How To De-Scale Your Organisation
Scaling is an anti-pattern. Big meetings, long loops, slow cadence, tight coupling, and deep hierarchies represent bottlenecks no matter how Agile your individual teams may be. But de-scaling refactors an organisation into self-directing streams of self-organizing teams working together like pods of dolphins.
How do human organizations de-scale? How can we balance autonomy of teams against alignment to business realities? This session presents principles, metrics and practice patterns for de-scaling based on a long running historical precedent, the Iroquois Confederacy, which sustained a de-scaled society of hundreds of thousands for over five centuries. And the Spotify tribal model. And Steve Jobs' NeXT/Apple culture.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
The session will explain and contrast de-scaling strategies employed by Spotify, Apple, and the Iroquois Confederacy. It will quantify these using three simple de-scaling metrics. It will provide a model that combines the best elements of all three, and explain how this model applies to SAFe, LeSS, DevOps and Waterfall cultures. And it will provide a high-cadence low-risk method to enable participants to do so in their own organisations.
Learning Outcome
Attendees will learn:
- Three metrics on the quality of de-scaling in any organisation
- Three strategies for de-scaling that can be applied singly or all together
- Three low-risk high-cadence transformation strategies to deliver de-scaling in their own organisations
Target Audience
Business, Design and Technical Leaders, Managers, Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, RTEs, VSEs ...
Prerequisites for Attendees
This is a self-contained talk but participants may enjoy viewing the XSCALE Principles webinars beforehand here.
Video
Links
Blog on this topic: How to De-Scale your Organization
Craig Brown
Caoilte Dunne
Dipa
Travis Birch
Alex Sloley
