What game do your managers play? Cricket or Football ?

Tags

Agile Technology, Learning Organizations

Corporates of 90s play cricket and corporates of 2020 play football.

Cricket and Football, both are team games but are as different as Chalk and Cheese.

A Cricket team is collection of specialized skills, like bowling, batting or keeping wickets besides some general skills that everyone has, e.g. fielding and throwing a ball. Every player has a role and performs within the parameters set for it, to the best of his/her ability. For example, a bowler gets freedom to decide his field placing and how he would bowl. The captain has a key role and takes most of the decisions such as batting order, bowling changes and field placings. A captain who follows participative management style, may discuss with couple of his team mates, his seniors or his peers. Most members of the team may have some or limited say during team meetings when they may discuss strategies for various batsmen or bowlers. That is also a function of culture in the team. In some cases, only seniors join the discussions. Cricket also has different rewards, man of the match/tournament, batsman of the match/tournament or bowler of the match/tournament.

Football is a very different game. Most players have the basic skills related to ball control and passing such as dribbling. There are players who might have additional skills. Like cricket, football also has different roles such as goal keeper, striker, defender etc. but unlike cricket, the players often change their positions and take on different roles as per the need of the game. A striker may fall back to defend or in extreme situation, a goal keeper may go upfront to score a goal. Interesting thing is that in football, the captain does not direct or no one asks a captain before switching his role. There is fluidity and positions and roles change as per the need of the game. This is not to say, that the team does not meet prior to the game and has no strategy, but the strategy and tactics evolve or change during the game based on response from the opponent team. Football does not has individual rewards. Either the team wins or loses. Players may get rated for their performance, but there are no rewards for extraordinary performances or punishments for blunders. The biggest shame is facing your team or fans. It is collective win or loss. While a captain may get credit for win or blame for losing a match in Cricket, captains hardly find a mention in win or defeat in football. It is the coaches who are feted or blamed.

Corporate teams in 90s resembled cricket teams. People were drawn from different functional areas. Each person specialized in an area of knowledge. The team members were expected to contribute based on their knowledge and skill sets. The performance appraisal was that of individual with performance in the team as one of the criteria, it had no relationship with performance of the team as a whole. 

Football is very different. Every player understands the purpose of the team and has all information of the match. The person is able to take his own decisions and responds to the situation.  The business environment today resembles a football team. With advances in information technology, the information exchange is very fast and information asymmetry is minimal. The companies tend to lose any strategic advantage due to its innovations or strategic initiatives within a quarter or two. Market rewards companies that are nimble, responsive and can respond to tactical opportunities, like a football (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/02/26/what-corporate-managers-can-learn-from-football-teams/) .

The idea of structuring organizations and rewarding individuals is deeply ingrained. Unfortunately, most of the organizations have not been able to develop a culture of collaboration and cooperation and achieve the levels as seen in football. Besides appraisals systems, the organizations would have to change their work processes to empower teams that lead themselves ( https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/building-football-teams-at-work/)

Cricket or football, whatever your game is, give it your best and enjoy.

Empowered teams are the way to go

Tags

empowered teams, Learning Organizations, Team Based Organizations

A major change eCommerce has brought to business is increased transparency. It has moved the markets closer to perfect markets by making information available at a click of button. Take sites like Trivago which make price comparisons so easy and help consumer choose best option at lowest price. People can compare brands and choose the best deal. The competitive market also ensures that companies are under tremendous cost pressure and hence cannot make super normal profits. The companies have to redesign and re-work on their strategies as mentioned earlier in https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/06/21/changing-management-paradigms/.

The classical management solutions will not help companies beat markets in this new age. The companies would need better products and cost-effective operations. More importantly the companies would not be able to beat the market using their strategic advantages but will also have to rely on making use of tactical or short-term opportunities in the markets. This would call for faster decision making. Many of the decision calls may not allow sufficient time for the people in the field to wait for while the information goes up and decision comes down. This makes a case for devolution of decision making to the people in the field. Since, teams collectively take better decisions than individuals, it would be better to delegate decision making to teams.

