How to Improve Organizational Resilience and Antifragility

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How to grow organizational
resilience and anti-fragility
Or why does it matter to your organization? What can agility
help you to achieve…

The World around us is
changing faster than we
think…

Technology can be one of
the main drivers in this
change…

And most of the time it is
considered a “commodity”
which we are willing to
compromise and
outsource…

What is Fragility?
We are trying to reduce the impact of volatility by controlling
the knows… forgetting that when the unknowns are hitting
us, they will generate immensely more harm…

Fire…

Fighting…

Prevention…

Brush…

So what are Resilience and
Anti-Fragility?
Let’s try to understand what these two words mean and
how can help us improving our organizations…

“Resilience is the capacity of a
system to absorb disturbance and
reorganise while undergoing change
so as to still retain essentially the
same function, structure, identity,
and feedbacks.” [Brian Walker, 2004]

“Antifragility is a property of
systems that increases in capability,
resilience, or robustness as a result
of stressors, shocks, volatility,
noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or
failures” [Nassim Nicholas Taleb]

agile42 | We advise, train and coach companies building software www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2014.agile42 | We advise, train and coach companies building software www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2009.
Individuals & interactions
Working software
Customer collaboration
Responding to change
Processes & tools
Comprehensive documentation
Contract negotiation
Following a plan
o
v
e
r
We recognize
the value here...We value
this more….

Client &
Value focus
Self-Organization
&Autonomy
Iterative &
Incremental
change to
reduce the
risk
Continuous
Improvement

How to improve resilience
and antifragility of a team?
Ever experienced teams of champions not delivering as
much as expected? Here is a couple of reasons why…

What makes a team fragile?
Notice that they are sinking…

agile42 | We advise, train and coach companies building software www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2014.agile42 | We advise, train and coach companies building software www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2009.agile42 | We advise, train and coach companies building software www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2009.
Lack of understanding of
customer’s needs
What is this?

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self-
organized
managed
leader

Team size between 5 and 9 people, why?
Relations of trust: n*(n-1)/2
1
Resilience:
Antifragility:
Low
High

3
Resilience:
Antifragility:
Low
High

6
Resilience:
Antifragility:
Low
High

10
Resilience:
Antifragility:
Mid
High

15
Resilience:
Antifragility:
Mid
High

21
Resilience:
Antifragility:
High
Mid

28
Resilience:
Antifragility:
High
Low

36
Resilience:
Antifragility:
High
Low

Specialization makes a team more fragile…
I
People Proﬁles
T X
Evolve Evolve

agile42 | We advise, train and coach companies building software www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2014.
Enabling Constraints
Clear Direction Creative Environment
CDE
Containers…
How to foster self-organization?

Encourage to
retrospect
often

Encourage
forming
Community
of Practice

If people fear to fail,
they will fear to change…
and if they never change,
your organization will
not evolve
Encourage Team
Experimentation
Allow for failure
to happen fast and
often

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Forming Storming Norming Performing
Tuckman, Katzenbach & Smith…
Performance
Team Eﬀectiveness (Maturity)
Working

Group
Pseudo

Team
Potential

Team
Real

Team
High

Performing

Team
Antifragility

agile42 | The Agile Coaching Company www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright ©2007-2016
Tuckman, Katzenbach & Smith… (with Coaching)
Performance
Team Eﬀectiveness (Maturity)
Forming Storming Norming Performing
Pseudo

Team
Potential

Team
Real

Team
High

Performing

Team
Working

Group

How to improve resilience and
antifragilty of an organization?
Can we really design an organization which is ready and
prepared to recover from failure? Can failure make your
organization stronger?

