What is SOPHIA all about?
SOPHIA, The Wisdom Of Agile Organizations. Explore how SOPHIA can help your organization become more agile and resilient.
As a reader of this newsletter, or if you have followed me some time, you will know that I am talking about something called SOPHIA. To be clear, SOPHIA is not about a woman.
During my journey as an Agile consultant, I found that many companies struggle with the implementation. They started working with a strong focus on ways of working and frameworks. It is very common to start with an implementation of Scrum, Kanban, and even SAFe instead of starting with a focus on principles and values.
When working for several clients, I started to see why all those companies struggled with the same issues. Eventually, they started to say something like “Working Kanban isn’t something for us” or “Scrum doesn’t work for us.”
And to be honest: they are right!
Scrum and Kanban don’t work in the environments of those companies. If you want to make those frameworks work, you need to create an environment where those frameworks can work.
So, during my work for over a decade, I collected many assumptions about why those frameworks failed. I recorded them, researched them, and finally found the real reasons behind their failures. Besides that, I also searched for the solutions to make it work.
And you read that correctly: “solutions” is plural.
There isn’t just a one-size-fits-all solution to benefit from Agile. You need a strong foundation of many solutions that work together. Agile appears to be easy at first, but to make it work, you need to do a lot of work. You have to work hard for it to succeed.
To make Agile work, you need to create the right environment in your organization. And precisely that is what SOPHIA is all about. It isn’t the next framework or next hype. It is your roadmap to building an Agile and resilient environment.
Before we dive into the meaning of the letters SOPHIA – they stand for something, I promise – it is a great idea to look at my thoughts behind it. This way, you get a more profound understanding why I came up with these solutions in the first place.
Environment before framework
Like you already read above, plenty of people start thinking about Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, etc. when they talk about Agile. We know them like the frameworks we can choose from when we want to start working Agile.
And let me stress something out first: I love those frameworks! There is nothing wrong with them, if used in the right environment!
But using these frameworks as a starting point, is almost always a receipt for failing. It is like trying to grow a beautiful palm tree on the North-Pole. Such a tree needs another environment. It requires heat and sunlight. You can't blame the palm tree for not growing in an environment it wasn't meant for.
When you read this, you might think something like: “Yeah, duh, that is obvious.”
And right at the same time, we keep doing that with our Agile transformations. We plant our palm tree (Scrum, for example) on the North-Pole (hierarchical organization), and start blaming the palm tree (Scrum) that it doesn’t perform as expected.
Before we can start with the implementation of our frameworks, we need to set the right environment. That requires an open mindset and a willing to change.
It requires looking at your strategy and organizational structures. Only after that, you can look at the framework that fits to that strategy and structure.
Principles instead of rules
Another thing I see many companies do, is creating rules. And when those rules don’t fit the reality, they start creation exceptions for it. Of course, in the form of new rules.
Definitely, rules can have benefits. Without rules, anarchy is just around the corner. But by creating too many rules, you just slow down innovation and growth of your company.
In Agile environments, it is always better to create boundaries instead of hard rules. Boundaries that arise from clear principles and values of the organization. Principles that help the organization evolve and grow.
For myself, as an example, I have 3 principles that are important for the organizations I am running:
Radical Transparency
For me, this stands for the ‘next step’ in transparency. I have everything within my organization open for everyone who works there. This gives me many benefits, like everyone knows exactly what happening, so they don’t have to ask me everything. It gives a lot of trust because there are simply no secrets.
The boundaries are simple: all the information is available to everyone INSIDE the organization. Because of this transparency, and trust, no one had ever let me down by sharing confidential information with the outside world!
Adaptive Agility
Saying that a company is agile is something that happens a lot, but really showing the behavior that shows that agility is another story!
That’s why I embrace adaptive agility. This is not a “hear us talk about how agile we are,” but “see how agile we act”. We do experiments, make mistakes and learn from them. We really connect with our customer, not because we say we are agile, but because we truly believe that connecting with our customer leads to better results.
This principle requires some boundaries. We experiment by example, but do our math before we put all our money on the table. Failure is learning, but learning still should be affordable.
Impact-oriented Results
Impact-oriented results are what our third principle is all about. We have a strong focus on impact-oriented results. Not just results to check off our KPI, but a result that really creates impact. For our company, for our employees and for our customers.
This creates the boundaries for selecting the right measurements. Not just KPI’s, but results that really matter.
Real involvement instead of just working
In many companies, starting with agile, I see that people in the organization just get the assignment to work agile. The first thing that happens: people start to worry.
That isn’t surprising at all. You tell people that they should embrace the uncertain. That they have to forget everything they know and start working and behaving in a new, unknown way. That scares the hell out of people!
Agile working is about involvement, connection and working together. That being said, it should sound strange to you if someone told you that, from now on, you have new responsibilities and have to work in another way. It is something that you should decide about together.
Real involvement arises when you start making decisions based on consent. In short, a decision is made by the absence of objection. You should hear everyone who is involved to find out if there are objections, and if so, change the final decision to remove those objections.
This might sound like something that will take plenty of time to do, but in later newsletters I will show you how you can do this in a less time-consuming way. You also will discover that the time you use for the decision itself, will be paid back with the speed of implementation.
Equality instead of hierarchy
The final problem I see in companies in transition to agile is a lack of equality. They try to push an agile way of working in the triangle of hierarchy. With all the command and control from management in place, they are surprised that employees don’t make decisions on their own.
