Software Enterprise Organizational Behavior – Part 4: The Organization-in-Crisis

Managing a crisis isn’t part of our usual organizational behavior. Otherwise, whenever something off-nominal happens, we’d just refine the current tactical plan and keep right on going. (But that’s not what happens, is it?) Instead, a crisis evokes our stress behavior and disrupts our organization from its current plan.

Let’s see how organizational behaviors help us distinguish the productive fail-fast/learn-fast mode from the unproductive crisis-recovery-repeat mode. And focusing on the latter case, what does it take to identify systematic problems within the enterprise, recognize the crisis-recovery-repeat pattern, and make a behavior changing transition to the organizational?

Here are some of the key questions we’ll consider as we explore this facet of organizational behavior.

• How did your interest behavior lead you to this behavior mode?
• How efficient is your stress behavior in driving recovery response?
• How likely will it lead to effective changes in usual behavior?

1. Background

In earlier parts of the series, we discussed the underlying models of organization and behavior, and approaches for constructing teams.

By way of review, our overall model of organizational behavior starts with people at its foundation.?How people act in certain roles and under certain conditions is the basis of behavior.?When we combine people into teams, and then groups of teams, this gives us an organization. So, people acting in roles, combined into two or more teams defines organizational behavior.

Underlying Models. Our framework combines two models to provide structure for organization and behavior.

• BAPO [1] – a model representing major functional enterprise roles, i.e, business management, architecture development, process administration, and customer operations.
• iMap [2] – a model representing relationships between three behaviors (usual, interest, and stress), and mapped into four basic behavior types – executer (red), communicator (green), analyzer (yellow), thinker (blue).

Behavior Descriptions.?Our framework extends the approach to individual behaviors to teams behaviors, and organizational group behaviors.

• Individual – indicated by the triplet of usual, interest, and stress behaviors for each role.
• Team – represented by the (closely-coupled) aggregate behavior of all individuals on the team, and approximated by the center of mass for each set of usual, interest, and stress behaviors.
• Organization – represented by the (loosely-coupled) collaborative relationships between teams.

Organization Structure. An organization is purposely formed to accomplish a set of short-term and long-term goals that align with a vision and mission.

• Functional – team structure formed to emphasize efficiency and effectiveness of primary (vertical) functions, e.g., business, architecture, process, and operations.
• Multifunctional – team structure formed to emphasize end-to-end (horizontal) execution, e.g., time-to-market, first-time quality.
• Hybrid – combination of function and multifunctional teams/groups to best fit enterprise objectives.

2. Biasing Usual Behaviors

Usual behaviors span the full set of behaviors needed for the software enterprise. As we’ve discussed in previous articles, the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall organization is based on the collaborative relationships between the teams responsible for each of these functions. See this summary of usual organizational behaviors.

• Business usual behaviors support gathering customer requirements and describing products.
• Development usual behaviors support designing and building products.
• Process usual behaviors support defining efficient development and production environments.
• Operations usual behaviors support deploying products for customer for customer satisfaction.

Many organizations may have refined their organizational structure around these usual behaviors. However, the same insights may not have gone into balancing their organizational interest behaviors, and this is where divisions in organizational behavior can bias their usual behaviors.?As an example, consider the following.

• Business interest behaviors can bias usual behaviors toward meeting product revenue expectations.
• Development interest behaviors can bias usual behaviors toward integrating robust enablers and quality attributes.
• Process interest behaviors bias can usual behaviors toward lowering development and production costs.
• Operations interest behaviors can bias usual behaviors toward improving customer experience.

3. Diverging Interest Behavior

The simple answer to “how did we get here?”or “how did this happen?” is that diverging interest behaviors have biased actions of different groups toward different subsets of company goals (while disregarding others).?This lack of collaboration for interest behaviors across the organization is likely to result in insufficient product requirements, incomplete design implementation, and incorrect process execution.

The net result from this lack of broader collaboration may be an incomplete or incorrect set of product capabilities and process disciplines.

If these interest behaviors are not balanced, then decision-making can become skewed in favor of one or two organization functions.?As an example, in a mature company organization, the business and process interest behaviors may exert stronger influence over the development and operations interest needs.

In this case the business may prioritize new features for customer over needed improvements for robust product and deployment infrastructure.?This can result in underfunding of critical enablers such as quality attributes for products and production environments.

And in practice, the root cause of many (if not most) operational “outages” stem from incorrect requirements for product enablers or incomplete development of architecture quality attributes. And for the software enterprise, customer outages can be one of the most stressful “crisis” situations they will encounter. (Hmmm. Does any of this sound familiar?)

4. Aligning Crisis Behavior… or Not

Now that the crisis has occurred, the organization transitions from usual behavior to stress behavior. The efficiency and duration of this shift depend on the alignment of organizational stress behaviors. If the organizational stress behavior is well-aligned, then the transition may be quick and lead to decisive resolution. If the organizational stress behavior is less cohesive and coherent, then working together on tough problems can be hampered by some of the same biases that generated the current crisis.

Stress behaviors for different functional groups may influence the urgency and quality of the solution as follows.

• Business behavior to drive quick recovery of revenue operations.
• Development behavior to improve quality of the product.
• Process behavior to improve efficiency of the recovery process.
• Operations behavior to restore robust customer operations.

In every case, after resolution is achieved and customer service has been restored, the organization has one of two choices to make.?

• Either return to their usual behaviors, with the diverging biases that were the root cause of the problem,
• Or learn from the experience, with initiatives to adapt and improve the behaviors of the organization. ?

Note that the less mature organization may return to their usual behavior and focus on refining their stress behavior, while the more mature organization will look deeper for insights and work to refine their usual behaviors.

4. Leadership Lessons

We didn’t discuss the fail-fast/learn-fast organization for agile companies, but it’s found in an efficient enterprise where the usual behaviors are balanced across the organization, the interest behaviors are collaborated across the organization, and the stress behaviors converge within the organization.

Contrast this with the crisis-recovery-repeat organization, where biased usual behaviors driven by diverging interest behaviors produce ineffective solutions. And when these solutions fail, the misaligned stress behaviors emphasize recovering production capability without addressing organizational behaviors and root causes.

As a leader, you need to assess your organization. Which of these cases sounds more like your team? If it’s the former, then good.?If it’s the latter, then you have some work to do.?

Follow up articles will look at the anatomy of failures within an organization, and what you can do to change behaviors to improve process efficiency and product effectiveness.

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