Kaleidoscope of Transformation

The 2 days metaTransformationCamp was an amazing opportunity to get inspiration from the community of transformation, organized by Metafinanz (aka meta), in the newly refurbished building at the heart of Munich. Empirically, Meta is one of the most advanced agile pioneers within Allianz family. Here're few selected takeaways.

Successful Transformation needs…

"cool workspace that drives collaboration"

After two years of planning and construction work, on September 20, 2022 meta was able to open the new offices! Where employees find both the most modern workplaces and meeting places such as new Health & Wellbeing Center. This is where meta have bundled offers and promotions on the topics of body, mind and soul, from fitness training and individual coaching to mental health advice. Check the drone video here:

Next-Work-wird-erlebbar-Neues-metafinanz-Buerokonzept.mp4

Successful Transformation needs…

"top leadership's courageous action and radical focus"

Board Member of metafinanz, CCO Jürgen Kalkbrenner has opened the TransformationCamp by clearly articulate what was important for him when he started the journey to agile, previous member of management Will (picture below) has shared his journey shifting from a traditional manager to agile leader:

Radical change requires radical focus, leaders must create the general conditions to let Agile emerge, that is engaging, exciting, driven by clear values and principles. Metafinanz has converted its entire organization by significantly reduce its management roles, shifted from centralized to decentralized control. With small, independent units to get closer to the customer. It was radical but holistic approach, creating new development path for people to grow, and able to self-organize to focus on items that have the highest priority. The result since change in 2017 has been outstanding: employee satisfaction has increased and stabilized at very high level, customer satisfaction improved visibly, profitability is continuously rising (see picture above)

Successful Transformation needs…

"alignment, transparency, measurement and relentless improvement"

If there's a rock star of Agile, it would be Joe Justice, previous Scrum Master of Tesla, he is one of THE leading agile expert on this planet, Joe applied agile to automotive manufacturing since 2006, founding Team?WIKISPEED. the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary for his work creating the disciplines?"Extreme Manufacturing". If you are interested to find more about Agile@Tesla, check out my previous summary here

This is the second time that Joe has visited us. He was challenged with the question from Thomas Funk, agile coach of metafinanz:

"What would Elon do, if he would be leading a 130 years company in Germany?"

Since Elon hasn't led an insurance company before, therefore Joe has used the example of Twitter to analyze Elon's behavior pattern, about what he would do. Here're the answers:

ACTION 1: Align the board

"Is the board, who has the highest decision authority, capable of immediate and decisive action towards the company's greatest possible contribution? "

"If the answer is No? Make it happen"

This sounds quite radical, Elon doesn't like decision latency, Joe said that transformation must be led by the highest leaders in the organization, the idea is to reflect how can we accurate decision making.

This reminded me of Gregor's law, author of "The Architect Elevator"

Excessive complexity is nature’s punishment for organizations that are unable to make decisions.

ACTION 2: ONE KPI

Establish one KPI for the company, that creates value for all humanity and is inspiring. Make new companies for each KPI if needed.

For example, Elon has been considering acquiring Twitter, because he believed that "Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy". But how to measure this?

"Percentage of Twitter's account likely to be fake or spam"

Elon's vision about SpaceX is to "make life multiplanetary &?extend?the light of?consciousness?to the?stars", but how to measure progress? he used the following KPI:

"Cost per kilogram of payload delivered to a low Earth orbit for SpaceX starship"

“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk said in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”

First principles thinking is the act of boiling a process down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there. Joe has asked the group, what is your most important single KPI to measure the success of your company that contribute to society?

ACTION 3: Digital Self-Management (real-time financials)

Create automated kpi indicator of a one contributing KPl that can be measured now, make visible to all staff on their phones, every wall, every monitor, this KPI must be connected to the organizational mission and value. It could be there's one incremental KPI at a time, but make it radical transparent, see how money is spent, where, why is spent, in real time.

ACTION 4: relaunch (but create clear policy)

Relaunch teams with 4 page or less policy document aligned to that KPI, telling everyone they are responsible for contributing that KPI directly.

ACTION 5: Do your Chores (relentless improvement)

Do the chores, every day. Aggressively focus to maintain a mix of people directly contributing to that KPI daily.

Everyday employees walk into the Tesla and Spacek facilities and choose their own project. No manager tells them what project they must join. Employees would recruit each other via iMessage or Signal. The available projects are displayed to everyone. For me, it feels quite similar to how consulting company works, depending on the viscosity between capacity and value streams. E.g. in finance it remains relative stable compared to IT project organization.

During the Q&A round I have asked Joe one question about

"how to scale and up skill people so that they can become successful in what they do"?

Joe said that in Tesla people tend to create short videos, in order to share and distribute knowledge on internal platforms, make it simple and easy to access. Sometimes Elon will offer training himself if there's a really critical skills or capability that the organization needs.

My overall impression of his talk was:

Tesla leaders and employee have demonstrated that they are faithful practitioners of lean product development. Agile?development ultimately is a process for rapid software delivery that is connected to many?Lean values and principles, both are inseparable.

Successful Transformation needs…

fun! tiny habits! positive rewarding loops!

One of the highlight during MetaTransformationCamp2022 was Jurgen Appelo's great talk: "You can't make people change…" Change management is not telling what people to do, people don't resist change - they resist being changed.

Make no decision is the worst decision, if you want to run, go out and run, if you want to ski faster and stay stable, you might fall if you lean forward but if you lean backward, you will fall for sure, encourage people to try out.

Transformation is a long journey, and people need to have some fun, gamification is one way how we can engage people, think about how game developers work? On the other side, if people decided and know what is the right thing to do, they need to go for it.

Io be agile and innovate at scale, organizations must be shapeshifters, by continuously trying practices, shifting between control and freedom, gamifying all small improvements, and turning behaviors into habits. It is a delicate art through unlocking the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers.

Successful Transformation needs…

community!

Transformation has so many different layers, involving organization, technology, culture, people and leadership. It's the interaction of all those elements that make transformation so hard but also so rewarding to do, therefore it is so important to exchange learning and sharing knowledge, community can scale and we contribute and learn from community.

The transformationCamp was a great event, and reconnecting with colleagues was quite fulfilling, the event is organized in a cozy, heartwarming and intimate atmosphere, I am already looking forward to next year's event! A big thank you to all the metafinanz colleagues!

Photo source: insideTesla, SAFe, Management 3.0, Jurgen Appelo's slide, AzD Agile Coach Team