What would it take for your organisation to explore the "if only..."?

Do you share, with so many other people out there, the nagging sense of underlying friction in your organisation? Do you often think about how everything could be so much better "if only..."? What would it take for your organisation to hold attention on that "if only..." and do something about it?

I’ve spent much of my career in the fields of technology, product development and consulting. In 2016 I co-founded a consultancy called EngineerBetter, to help organisations be more effective at delivering value through software.

Then after 4 years of success I decided to leave my own company. Why?

Over recent years I've had the opportunity to grow and experience software development teams that worked beautifully. I’ve seen clear, expressive stories, small batch sizes and sustainable pace. I've seen self-managing teams, pair or mob programming, conversation bubbling away, high levels of trust and safety, and everyone having a lot of fun. I’ve seen continuous delivery in action, test-driven development, quality built straight in, and very little waste or rework. These moments were majestic. When these teams had 'flow' they cut their way through a feature backlog like a wood-chipper, adjusted quickly to change, and built robust, maintainable things.

But even when everything looked great in the team, things were nearly always unhealthy outside the team. Every time I zoomed out to look at the bigger picture in the organisation, I saw a complex landscape of tension and dysfunction.

Agile on its own offered no opinion on how to face this bewildering mess of human relationships. It couldn't even organise the upstream flow of "value" from ideas into engineering, or organise software development at program level. The corporate agile frameworks and digital transformation theatre that attempted to fill this vacuum seemed to be creating more problems than they solved.

Most crucially, Agile provided zero insight on what business value actually is.

And if there was no shared understanding of what was valuable, how did anyone know if we were doing the right thing in the first place? What use was quality engineering, rapid iteration and learning on something which didn’t make a difference? What was the point, if we weren’t meeting anyone’s needs?

We’d always aspired to tackling organisation-level issues at EngineerBetter, but in the business system that had emerged around us I wasn’t finding the right kind of space or business relationships to explore this.

As a result of my ongoing curiosity about the nature of collaborative knowledge work, I came to recognise the importance of reflecting on underlying needs - what really matters to each person - in order to understand collective behaviour. There were customer needs of course, but just as importantly there were the needs of everyone inside the organisation. When folks’ needs were being discussed and attended to I saw flow in the organisation. When they remained poorly understood and unmet, I saw tension.

Recognising that work in the space between people was where the magic happened, I began to develop a new style of practice that combined group facilitation with a humble consulting approach. Through this I aimed to do less telling and more listening and asking, throwing light on what really mattered, holding collective attention on this, and connecting folks with more effective strategies for attending to these things. Needs Workshop is the project I created to focus on this work.

Here are three examples of the kinds of work I've been doing in the last year:

• Convening people across varied functions and power differences so they can relate to each other in new ways. Creating space for safe, authentic conversations that bring a completely different perspective to everyone involved.
• Processing confusing or traumatic events, helping folks be heard and seen, find meaning and create opportunities for new growth.
• Helping to define boundaries and find shared understanding of huge, cross-organisational projects that are dragging on forever.

If you connect with any of these examples in some way, or they prompt an idea for you, I currently have availability from July 2021 onwards and would love to find out more about your story.

You can reach me at [email protected]