Moving Beyond Problem Solving

One of the most highly prized skills these days is problem solving. Being known as a problem solver is an almost surefire way to guarantee success in whatever organisation you are in. As the great Vanilla Ice once said - "If there was a problem, Yo, I'll solve it". Mind you, he did also say "Word to your mother" which is somewhat less profound. Problem solving is indeed a very valuable thing, but at the same time a very limited one. Problem solving implies finding the root cause of an issue and solving it - making sure that it doesn't occur again. But what happens when the root cause of a problem isn't something that can be fixed?

Many of the problems that confront organisations (and society as a whole) these days are not problems where you can look at the problem, see the root cause and fix the system so the problem goes away. Many of the key problems we face are caused not by an easily fixed flaw in the system, but by the system itself. They aren't really problems at all but behaviour that emerges from the operation of the system. What I'm talking about, of course, is complexity. When a system behaves in a complex way, it exhibits unexpected behaviour and we see that as a problem. But you can’t just go in and fix a complex system. Any fix you make will itself have unexpected consequences. Complex problems can't be fixed. At least not in the conventional sense of finding a root cause and applying a discreet solution. What do problem solvers do when confronted by complexity?

LeadershipDave Martin14 April 2020complexity, cynefyn, experimentationComment

Incremental Organisational Change

Last time we looked at some of the challenges around organisational change and the need to flip the system from one attractor to another. But where does that leave us? We know organisational change is hard. We know that we need to change the state of the system. We know that traditional approaches run out of steam and the system settles back to where it was before (often after thrashing wildly). We know we still want to change organisations. But how? How should we be doing organisational change?

Traditional approaches fail for a few reasons - they try to do a massive change all at once but don't add enough energy to push the system into a new state, or they add so much energy that the system breaks completely and descends into chaos, or they go the other way and try to do a low energy change but they can't sustain for long enough and they don't manage to shift the system. So what do we do?

Organisational Change, LeadershipDave Martin23 August 2017experimentation, organisational changeComment

Organisational Change Through Experiments

First up, a huge thanks to Mike Pollard for the inspiration on this one. This all started with a meeting invite from Mike to set up some experiments in organisational change. We all know that organisational change is hard. Organisations tend to resist change so doing any sort of substantial change is a lot of work, and also prone to failure as organisations slip quietly back into their old way of doing things. Since real agile success relies somewhat on changing some pretty fundamental things in the organisation, this has always been a pretty major limiting factor in agile adoptions - success relies on change and is limited by how much change we can introduce. Change is hard which limits the amount of success we can have.

Mike's idea was quite simple - rather than try to change the whole organisation, why not set up some small experiments instead? That gives the organisation a low risk way to see what works and what doesn't. Once we have some successful experiments we should have some good, hard data to back us up when we push for a wider rollout.