These self-managed teams would take responsibility for their performance and take their own decisions. The responsibility of the senior managers would be to provide conditions that facilitate such decision making. Some of the enablers for empowered teams are ( please also see https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/building-football-teams-at-work/)

• Access to information  
• Roles based teams with psychological safety
• A performance appraisal system that supports collaboration and cooperation within team members instead of rewarding for meeting requirements of the role. (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/teams-and-performance-appraisal-systems/)
• Acceptance of decisions taken by the team.

We are now seeing a trend where some of the companies have adopted this. Harvard Business Review in its recent edition has carried the story “Harnessing Everyday Genius” and explains how Jean-Michel Guillon, head of personnel department and Bertrand Ballarin worked together and launched their project MAPP (Autonomous management of performance and progress) in summer of 2012 with the aim of redistributing authority and creating empowered teams.  

Some of the other companies, mentioned in HBR are

• Nucor: An American steel maker that allows operating crews to take responsibility for business development, capital planning, product innovation, process improvement etc.
• Buurtzorg: Dutch health care service provider which is organized into more than 900 self- managing teams.
• Svenska Handelsbanken:  A Swedish bank that treats each of its branches as standalone business. Branch teams take on decisions on credit, loan rates, deposits, customer communications and staffing levels.

Holacracy is another concept that operates with similar organizations. Lot of companies today are adopting Holacracy. Zappos is one of the largest companies to adopt Holacracy. Some other companies that have created self-managed teams are Morning Star, a ketchup manufacturing company and W.L. Gore, a material science company that specialises in PTFE (Teflon). The movement is now gathering critical mass and snow balling into a revolution.

Reviews – are key to learning and success

Tags

Business Systems, Learning Organizations, Management, Strategic Management

Most business owners are involved in all aspects of their business and know every small thing in their business. That’s like knowing the wood or in other words, knowing all trees intimately in a jungle. That’s why most business owners get flummoxed when told that they should conduct reviews. The typical response being, why do I need reviews when I already know everything in my business?

A review allows us an opportunity to detach ourselves from the business and look at it from a distance. While engaged in day to day operations, we are getting a 30 feet view of our business, a review helps us step backward and get a 30,000 feet view of our business. We are able to see the forest instead of trees. Hence we get a more holistic view of our business. For example, how our credit policy is affecting not only our sales but also our cash flow.

Periodic Reviews also help us gauge scale of movement and hence provide inputs in planning course correction(s) and in gauging impact of new initiative(s). For example, how costs have changed in last few years.

A review would typically start with a comparison. Mostly it is comparison of budget vs actuals. The review could also be a comparison of performance in current period with that of a past period. Most organizations use budget vs actuals for reviews. This helps them gauge progress against plan. It also allows companies to revisit assumptions that they made in their plans. The assumptions could be related to any aspect of sales or costs. For example, percentage bids won or lost, number of inquiries generated or average order size.  This allows companies to revise their assumptions and make course corrections.

Good planning processes and reviews allow managers to zero in on problem areas and move from 30,000 feet to 30 feet. This reduces there day to day involvement in operations and allows them to delegate.

Given the importance of reviews, it is important that they are conducted in a friendly and positive atmosphere, are scheduled on regular periodic intervals. Most importantly, they should be structured in a way that they help us learn and take action.

Some ground rules for review meeting

1. Psychological safety – for a meaningful review, it is important that employees feel comfortable in speaking up. It is important that employer provides a psychological safety. As Amy Edmondson, Professor at Harvard says, “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.”
2. Everyone has equal voice. Everyone can raise an issue and respond to an issue. Listen with an open mind and remember that everyone’s experience is valid.
3. Don’t make it personal, don’t take it personally.
4. Avoid blame game. Take learnings and think of improvements. Look forward and Think Positive

 

Structure of reviews

It is necessary to ask three questions in reviews

1 . What has worked for us?  What is it that we need to do more?

2. What did not work for us? What is that we should change or avoid doing?
3. What should be next steps? What should be our action plan with time frame?

Plan and review. Your business will go places.