Hierarchy
Compliance
What makes an organization fragile?
Rigidity

1st Principle: focus on small
incremental changes
Whenever changing from one way of working to another, we
will go through a hybrid situation where the coexistence of
two different ways generates attrition, duplications and other
forms of waste. The awareness of this fact should push us
in delivering changes fast and in small increments…

The traditional approach to change management…
…focused on standardization, before stabilization…
t
Design
Documentation
Rollout
Fix Issues
> 3-4 months…

The agile approach to change management…
…focused on stabilization with emergent standardization…
Design
Rollout
Doc
Rollout
Doc
Rollout
Doc
Coach
≤ 12 weeks t
Design Coach
Rollout
Doc
Rollout
Doc
Experimentations
allows for better
approaches to
emerge

Goal PSF
NC
Agile Strategy Map™
Define the Goal we
want to achieve
Possible Success Factor (PSF)
represents a hypothesis about a
key factor that would enable us
to achieve the Goal
Necessary Condition (NC):
what is needed in order to fulfill
the Success Factor

Strategy Map from
March 2014
• The Goal for 2015
has been
established
• The Transition
Team identiﬁed at
least 7 PSFs that
would provide a
powerful leverage
to achieve the
ﬁnal Goal

Strategy Map
June 2014
• Break out
groups worked
on detailing the
various PSFs
into actionable
experiments to
validate the
hypothesis for
organizational
improvement
Safe-To-Fail
Experiments

2nd Principle: focus on value
and organize accordingly
Focusing on value means to make sure that there are as
few obstacles as possible in the direction of the value
streams…

The matrix organization…
SubSystem1
SubSystem2
SubSystem3
Infrastructure
Operations
PMO
Project 1
Project 2
Project 3
… optimized for utilization, not value delivery…
Handovers and coordination
Value
Client
Push in the lines

Stream 1
Stream 2
Stream 3
The agile organization…
SubSystem1
SubSystem2
SubSystem3
Infrastructure
Operations
… optimized for value delivery and time to market
Value
Client
Pull on the streams

Opportunity Canvases to create context and focus on Customer Value…
Lean Portfolio Canvas™ have been created by agile42 and are licensed using Creative Common 3.0 with attribution (BY), non commercial usage (NC) and
share alike (SA) options. You can reuse and modify the template, but you will always have to leave the logo on it.
OpportunityName (title)
1. Opportunity 2. Customer Segments
What is the problem to be solved? What type of customers & users will
benefit from this solution?
How is the customer solving the
problem right now?
3. Possible Solution
What are the key points of a possible
solution to the presented problem?
4. Benefits
What are the benefits for the
customers?
6. Measuring Success
What metrics will be best measure the
success of the feature?
5. Business Readiness
What steps are required from the
business side to be able to use this
capability?
7. Cost of Delay
Which profile better represent the cost
of delay (CoD)?
8. Costs Structure
How does the cost structure look like for such a feature? One time, ongoing
costs, contractors expenses, development costs?
9. Value to Customer and Business
What are the expected incremental revenue for selling this feature, and what are
the strategic and tactical benefit? What are the intangible values (usability,
performance, customer knowledge obtained...)
Opportunity Owner (name)

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Uniﬁed Portfolio and Program System
to increase transparency, to visualize
Customer Value and dependencies

3rd Principle: decentralize
control whenever possible
Decentralization of control and decision making, reduces
the feedback loops, and enables faster reaction times. It
requires deﬁning goals and constraints to allow for
autonomous decision making.

Control !
Worker 1
Sub 1
Worker 2
Sub 2 Sub 3
The hierarchical organization… Centralized Control,
ends up overloaded,
introducing delays
Requests
Authorization
the design is based on mistrust…
Information&power

Container for empowerment
Worker 3Worker 2
The agile organization… Decentralized
Control reduces
overhead, and
encourage
collaboration
the design is based on trust…
Worker 1
Collaboration
Information&power

• Both on the “budget”
level, as well as on the
expected delivery and
preparation levels
• This level of
transparency allows to
build trust between
Portfolio Management
and self-organizing
teams
• Clear Policies
describing the
range of autonomy
the teams have

• Every team has two “avatars” to
volunteer on upcoming
Opportunities
• The Opportunity Owner will get in
touch with the team to get their
input and enrich the backlog

And don’t forget about
culture and context…
Ok, now you get which patterns can help your organization
and your teams improve their resilience and antifragility so
what do you need to make it happen?

