Manoeuvre Agility or Meta-Agility (only for Complexity and Lean-Agile geeks)

Organisations that have achieved a good degree of agility, and have successfully adopted lean and agile principles and practices, each one has evolved a different approach that fits their unique context and circumstances.

None of them is practising a lean/agile framework by the book (e.g Extreme Programming, Scrum or Kanban), or copying some other organisation’s approach (e.g. Spotify), or adopting one of the agile-in-name-only frameworks (e.g. SAFe or DaD).

The ability to match an organisation’s unique context and circumstances with a suitable agility approach and related capabilities, it is a capability in itself, or a meta-capability. Enters Manoeuvre Agility.

Manoeuvre Agility or Meta-Agility: is the ability to recognise the approach to Agility appropriate for the circumstances, and to transition to this approach in a timely manner. It is a function of the set of Agility approaches available to the team/organisation.

Below are some lens available in the literature to look at each context and circumstances, and match them with a suitable approach.

Kent Beck’s 3x

In the 3x model, Kent Beck looks at things from the product’s life-cycle point of view, using as “timeline” the degree of success (number of clients and/or users) of a product instead of the time because when we experiment, things can move in both directions, unlike the time.

On the left end, there is the Explore phase where one launches as many possible experiments hoping to discover a successful product idea.

On the opposite right end, there is the Extract phase where one tries to extract further value and find marginal growth from a mature and successful, money cow, product.

The levels of complexity in Explore and Extract differ, as well as the approach best suited.

In the Explore phase, the level of complexity is predominantly high. In Cynefin terms (see below) it moves across the Complex and Chaos domains.

In the Explore there is always more to gain than to lose, experiments are low-risk and there is the possibility of high payoffs.

The things that are beneficial in the Explore phase are for example:

• diversity, innovativeness, disruptive thinking
• cheep experiments
• quick lunches of a large number of experiments in parallel
• speed of learning

In the Extract phase, the level of complexity is predominantly middle, crossing into the medium-high for something and into the low for other things. In Cynefin terms, it is Complicated with dips in Complex and Simple domains.

In the Extract there is more to lose than to gain, a failure can create big losses while a success can only create marginal gains.

The things that are beneficial in the Extract phase are for example:

• reducing risk
• predictability
• reliability
• efficiency

- as reducing costs of maintenance/evolution and operations

- as simplification

- as automation

• some degree of standardisation/uniformity
• some degree of economy of scale

Kent Beck in the 3x model explores also other factors that change between different phases. Those factors include teamwork, economy, time, money, and estimates.

David Snowden’s Cynefin

The Cynefin framework by David Snowden describes four domains (obvious, complicated, complex and chaotic) plus one (disorder).

Snowden also describes an exercise, Butterfly Stamping, that results in matching the domains with the various organisation’s challenges and opportunities, initiatives, or requirements.

For each domain, Snowden describes the leadership style and the approach (e.g. the type of constraints and practices) that are well suited to tackle the items in that domain. 

While the organisation’s challenges/opportunities/initiatives/requirements are likely to be scattered across various domains, and those items also evolve and move over time across adjacent domains, the exercise still gives a sense of which domain is predominant and so what level of agility should be predominantly beneficial for the organisation.

Cynefin domains are: 

- Obvious and Complicated: are governed by the cause-effect relations; 

- Complex: is where there are no stable cause-effect relationships and instead order is emergent; 

- Chaos: is a status of emergency where things change very quickly, and there is no cause-effect relation. 

Additionally, the Disorder domain right in the middle is where the current domain is unclear.

In a recent work still in progress David Snowden is also mapping various methods of software development into the different domains, showing how different methods achieve different levels of agility and are better suited for the different domains:

David S. Alberts Agility, and NATO NEC C2 Approach Space

In David Alberts work there is a list of 5 elements that can be used to access which agility approach is better suited for the context and circumstances (David Alberts uses the term Endeavour).

David describes a set of approaches to agility that range from one extreme with the more traditional and directive command and control to the other extreme with edge organisations (flat, self-organised). 

The set of approaches to agility are defined by these three variables:

• Delegation of Decision Rights (from none to broadly delegated)
• Distribution of Information (from totally restricted to broadly distributed)
• Patterns of Interaction (from prescribed and tightly contained to informal and totally unconstrained)

These three variables and related levels of agility (see the diagonal) lead to different team/org structures, different means and practices to share information, and different leadership approaches.

There is a fourth variable mentioned by Simon Reay Atkinson in “The agile organization: from informal networks to complex effects and agility":

• Trust and shared beliefs (from none to complete)

that in the context of a military environment, where this study took place, are always assumed as complete, but in a commercial organisation, they are not.

