Design Organizational Change with Adaptivity Fit

An organizational transformation being a long-lasting journey is a complex matter, and it is easy to get lost and stuck in an intermediate state, forgetting your target state, the bigger picture.

So, we've designed a map that we call Adaptivity Fit to help you better navigate your transformational journey and plan the next strategic steps. Read on to see how this tool can be helpful to you and your organization.

High Adaptivity as a Target

Organizational transformation is not a project with a fixed end date. It is rather an ongoing effort of learning to get closer to the ideal state, making incremental changes over time.

And what is the ideal state worth pursuing?

We believe it is an organizational ability (of all the employees, teams, and departments) to be able to re-focus and keep doing what's most important and most valuable, at any given moment of time. This is a state of?high organizational adaptivity. And your organization can get better at it, improving its fit for adaptivity continuously.

We discovered two essential?dimensions?that need to be mastered on the journey of getting your organization fit for adaptivity. Read on to learn more about dimensions and how to navigate among them.

Towards better (team) delivery

For many organizations that we know, "agile transformation" means creating "agile teams". And it is a step in the right direction. It is impossible to get to higher adaptivity by relying on individualistic work. Jelled groups of people (teams) possess abilities to adapt to changing environments much better than individuals. Teams absorb the complexity of uncertainty, acquire new skills, and discover and deliver at the same time.

Organizational improvements along this dimension increase the capabilities of teams to work across the entire tech stack, delivering results faster and in a constant flow.?That is very much correlated with what Scrum people call the "Definition of Done" and the DevOps techniques of "Continuous Delivery".?

Mastering this dimension allows teams to work on customer problems end-to-end. That means without having blocking dependencies between each other - i.e. no queues, no waiting, no blocking, no handing work over to someone, no victimization or lack of responsibility. Lean production requires multi-trained individuals and cross-functional teams to improve delivery and learning. And that's why we see that organizations tend to focus much more on this dimension - creating better teams.

Yet, from our experience of years of consulting, focusing only on improving the performance of individual teams is not enough. When each team focuses only on a specific narrow product aspect (such as a certain feature or a product capability, for instance, a catalog product search) the joint result of all the teams will unlikely provide a seamless and joyful customer experience (e.g. finding and buying a product at minimal clicks). The product might look like a Frankenstein to its customers, lacking holistic design.

Towards better (customer) experience

As we mentioned above, improving the performance of individual teams is not enough to provide a good customer experience. And also, when teams are driven by narrow focuses and local interests, that usually creates a fragmented and conflicting view of the reality, hence jeopardizing the organization's general ability to foresee upcoming changes and adapt.

So organizations also need to focus on the other dimension: we call it "Value Consolidation". It means how broadly and holistically teams, departments, and the entire organization understand the value it provides to its customers.

That means enabling teams to work together with a broader focus and wider responsibilities. Not only cross-functionally but also product-wide, thinking of integrated user journeys and holistic customer experiences.

In?practice, such organizations have fewer backlogs, fewer roles, and less bureaucracy and hence require?fewer steering wheels to be turned when the organization needs to adjust its course. That's a better fit for adaptivity.

Organizational Archetypes

We worked with many leaders and teams who would like to improve their organizations. They try different approaches and run experiments, but in the end, lose that drive and accept the status quo. We think this happens because organizational design as a domain is very much unknown to managers and engineers.

We want to help! So over the years of consulting and managing changes, we have described seven "classical" organizational archetypes that we put along the two dimensions mentioned above.

We believe that this overview of options works as a Chinese restaurant menu - providing a common language and making it easier to compare and contrast options of org design. And hence facilitating the right discussions in any organization: "where are we?" and "where are we heading to?".

Clarity on these questions is vital for the success of any transformation, bridging the "top-down" and "bottom-up" efforts?on the transformational journey.

Download and learn more about the Adaptivity Fit - a map to guide your organizational transformations.