Most organizations use a primarily hierarchical organization structure to organize their scaled populations. These organizations cannot be agile without adding additional connections between interdependent nodes. Hubs and scale-free networks offer a solution, and we find them in traditional structures usually associated with peripheral or vestigial concerns.

1. Scale-Free Organizations: A
Sober View, Some History,
and How to Make One
James O. Coplien
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2. • “Many software engineers are thus drawn like
moths to the flame of scale.”
• Excerpt From: Clive Thompson. “Coders.” Apple
Books.
https://books.apple.com/us/book/coders/id13903
60381
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3. Scrum@Scale and Scale-
Free Systems
s://www.scrumatscale.com/scrum-at-scale-guide-read-online/#3

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6. 6
0
0.25
0.5
0.75
1
5 25 125 625Organization Size
1 4 6 8

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8. What Is a Scale-Free
System?
• They tend to have a high number of hubs
• Long tails in the distribution of node degree, with some
nodes an order of magnitude larger than the smaller nodes
• The hubs tie together communities of leaves (and maybe a
few other hubs)
• They tend to be flat — so they have low graph diamater
(the largest number of hops from any node to any other
node) — and the diameter remains constant as the graph
grows (scale-free)
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9. Hubs reduce graph diameter
astillo: "Effective Web Crawling", PhD Thesis, University of Ch
Diameter = 7Diameter = 18
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10. Node Degrees
0
5
10
15
20
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
0
5
10
15
20
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
“hubs”
Normal Exponential
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11. Examples of Scale-Free
Systems
• The network of
WWW page
citations
• Network of
academic
paper citations
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12. Exercise
• Physical exercise to simulate the various
organization structures
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13. Why are Scale-Free Systems
Good For?
• They are robust — they tend to survive random
link breakages
• They tend to reduce internode traversal distance
• They have redundancy
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14. Alternatives To Scale-
Freeness
• A fully-connected network
• Works for one development team but does not
scale to large developments nor beyond
development
• Hierarchy
• Works, but a lot of overhead and delay that
violates TPS principles
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15. Just a footnote…
• “Agility” is at best awkward when trying to
remember the names of the 650 people you work
with, or if it takes a long time (more than five
minutes) to walk to their desk.
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16. Data from the Pasteur Project
• Empirical
sociometric data on
> 100
organizations
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17. A journey into history
0
2
4
6
8
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
A Telecommunications R&D Lab
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18. An Agile Organization!
0
0.75
1.5
2.25
3
3.75
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Borland QPW
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19. A Curious Organization!
0
2
4
6
8
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
A Documentation Organization in
Manufacturing
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20. Another Agile Organization
0
2
4
6
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
An XP Commerical Network Project
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21. A pentary hierarchy
0
200
400
600
800
0 1 2 3 4 5 11
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22. The results from walking
down memory lane…
• Most organizations followed the “natural” normal
distribution of node degree
• Agile organizations followed the exponential
distribution of node degree
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23. Many Scaling Approaches
Use Multiple Hierarchies
C
P
O
The PO Team
The communication metaphor is hierarchical, because a
flat structure will not accommodate that scale
The MetaScrum
Leadershi
p
Stakeholde
rs
Customer
s
Distance from any Dev
to a Customer is at
least 4, more likely >= 6
(the same as any two
people on Earth…)23

24. Achieving Scale-Freeness in
your Organization
• In a large organization, add overlay hubs
• Hubs support helping relationships in large organizations (Powers et al.)
• Network-structured Scrum of Scrums (not the old-style variety)
• Birds of a Feather
• Beyond a certain point, the hub complexity is overwhelming
• I.e., beyond a certain point, agile is impossible: e.g., open source
• Split the large organization in smaller ones: Value Stream Fork
• Autonomy, mastery, purpose
• To the degree possible, let each team deliver autonomously
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25. But what is the goal?
• Scale-freeness supports information interchange
in large organizations; that may increase output
• Small organizations need “critical mass” to do
something significant, up to five people
• So, innovation is effective in groups of about five
• Innovation is also effective in connected (urban)
populations — which have hub connections
(Johnson)
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26. Development is largely self-
contained — to optimize productivity
• Maybe you need few hubs
connecting sales with R&D
— only for essential
coupling
• Therefore, maybe fewer
“individuals & interactions”
at the enterprise level
• Raises the question of
whether “enterprise agile”
make sense
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27. High-Density Liquid Networks: What if I
wanted to optimize innovation instead?
Scale-free!
“The innovation power of the marketplace derives, in part,
from this most elemental math: no matter how smart the
‘authorities’ may be, if they are outnumbered a thousand to
one by the marketplace, there will be more good ideas lurking
in the market than in the feudal castle. Cities and markets
recruit more minds into the collective project of exploring the
adjacent possible. As long as there is spillover between those
minds, useful innovations will be more likely to appear and to
spread through the population at large.” — Johnson, “Where
Good Ideas Come From”
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28. Extending the Network
Beyond Development
• The real sense of
“enterprise”
• If you have multiple
customers, a scale-
free graph is
unreasonable
Development
Hu
b
SupportHu
b
End Users
Hu
b
Hu
b
Hu
b
Management
Hu
b
“Cartel”
Scrum of Scrums
Scrum of Scrums
BOF
Distance from some Devs to an
end user is as small as 228

29. Examples of Organizations
that Work this Way
• Research
laboratories
(Bell Labs:
one patent
a day over
100 years)
X
X X
XX29

30. Longitudinal Possibilities!
• Combine gestalt theory and scale
freeness to create organizations
where the output is not linear
with adding people, but a weak
power series!
• We already know this boosts
product output for small values
• We know this boosts innovation
for large values
• Law of diminishing returns on
output, but maybe a win in
innovation
Output
Nodes in Organizstion
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31. Working Groups —
Brainstorming
• How to add hubs to an existing Scrum organization (like yours!)
• Agile Lean Leadershiop framework
• Others? Buddy systems? Staff sharing? No constraints!
• Scrum of Scrums / Feature Owner
• Meta Scrums
• Birds of a Feather
• The architecture structure — code “stewardship” teams !!!
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32. Conclusion
• Most scaling frameworks are not scale-free
• At best, they are hierarchical organizations that just
run interrupt-driven
• Small Scrum works because everyone is connected
• Scale-freeness supports enterprise agility
• Scrum has some facilities now, but more formalized
“hubs” could make it even better
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33. Possible Corollaries
• Don’t try to scale your organization unless it is
scale-free AND you do it in a scale-free way
• You cannot be purely agile (individuals and
interactions) in a market where hubs can’t reduce
the connection path length to all users (democracy
/ republic)
• All scaled agile frameworks are traditional
hierarchies with scaled graph diameters: are those
agile?
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long on side topics.
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The criticism of the premise that scaling is solved wa
deficiencies in the marketplace, so measuring produ
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Was very interesting insight, I have enjoyed the topi
presented as extension of Scrum@Scale that it in ac
best case if it could be led together with someone w
possible confusions.
4 4 3 4 4 Next time Keynote please!!!
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Very approachable presentation of a highly theoretic
surprised. That definitely happend in the most posit
4 4 4 4 4 I really appreciated a talk based on data evidence
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2 1 2 2 2 I would have preferred interaction and discussions
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4 4 4 4 4 Confusing! Awesome! Animal noises 😁 loved it.
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4 4 4 4 4 The first honest talk in these three days
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