It’s like Cauliflower!? My first thoughts about Scrum at Scale (S@S)

Ever since I entered work life I have been working with managers. Supporting, developing, training, leading with them (change & people dimension), and following managers closely.

My academic background in natural sciences and systems thinking gives me a totally other way of looking at organizations than the usual leaders coming from the engineering or economic science backgrounds.

What always bugged me about organizations was the fact that we were expecting managers to be great at basically opposite capabilities; leading the WHAT (projects, numbers, products, processes) and simultaneously expecting them to be awesome with the HOW (people, social interaction, change leadership, coaching, listening…). The both-and-leaders are very rare. It is a looooong path to try to get Eddie the Engineer or Carol the Capitalist to learn about how to make human interaction tenfolds better. It’s a bit shorter, but still a decent and rocky way to go teaching Felicia Facilitator about balance sheets, efficiencies, market fit or operative investments and planning. So why are we still doing this? Why aren’t we utilizing people’s strengths and mitigate their weaknesses? Why aren't we pair-leading?

In 2009 I told my colleagues that I think we are closer to seeing the manager role dissolve into either pair-work (so that the super strategic "what"-people combine forces with super talented "how"-people) or that we won’t need the kind of management that we have been used to at all. The work of people in white collar jobs are so specialized, that all they will need is decent direction and great cross-coordination with transparency. I said I think there will be mostly coaches that support the talented employees to work and collaborate better. Never heard about Agile or Scrum then.

They thought I was bananas.

2010 I learnt about Scrum and Agile. That changed my life. I realized that Scrum / Agile will change how whole business models are setup. I realized that it will change the fundamentals of strategy, operations, planning, manager’s roles and HR. So I quit my job. And started to learn.

Eight years later I am on my way to be a hard boiled, no-nonsense Agile Enterprise Coach redesigning how organizations and people-systems work, together with my awesome and courageous clients.

Now, eight years later, just last week, I am meeting the father of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, and learning from him about Scrum at Scale – how to make organizations five or ten times more effective, delivering value at a speed that competitors just can’t match. And simultaneously building it on the scrum values of openness, respect, focus, commitment and courage, meaning a built in respect and valuing of the employees, managers and leaders.

How's that for a vision? An mega-efficient AND healthy organization model. 

Scrum at Scale is brilliance in bits.

The org model is like Cauliflower. Break a piece of a big cauliflower and you will have a copy of the cauliflower, but smaller. Look at the smallest piece of an S@S organization, and it still works with the exact same ways as the Executive team will work. This metaphor is of course stupid, but that was my first thought. When you know how to work in the small unit, you know how to work in any of the org units. Beautiful. This builds an organizational habit, and once these habits are in place throughout the organization – you can tweak and change, move up and down the hierarchy and you always know how to play.

Add transparency and removal of politics by clear accountabilities and mandates and we will be rid of the ridiculous decision bottleneck and political games bullshit that is going on in so many organizations. 

Add the flexibility and navigation according to value creation and your teams are steering themselves continuously towards profitability, customer value, growth, and improvement.

And then the best part…

Add a transformation ideology where you start small and get a couple of teams up to at least double, if not quadruple their efficiency, value creation and engagement.

First get the team development boosted. THEN Scale.

How’s that for a leading ideology?

Scaling with more teams should at minimum bring a linear performance growth. Most often, with the current scaling models, adding more teams worsens the overall performance.

Frankly: Don’t scale shit that does not work. You just end up with more shit that does not work. 

Not very surprisingly, my intuition ten years ago was imagining something like Scrum at Scale regarding the managerial roles, too. Leading the WHAT and the HOW in a Scrum at Scale organization is beautifully separated, lead by capable professionals on both sides, collaborating and coordinating where needed.

Thank you Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber for changing so many lives, including mine.

Ready to rock with S@S.

Thanks for reading, Riina