youtube for more videos!

#Stoos and the Prime Directive

When I read some of the postings on twitter about the #Stoos Gathering, I wish I could shout to everyone, "Stop! Remember the Prime Directive. Everyone wants to do a good job! Everyone did and is doing the best job they can under the circumstances."

"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

"At the end of a project everyone knows so much more. Naturally we will discover decisions and actions we wish we could do over. This is wisdom to be celebrated, not judgement used to embarrass."

The Retrospective Prime Directive

My wishes on the community at large: Ask constructive questions. Be patient. Contribute.

The world won't change in a day. We're all volunteers with a day job. And remember the prime directive. It makes genuine improvement possible.