Is your approach to governance upside down?
We are all very familiar with the notion of a hierarchical org-chart — whether it applies to our programmes or wider organisation. To the extent that it can sometimes feel as if this represents the ‘natural order’ of how organisations should be structured.
And perhaps this is true. In her seminal book Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows observes that highly functional systems exhibit… resilience, self-organisation and — yes — hierarchy.
However, Meadows also states that “The original purpose of hierarchy is always to help its originating sub-systems do their jobs better”.
Whereas hierarchies (and their associated governance) within many organisations are created with the intention of commanding authority from the top and controlling (rather than ‘helping’) those at each sub-ordinate level.
I believe this is largely because these hierarchies are defined from the perspective of the most senior stakeholder(s), rather than that of the teams conducting the work (whose needs are often assumed from on-high), let alone the customers/users these teams wish to serve and delight.
This is perhaps why the products such organisations create so often fail. Their structure is focused on satisfying the senior stakeholders, rather than their customers. As Skelton and Pais state in Team Topologies, whilst exploring Conway’s Law “Communication paths within an organization effectively restrict the kinds of solutions that the organization can devise”.
This problem of internal focus is compounded by the extent to which such organisational structures and governance are often defined in their entirety at the start of an initiative. They may be subsequently expanded, but usually along the same (often literal) lines and with the same ‘command and control’ objective in mind. There is little appetite for adapting the structure as we learn what works and what doesn’t.
So how might we approach our genuine need for hierarchy more effectively? How could we enable the creation of organisational structures and governance that align teams and their customers with our leadership’s strategic intent, which can also be adapted as teams learn increasingly effective ways of working?
I think we should take inspiration from John Gall whose law states that… “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked”.
Instead of assuming we know how teams should work and imposing some system or framework upon them, we could instead ask the teams what they believe they need at a minimum to meet an agreed objective. They will presumably want access to customers and may identify additional skills required within their multi-disciplinary team, in order to delight these consumers of their product. And whilst they are unlikely to convey a desperate desire to provide weekly reports filled with burndowns and RAG statuses, they will perhaps request regular guidance and escalation opportunities with senior leadership and propose metrics through which their success can be measured.
This rapid access to customers, colleagues and stakeholders will allow the teams to inspect, reflect and adapt their products and their processes, to incrementally target these agreed success criteria and overall objective. In doing so the self-organising team will become resilient, supported and empowered. Only once such governance and processes are proven should we consider expanding them out — if indeed such an expansion is actually required.
As Gall’s Law concludes… “A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system”.
This approach of course adheres to the only principles from the Agile Manifesto that alludes to how our teams should be structured… “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done”.
So does this all mean that leadership is surplus to requirements? Of course not. Leaders need to provide strategic direction and objectives, as well as informing the principles and guardrails teams should work within. Additionally — as Frederic Laloux proposes in Reinventing Organizations — leaders should ‘hold the space’ for these new structures and practices the teams themselves create, allowing them to evolve, fail, learn, adapt and flourish.
We may not know how the ancient Egyptians built their pyramids, but we can be certain they didn’t build them from the top down! We should instead be mindful of Donella Meadow’s assertion that… “Hierarchies evolve from the lowest levels up”.
