The role of management in developing self-conscious and agile organisations

 This level of organizational consciousness is built on the idea of a machine, where each individual gear-wheel contributes to this overall goal. Management by objectives and meritocracy are the tools of this vertical world and individual accountability is the grease to each and every gear-wheel. The leadership style is in consequence goal- and task-oriented as well as decisive

The next development stage superseding "achiever" organisations are "pluralistic" organizations. Within the classic pyramid structure of organizations, focus lies on company culture and on empowerment of people in order to achieve extraordinary employee motivation. Teams strive for holistic stakeholder satisfaction (internal as well as external), derive their decisions on shared values and demand high engagement from everyone in the organisation.

"Pluralistic" organisations provide a meaning in work beyond being a part of a profitable machine. This is especially relevant keeping in mind, that the profit motive of "achiever" organisation feels less relevant to most employees, and that monetary incentives may even be a countermeasure to engaging employees (be sure to check on a fine Animation by The RSA on Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.

The agile and lean movement evolved from companies with a "pluralistic" culture.

From an "achiever" management perspective, agile methods and proceedings are merely means of improving organisational efficiency. This misconception, based on the cultural context, is the key reason of mismanaging agile organisations. Without adopting the cultural elements of the "pluralistic" organisation, only ideas from the agile and lean movement are accepted, that fit the "achiever" perspective, such as top-down decision-making. This conflict between self understanding of teams and an "achiever" management perspective will in time deteriorate the team culture and motivation.

Changing an organisation culture is tough, needs to be enforced by the top management and could just be a bridge to far for most of us. When in doubt, you might want to double-check with John Kotter's The Key to Changing Organizational Culture in the Forbes Magazine. Allthough, developing and evolving a "pluralistic" culture on a team level is a valid alternative to strive for in management.

This is true for three reasons:

1. A valid meaning to work, derived from a common understanding and set of values, is the best motivation and leads to long-term employee loyalty
2. Inheriting the cultural aspects of pluralistic organisations, teams following the principle ideas of the lean and agile movement will produce results faster, are able to react and change quicker and will be superior in coping with complexity (e.g. as we find it in software developement at www.otto.de)
3. "pluralistic culture" is the foundation of high performance teams

The first reason is deducted from the Laloux Model, and stands for itself, as it directly addressespeopleThe second reason is well explained by the Cynefin Framework as described by Dave Snowden.

I am certain, that not only designing an enterprise e-commerce platform from a customer perspective is a rather complex problem in itself. Looking at the methodology the product development organisation needs to be able to close the loop of probe, sense and respond quickly and efficiently, in order to minimize cost of change. The complexity of enterprise software development and architecture sets empiricism as the guiding paradigm in short term decision making (the long term decision making requires foundation in an overall product strategy). This has been the motivation for introducing Scrum and Continuous Delivery to the product development of www.otto.de.

The third reason targets the team The FIT "Functioning Integrated Team" model depicts the elements of high performance teams.