Patrick Steyaert is founder of Okaloa. As a creator of Okaloa Flowlab, he teaches and coaches agile thinking (before methods) by making use of business simulations. With his work on upstream, customer and discovery kanban he helps organizations to look at the end-to-end flow (from suspected to satisfied need). He is the author of the Essential Upstream Kanban guide, a regular speaker at international conferences, and recipient of the 2015 Brickell Key award for outstanding contribution to the Kanban community.
Agile that begets agile
A team shows agile leadership to the extent that it autonomously develops its own - agile -capabilities. Likewise, a business shows agile leadership to the extent that it autonomously develops and improves its own - agile - capabilities, including the capabilities to self-organize and self-govern that are crucial to organizational autonomy (i.e. autonomy at the individual, team and organizational level). Take away autonomy, and people will become disengaged or even actively resistant. Take away autonomy, and the team becomes nothing more than a cog in the wheel of a machine called 'the organization'. Herein also lies the challenge. Autonomy cannot be imposed (lest risking putting people and teams in a stress-full double bind), it needs to be developed. It requires that we step away from projecting our experiences and imposing our models onto people, teams and organizations, and start to understand how people, teams and organizations can reorganize their own experience and develop their own (agile) thinking. It requires a way of teaching and coaching agile in a way that it begets more agile.
Exploring Models for Developing Organizational Autonomy
Organizational autonomy – together with enterprise flow and organizational learning – is a cornerstone of scaling agility across businesses that find themselves in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) business environment. A team shows agile leadership to the extent that it autonomously develops its own – agile –capabilities. Likewise, a business shows agile leadership to the extent that it autonomously develops and improves its own – agile – capabilities, including the capabilities to self-organize and self-govern (i.e. autonomy at the individual, team and organizational level). Take away autonomy, and people will become disengaged or even actively resistant. Take away autonomy, and the team becomes nothing more than a cog in the wheel of a machine called ‘the organization’. Herein also lies the challenge. Autonomy cannot be imposed (lest risking putting people and teams in a stress-full double bind), it needs to be developed. In this workshop the participants will develop their own thinking models for developing organizational autonomy. Starting with flow, autonomy and learning as the cornerstones of business agility, we will zoom in on organizational autonomy and how methods that act as blueprints fall short for developing autonomy. Next, we discuss the question what would have happened for an organization to have developed high levels of organizational autonomy and tap into the good and bad experiences of the participants. The workshop format itself is a demonstration of how not to impose one’s own models and thinking but allowing participants to develop their own models of thinking.