5th Principle: make your
culture explicit
Organizational culture exists, whether we acknowledge it or
not, and making explicit allows for better alignment and
context creation

“This is how we do things around here…”
Culture is the set of
behaviors that have been
established and accepted
within an organization

Culture Type: Hierarchy
Orientation: Controlling
Leader Type: Coordinator, Monitor,
Organizer
Value Drivers: Efficiency, Timeless,
Consistency and Uniformity
Theory of Effectiveness: Control and
efficiency with capable processes
produce effectiveness
Culture Type: Market
Orientation: Competing
Leader Type: Hard driver, Competitor,
Producer
Value Drivers: Market share, Goal
achievement, Profitability
Theory of Effectiveness: Aggressively
competing, customer focus produce
effectiveness
Culture Type: Adhocracy
Orientation: Creative
Leader Type: Innovator, Entrepreneur,
Visionary
Value Drivers: Innovative outputs,
Transformation, Agility
Theory of Effectiveness: Innovativeness,
vision, and new resources produce
effectiveness
Culture Type: Clan
Orientation: Collaborative
Leader Type: Facilitator, Mentor, Team
Builder
Value Drivers: Commitment,
Communication, Development
Theory of Effectiveness: Human
development and participation produce
effectiveness
Flexibility & Discretion
Stability & Control
Internalfocus&Integration
Externalfocus&Differentiation
Organizational Culture Profile (CVF)

Organization Cultural Proﬁle (CVF)
10
20
30
40
50
60
10
20
20
20
10
10
30
40
50
60
30
40
50
60
30
40
50
60
Ad-hocracy
Hierarchy
M
arket
Clan
Stability & Control
Most of mature organizations
today have a strong Hierarchy
oriented proﬁle
They struggle to introduce a
more agile and lean approach to
work, because the hierarchical
culture is not supportive of agile
values and principles
Agile Values &
Principles

Organization Cultural Proﬁle (CVF)
10
20
30
40
50
60
10
20
20
20
10
10
30
40
50
60
30
40
50
60
30
40
50
60
Ad-hocracy
Hierarchy
M
arket
Clan
Stability & Control
Most of the organization today
have a strong Hierarchy oriented
proﬁle
They struggle to introduce a
more agile and lean approach to
work, because the hierarchical
culture is not supportive of agile
values and principles
To create the right context to
move toward a more agile and
lean culture, we need to
transition toward Clan or Ad-
Hocracy

“If you can
make culture
explicit, you can
agree where you
stand, and where
you want to
go…”
There are two ways of encouraging behaviours within an organization:
1. Story telling and role-modeling (e.g: empathy and tradition, walk
the talk)
2. Ritualization (e.g: Scrum events, Ritual Dissent, Open Space)

6th Principle: create the
appropriate context
Often time we have the instinct to deﬁne processes, rules
and even culture, independent of the context in which we
want to apply them… We learned that the context matters,
and can be a great leverage for you to succeed

Ordered
Unordered
Obvious
ComplicatedComplex
Chaotic
Sense
Categorize
Respond
Best Practices
Good Practices
Sense
Analyze
Respond
Probe
Sense
Respond
Act
Sense
Respond
Emergent
Novel
Disorder
Cyneﬁn Framework

t
Context dependency
Early Adopters
Early
Majority
Late
Majority
Laggers
Chasm
CultureTools
Ad-hocracy Clan/Market Hierarchy Hierarchy
Chaotic
(Novelty)
Complex
(Emergent)
Com
plicated
(G
ood
Practices)
Obvious
(Best Practices)
Rapid
Prototyping/XP
Scrum/ 
XP
Scrum/ 
Kanban
Kanban

Thank
You!

More food for thought...
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How to Improve Organizational Resilience and Antifragility

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