Adaptive Structures and Processes

Adaptive Structures and Processes means designing your organisation to match how work actually needs to flow in order to pursue a proper Adaptive Product Management System. Conway’s law tells us that organisations design systems that mirror their own communication structures - so if your structure is broken, everything you produce will be too.

Most companies try to fix culture first, but as John Seddon and Craig Larman teach us, “Culture follows Structure” (law 5): you can’t change behaviour without changing the system people work within.

This isn’t about reorganising for the sake of change or copying what worked at other companies. It’s about understanding how work flows through your organisation and designing structures that support rather than hinder that flow. When structure aligns with work, people naturally collaborate because the system makes it the easiest path.

The solution is simple and elegant - though not easy to implement: in fact, this process usually requires patience, consistency of purpose by the Leadership Team and an evolutionary and increamentale type of work that requires a lot of learning at all levels in the organisation.

An Adaptive Structures and Processes system in an organisation involves several aspects

Understanding and applying Conway’s law to your advantage

• designing team boundaries that minimise handoffs
• reducing communication overhead through smart structuring

Creating structures that enable product-oriented teamwork

• cross-functional teams that own product outcomes
• cross-team collaboration enable by sound scaled structures

Leadership taking responsibility for emergent incremental organisational design

We help organisations through this journey using our long experience in large-scale evolution initiatives, combining Organisational Design, Systems Thinking, lean principles and agile practices to create the mix your organisation needs.

Our approach is based on ELSE - The Emergent Large-Scale Evolution principles for scaling, that we have co-developed as part of a think tank group that brought together their experience to synthesise the best of their experiences and codify them in a system of guiding principles.