Sharpening the Blade and Improving The Handle: A Metaphor For Greater Agility

To often, we focus on helping teams use better practices, with very little impact on their agility. As change agents, we can serve teams a lot better by helping them chip away at the structural barriers to their agility. If we reframe the discussion away from practices and capability and instead focus on tackling the impediments that get in the way of team success, we are much more likely achieve improvements that are sustainable over time.

Riffing on Niels Phlaglen's outside-in organizational model, we can infer that agility improves when we place teams on the Edge of our organization with direct and unfettered access to market actors, and we provide these edge teams with the autonomy required to self-organize based on market feedback.

But this is not an all or nothing discussion, rather this a model we can invite organizations to move toward over time. Using this model of organizational model, we can frame improvement discussions around the metaphor of a kitchen knife. We want to help teams:

• Sharpen their Blade: increasing market precision
• Improve their Handle: increasing autonomy and independence

Many teams encounter common obstacles that dull their blade, and erode their handle. Framing a retrospectives, leadership reviews, or quality circles through the lense of these obstacles can bring about some very tangible and achievable results.

A Dull Blade

• Poor Market Contact: Teams do not work directly with customers to understand their needs, and do not act on feedback gathered frequently
• Limited Market Access: Teams do not have direct access to market actors, and only engage with proxies and/or must seek permission from other groups in order to work with real users
• Lack of Meaningful Purpose: Team purpose is unclear, or is not motivating, purpose may be viewed as in-authentic, an exercise in propaganda
• Missing Business & Product Capability: Team is missing the skills & experience to navigate their market and own their product

A Poor Handle

• Poor Enterprise Experience (EnX): Enterprise support functions and governance groups provide teams with a poor experience. Mandatory services and mercurial governance are forced on teams, regardless of quality or value.
• Lack of Autonomy & independence: Team does not have autonomy to own value creation activities. Team must hand off work and is governed by numerous other teams, groups, or departments
• Lack of Meaningful Work: Work doesn’t require people to learn and grow. Work is mundane or frustrating
• Missing Delivery & Operational Capability: Team is missing the skills & experience to deliver and operate their product

It should be noted that the idea of enterprise experience is inspired by Manuel Paise and Matthew Skelton's book Team Topologies. They talk a lot about how platform teams must provide dev team with an amazing DevEx or developer experience. I think this notion applies to all centralized support function that are serving market facing teams, HR, Legal, Desktop, you name it. Agility cannot increase if Edge teams are subjected to crappy service

Also note that I am not saying capability isn't something to discuss, it is included in this model. But instead of dominating the dialogue, it is now just a piece of the puzzle.

We can start down the path of tackling some of these barriers through a simple workshop that can be facilitated, perhaps during a retrospective, to allow team members to discuss these points, and high-light areas that the team wants to improve. Here is an example taken from a team level session run, where the team identified various barriers that were impeding their agility.

We are also experimenting with facilitating the dialogue through the use of a canvas. Teams and stakeholders iteratively complete the canvas by describing where they would like to sharpen their blade and improve their handle, along with the improvements required to get their. Here are what the sections of a potential canvas could like.

If you are interested in a more detailed write-up walkthrough of the canvas let me know! Perhaps we can arrange a facilitated session. I will also be writing more about this and other topics related to structural agility in my upcoming book.