Archives February 2020

Since Teal is part of our brand name, I feel compelled to comment on the “Teal Ain’t Real” article from the Corporate Rebels.

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Our number one priority in remedial situations – i.e. nearly every org we’ve ever been into – is usually Create Headroom.

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I’ve been posting and commenting a lot in defence of the much maligned manager.

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It is interesting that so many of Dr. Cherry Vu’s success stories are with women. Not all by any means, but the four we have written up so far are.

We have been reflecting on why this might be:

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As everybody is surely aware by now, big things are afoot in how we think about work and management. Agile has spilled out of IT into the enterprise. Complex systems theory is finally shifting how we think. Safety culture is revealing the value in failure. Less widely known (yet), Open culture is flipping the hierarchy.

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On a car, a bolt and an emission sensor are the same size and shape. Package, deliver, and install are the same. But design, build, and test are very different.

This is why we need to be careful of manufacturing paradigms like Lean and ToC (Theory of Constraints).

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Changing how we manage is another way of saying change the conditions of the work system. Changing a complex system is an organic process, like healing a patient. You can’t directly change it, you must treat it with stimuli and observe the effect.

Nobody knows how an organisation will respond to change until they try.

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Two areas of fascination for executives at the moment are “Digital Transformation” and “Industry 4.0”. These ideas look at the impact of technology on product and manufacturing respectively. What is often lost in these discussions are the work changes that they cause, and the wider social advances that are happening anyway which they align with. As digital transformation gives customers direct access to our systems, and as industry 4.0 increases automation, these have direct impacts on the people using the products and the people creating them. It calls for greater humanity.

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There’s as much heat as light generated by conversations about SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework).  I want to share my views, for whatever they’re worth. They can be summed up in one sentence: the best day using SAFe is the day you agree you don’t need it any more.

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The lizard brain is a colloquial term for the most basic parts of your brain.
We are primal animals. We dont interact with machines in the same way as we interact with humans.

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