For me, this isn’t surprising at all. As long as you keep telling people what they should do, they will never start making their own decisions. That is not a failure of the self-organization idea, that is a failure of implementation.
That is why I do not prefer an existing team to start as a Scrum team. Just changing the name of manager role to product owner, doesn’t change the way they act.
On the other hand, the team members will also identify their product owner as their manager. That is what they used to. When they start working in the new way, it seems to work out fine. Reactions like “hey, you are not our manager anymore, you are a product owner now. Act like it!” are very common when the team starts with Scrum. Mostly followed by some laughter.
In the long term, some issues arise. When the teams start, everything is new, but when they have done a few sprints, there are though decisions to make. In the stress of the moment, people tend to fall back to their old behavior. And yes, that brings the manger back in position. Not consciously, but just that is the way everyone is familiar with.
When a team starts with agile working, always create a team that consists of people with no known hierarchy. This will make it much easier in the future to keep working agile. Even if it becomes difficult. No-one has the option to fall back in ‘old behavior’, just because there is no history of old behavior.
The meaning of the letters SOPHIA
That was quite a bit of background and thoughts. But I made you a promise that I will explain the meaning behind SOPHIA. With the background, I just explained to you, you are ready for this next, big, step.
SOPHIA stands for Strategy, Organize, Process, Human Capital, Inspect and Adapt. I think that you have some idea of what this means when you read the first part of this newsletter. In my perspective, these are the pillars every organization needs when it comes to agile working. Let’s go through the pillars one-by-one.
Strategy
Strategy is all about direction. In the long term, and in the short term. It involves the vision, mission, ambition, and goals of the organization. It is the explanation of the big ‘why’.
The vision tells the big picture the company want to accomplish. It tells everyone what change they would like to make to the world. It is the mission to realize that vision.
With the ambition, you describe where you would like to go in the next 3 to 5 years. Of course, in the direction towards the vision.
The period of your goals is very short. You should set your goals for 1 year and then split them up to 3 months. This makes it easier to change and give you enough direction to thrive.
Organize
It doesn’t make sense to put an agile shape in the hierarchical triangle. The only way to thrive with agile is to organize agile. This means, you have to create an agile organization structure. One way to do this is with domains, circles, and roles.
Domains are the big chunks. See them like small companies within your company. All with their own vision, mission and aims (connected with the vision, mission, and goals of the larger organization of course!)
Within those domains, you find circles. Circles are the units who do the work. Every circle has at least 2 members who work together to realize the circle's aims.
To overcome silos of knowledge, you have to work with roles instead of function profiles. Functions are focused on tasks, while roles are focused on outcome. A big difference!
Functions are normally grouped together, based on knowledge and tasks. This creates silos by design. Roles aren’t grouped. They arise when they are necessary within a circle or domain.
Process
Saying that you work with an autonomous team but require them to ask permission to act, is working in the same, rigid, way you always do, but giving it another name. If you want to work in a real agile way, you need to change your processes.
You need to create processes based on trust. Asking for permission should be something that a circle (team) can decide by themselves. They have their aims, and should be able to achieve them without the need for outside permission.
So, take a look at your processes. Can everyone achieve their goals without the need of permission from outside? Can everyone be responsible for their aims? Only then you could make them accountable for those aims. This is something that goes terribly wrong in many companies. They make people accountable, without giving them the permission to act responsible. You really have to avoid this mistake in your organization!
Human Capital
“With great power comes great responsibility”, you know this saying, but do you act to it? When you give employees the power of deciding and involvement, you need to make sure they can carry that responsibility.
I sometimes hear managers say things like: “I make the decisions because my team members aren’t able to do that.”
Really? Why did you hire them in the first place?
On the other hand, why didn’t you invest in your team members so they were able to make the decisions? A real investment because it set you free for more important tasks!
Human capital is about the investment in your employees. Let them learn, let them make mistakes, let them grow. An investment that, over time, pays you back in tenfold.
Inspect
Look at your strategy, organization, processes and human capital. Are they still on track to get to that vision you have? Is your vision still applicable? Is what you are doing still the best you can do?
By periodically asking these questions, you can adjust to your destination. See it like the navigation in your car. It checks on a frequent base if you are still going in the right direction. If not, it gives you advice to take a turn. To change your directions to get back on track.
Exactly that is something you should do with your organization as well.
“But that costs time!”
Yeah, I know. But skipping it and keeping moving in the wrong direction will cost you money. A lot of it! So, inspect on a frequent base will help you to steer before you break the bank.
Adapt
The navigation example from inspect also applies for adapt. If you get the advice from your ‘inspect navigation system’, you decide to react on it, or not.
By adapting to the information, you have from inspect, you can short the time of your journey. You will be able to reach your goals faster and with less money.
You can also decide to do nothing. If you know that taking the next exit will lead to a roadblock, you might be better off keeping going and taking the exit after the next. But this is an informed decision because you have all the information you need to make a good decision.
Whatever you decide is up to you, but holding inspect and adapt sessions on a frequent base, will help you to achieve your goals much faster.
How to move on
With this extensive newsletter, I introduced my vision of agility. In my vision, it is way more than just a way of working. You need those 6 pillars in place to really adapt agility in your organization.
With this newsletter, it is my mission to teach you how to become – and stay – agile in your organization. So, if you find this is interesting for you, subscribe to the newsletter and keep learning!
I Will Teach You Agile!