Scaling

Leaders become so busy with daily operational tasks that they lose sight of their most important work: growing organisational capabilities and developing people.

Organisations create too many specialized roles too early, leading to knowledge silos, coordination overhead, and organisational complexity that becomes impossible to reverse.

One interesting observation I made several times during agile transformation initiatives is that they seem to be activated by a sort of organisational energy that drives the change. This lasts for a certain amount of time, but then it usually fades and is eventually gone.

Organisational agility requires reducing ‘accidental complexity’ - rather than just implementing agile methods at the team level.

Scaling frameworks create rigid rules that clash with organisational realities, making it difficult to adapt agile practices to large, complex environments with existing constraints.

This is a short post to share the slides of the presentation I gave today at XP 2010 in Trondheim.