Learning Organization: Structures that facilitate learning

Tags

Human Resource Management, Learning Organizations, Organisation Structure, Strategic Management, Teams

There is an idiom in English language. “All good things must come to an end”. That is nothing great will last forever. And so it is with civilisations, countries and organizations including companies. Civilisations like Greek, Indian and Egypt have lost their status and so have countries like England, France and Germany. Tom Peters and Robert Waterman researched and put together a list of organizations that they said were excellent (Please refer to the book “In Search of Excellence”). They put together a list of companies they felt were great but by the end of 10 years, 7 out of 10 companies had lost their status. Companies like Nokia, Firestone and Toshiba which were industry leaders are now struggling to survive.

A key question that keeps on bugging us is that can we design Learning Organisations? Smart machines are machines that can think, that is they can process new data and adapt themselves based on the incoming data. Can we, human beings design organisations that change with time?

This should be feasible provided we can break “The Trap of Success”. Success is the biggest block to learning. Success reinforces our mind-sets and reinforces our beliefs. It makes us repeat what we did before in a changing environment while the competitors try new things and hence one day competitors overtake successful companies till the time, another company comes and changes the rules of the game. How can companies avoid this trap?

The key to avoiding trap of success is to keep on questioning our mind-sets especially the mental models that helped us win. We all are more comfortable with and like people who share our mental models. But this creates a trap. Its like everyone is looking in same direction and the group fails to watch its back. We all have blinders, a group with same set of blinders would fail to look at 360 degrees.

The easiest way to look at 360 degrees is by allowing a diverse group of people to challenge our mindsets. That is have teams of peers with no hierarchy so that people can challenge each other’s mindsets and the team would not only be taking optimal decisions but would also be creative or innovative. For this we need to structure an organization around teams (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/team-based-on-organisations-a-new-organisation-structure/ )

Teams allow us to develop an organisation without hierarchy and where people can question each other and challenge each other’s mindsets. This not only improves quality of decision making in the teams but also makes them more creative and innovative. Teams built around roles and without hierarchy would encourage people to take on roles of others just like in a game of football or basket- ball unlike Cricket where the captain takes all the decisions (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/building-football-teams-at-work/). An unlikely fallout of it is increased ownership of employees, which in a competitive market is a big advantage.

We can design a learning organization by designing an organization around teams and

• building a culture where people affected by a decision or people taking a decision can participate in decision making. Decision making is by and large by consensus.
• Providing psychological safety to staff and assuring them that they would not be punished for calling out if they are affected by a decision or in a discussion, and https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/indian-experience-with-democracy-2/
• promoting diversity. Diversity not only in demographics but also diversity in thoughts.
• Processes that facilitate team members to cooperate and collaborate and not compete with each other.

Is that all what we need to develop learning organizations? There is more to it but then teams is a good starting point.

Simplifying Agile Story Points

Tags

Agile Technology, Management, Software Development

One of my client was struggling with a huge backlog. His teams were not able to prioritise their tasks. The estimations were going haywire and productivity was low. The concept of story points (used in Agile Technologies) did not help them much as it was too abstract for them. Each story or task was different and hence they were not able to relate them in levels of difficulty. Because the idea of story was abstract, it was also not easy for them to compare stories with same points in different sprints.

Then I developed a framework to understand the stories and improve time estimations. The three parameters used were

1. Understanding of business needs
2. Complexity of tasks
3. Difficulty of task and volume of work

The easiest tasks to estimate are the ones that are fully understood both in terms of what the customer wants and in terms of steps to be taken to complete the tasks. A task where the customer himself is not sure of what he wants or a technical task for which the engineer himself is not able to develop a road map would need more time in analysis. Either way the estimations for the time would be way off. Effort and time would be required in analysing and breaking the task into smaller tasks or sub-tasks.

Once the tasks are understood and broken into task with steps needed to accomplish it are defined, the estimations would be a function of difficulty and volume of work.

It works actually like story points does in Agile. The stories can be placed on matrix based on story points. It would be easier to develop time estimates for stories with lower story points and hence they are prioritised to be picked up. The above model can also be used for prioritising projects in case of a clogged pipeline. The teams would also be able to compare stories across sprints based on difficulty level.

Please do wait for an illustrated example of this in next blog post.