The level of complexity of an endeavour, or the level of complexity of the unique context and circumstances faced by an organisation, determine the level of agility required.

And it can be assessed using these 5 elements:

1. The degree to which the environment is highly connected with frequent interactions that cause a diminished capacity to predict
2. The level of shared understanding that is needed to succeed because of the level of interdependency
3. The presence of rare, very low probability events that can occur and bring great opportunities or risks, together with huge consequences
4. The degree of time pressure because of the amount of information and information processing required that exceed the available time
5. The nature and extent of the uncertainty associated with a situation, affecting our ability to both formulate the problem and find an acceptable solution.

In David's work, the relation between the level of agility and the level of complexity of the endeavour has been tested with a set of empirical experiments.

Simon Reay Atkinson in his book quotes W. Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety as a possible rationale for this relation:

The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate.

Michael Spayd's mapping of Frederic Laloux cultures

While the previous Cynefin and C2 Agility models offer a way to access the level of complexity of the challenges and opportunities an organisation faces, and maps that complexity level with the level of agility desirable to handle that (and also with a set of things to do to achieve that level of agility), Michael’s model provides a way to map the the culture of the organisation, that can be assessed by the employees, with a relative level of complexity (altitude) that matches the culture.

This model also maps the culture of the organisation (and so the relative level of complexity) to the Agile Manifesto (that we use as an approximation of the level of Agility).

So when we use this model in combination with the previous models, we have on one side the complexity level or the challenges and opportunities that an organisation is facing, on the other side we have the current culture on the model, and so in the middle we have the desired level of Agility and the level of Agility that is compatible with the current organisation: Complexity level <=> Agility level <=> Company Culture.

This is the set of cultures described by Laloux (he uses the term Level of Consciousness) that evolved over time, and he makes the assumption that those cultures evolved over time to fit the increasing levels of complexity of the world:

The following one is the mapping of those cultures with the Agile Manifesto created by Michael Spayd, showing how those cultures are progressively more congruent with Agile and constrains less the expression of Agility. 

In other terms those cultures progressively show a higher level of Agility.

Sudden changes to culture can happen only in times of crisis, or when re-founding a part of an organisation (e.g. in a new building, in a new parallel structure, in a new branch, etc.)

Otherwise, it’s important to remember that culture changes usually take many years. 

The Integral Agile Transformation Framework (IATF) by Michael Spayd and Michele Madore

Michael’s and Michele’s IATF brings together all the topics discussed previously (e.g. culture, structure, leadership, practices) into one framework that can be used to support and develop the organisation’s Manoeuvre Agility or Meta-Agility. Indeed it can be used as:

- a diagnostic framework to assess the organisation’s ability to cope with complexity, it gives an integral and holistic view from the different perspectives of the four quadrants

- an envisioning tool to explore and describe in which directions the altitude (the complexity and so the agility) of the organisation could shift, in each quadrant, to better suit the organisation’s circumstances and needs.

The framework is neutral in the sense that different frameworks/methods/tools can be used to pursue the desired shift, and the choice of the framework/method/tool can itself be based on the current organisation’s circumstances and the result desired.

The colours used in each quadrant of the framework resemble different levels of complexity (altitudes), and are loosely inspired by Spiral Dynamics and Clare Graves’ work just like the Laloux cultures colours.

The colours mark different altitudes that range from the less complex (amber) to more complex (teal).

The four quadrants are:

• Organisational Culture & Relationships: the We perspective, that is mapping to the Agile Manifesto described previously
• Leadership & Mindset: the Me perspective, about the style and approach to leadership 
• Practices & Behaviour: the His/Her perspective, about competencies as well as everyday behaviours at work
• Organisational Architecture: the Them perspective, about an organisation’s structure, governance, etc.

Conclusions

Agile teams continuously experiment, inspect, learn, adapt and evolve their way of working to suit their circumstances and context.

How do organisations recognise and adopt an agility approach that suits their unique challenges and opportunities?

The ability to do exactly that is called Manoeuvre Agility. 

And here have been presented few models to assess the complexity of the challenges and opportunities an organisation is facing and they also suggest an approach to/level of agility that suits them well.

Those models also suggest things that enable the desired level of agility. 

For example, the C2 Agility Approach suggests 3+1 variables. Cynefin suggests a leadership style plus types of constraints and practices that are best suited in each domain.

3x model suggests lost of different things in terms of risk, team, economy, time, money, and estimates.

Laloux/Michael model suggest an organisation culture.

And finally Michael’s IAFT brings all together.

As a consequence, those models used as part of an experiment-inspect-learn-adapt-evolve loop at organisation level can help to achieve the Manoeuvre Agility introduced here in the beginning.