Embrace the Essence Evolution Revolution

Introduction

Succeeding in today’s world requires organizations and teams to adopt practices and methods that give them the best chance of success. But as the environment they operate in changes, those practices and methods must also change. The problem is that this change is at a pace far faster than traditional transformation and change management can keep up.

The Essence approach focusses on creating a culture of practice-based continuous improvement across an organization. A culture where teams are empowered to ensure their ways of working are always optimized and that the practices they are using are always the right ones for them. This means they continually and habitually think about which practices they use, which practices they are not using, who uses them, how they use them, how well they are using them, when and how often they use - in fact, everything about their practices and especially how they can be improved.

Teams are supported in this by well designed, curated ecosystems of practices and powerful, practice-aware tooling. This approach means that changes to how they work are driven by teams themselves rather than it feeling imposed upon them. Teams believe in their practices and devote energy to ensure they understand and apply them well, knowing that they are empowered to make changes when they need to.

Evolution not transformation

The Essence approach is one of evolution not transformation.

Transformation projects focus on moving to a new target operating model (for example, SAFe) and success depends on reaching that new state. The journey is disruptive, expensive, and lengthy with most benefits not felt until everyone has transformed. These transformations frequently fail.

When we evolve, we see improvements from the very start. From the beginning, we are constantly improving, taking small, frequent, evolutionary steps toward a goal. This also means that if the goal shifts, which it always does, we can shift our direction of travel and make further small improvements, from our already improved new starting position.

Common goals, different journeys

While there may be common organizational goals, each team or team of teams is usually different from one another. They start from a different place, require different things from their way of working, and have different optimal paths to reach the goals. Adopting an evolutionary approach makes accommodating these differences between teams much easier.

These factors also mean that defining an ideal operating model – one that is appropriate for all teams all the time – is impossible. That’s why our approach is not about evolving to an ideal operating model – it is about evolving to a different way of thinking about how we work; one where we assume our way of working should be continually evaluated and frequently changed. One where we continually adapt and improve in response to changes in our environment.

In other words, the goal is achieving a culture of practice-based continuous improvement; not transforming to a new method or framework.

Practice-based continuous improvement

Adopting this culture will not come quickly. It will not be the result of a training course; pep talk or purchase of a tool. It requires changes in the repeated and default behaviors of the people in and around the team. It needs teams to regard their way of working as something that changes and evolves. However, in many teams and organizations, this is not how they think; they are used to believing that ways of working are fixed and cannot be changed. Our approach, with small, frequent interventions, changes this perception. We help teams focus on the importance of their practices and ways of working and help them to identify how to reinforce or improve them. As this type of activity becomes more prevalent, it becomes more normalized and the default behaviors in the team begin to change. This results in a change of team culture which then reinforces itself as more changes result in more improvements and the team see more benefits.

A critical difference from a transformation focus is that this is not about adopting a new method or framework. It is about starting where you are and identifying how to improve. It is about broadening your perspective, considering practices from anywhere and being open to changing anything, everything or nothing about how you work. But it isn’t about losing control.

Through the use of curated practice ecosystems, an organization can define guidance and rules, retaining control while also enabling teams to choose the most effective practices and method for them. Practices can come from anywhere: from existing frameworks like SAFe, LeSS or The Flow System; from industry best practice like User Stories or Domain Driven Design; popular approaches like retrospectives, metered accounting, agile governance or value stream mapping; from internal, bespoke practices applied within your organization; from communities of enthusiasts; or from anywhere else. Each practice in the ecosystem is described using a common, industry standard language making them easy to understand, compare and combine.

Team led, tool-supported

The use of new tooling and concepts are critical to help reinforce this change. Cards, collaborative exercises, coaching conversations and the use of practice-aware tools underpin that this is a different way of thinking and help focus the team on the purpose of these exercises – a focus on practices. This is not a project that ends. The point of continuous improvement is that it is continuous. But external support may end, so it is important that teams learn to self-sustain their continuous improvement focus.

This is achieved by helping teams developing lasting habits and by providing tooling that helps support and sustain those desired repeated behaviors, helping the new culture to flourish.

The Essence Approach

Our evolutionary, practice-based approach to improving organizational effectiveness involves 5 simple steps:

• Step 1 – Define your ecosystem. Create and maintain curated ecosystems of practices and guidance. Include practices written by world renowned experts whose advice you can trust, customized or tailored practices, or create your own bespoke practices. Practices are presented in a common way making them easy to create, compare and understand.
• Step 2 – Define team directions of travel. Each team selects the most appropriate combination of practices for their situation from the ecosystem. This will usually be different for each team and is not final - it is their current view on what they think they will need - a key assumption is that this initial way of working will evolve as the team, their work, and their environment evolves.
• Step 3 – Start from where you are. Each team or team of teams analyzes how they currently work and how that differs from their chosen method. This will result in 4 kinds of conclusions about practices or elements within practices – things to: keep, stop, improve, and start. Based on what is most valuable for the team, these things are prioritized and small, evolutionary changes begun.
• Step 4 – Create a culture of practice-centric continuous improvement. To start creating a new culture of practice-based continuous improvement, each team begins with small, specific coaching interventions that support their highest priority changes. There are many ways to do this, and the right mix will be different for each team.
• Step 5 – Embed the culture. Culture change is driven by changes in the repeated behaviors of the people. The behaviors we desire are those of making many small, evolutionary changes with a constant focus on improving the ways of working. This focus is initially brought by the consultants, but as these behaviors become habits, the need for external facilitation reduces and the team can take more of a lead themselves. This is helped by effective use of the right tooling - tools like Essence WorkBench don’t just provide reminders of the details of the practice, they become integral to how teams analyze how they work and how they track their progress.

Conclusion

Optimizing organization performance is a complex issue, one that is not possible to address by simply defining a way of working and requiring everyone to follow it.

Instead, provide the environment where your teams are constantly improving and optimizing their ways of working themselves –create a culture of practice-based continuous improvement.

The need for improvement never stops. With an Essence approach to evolving not transforming, it doesn’t have to.

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