132: Domain Understanding with Event Storming

Avoiding organizational debt and deeper business understanding with Event Storming

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Off Topic: How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Organizational Debt 

Organizational debt is a term used to describe the accumulated inefficiencies and bureaucracy that can develop in an organization over time. This debt can make it difficult for an organization to adapt to change, decreasing productivity and innovation. There are several things that organizations can do to avoid the pitfalls of organizational debt. One crucial step is to constantly and vigilantly simplify. This means regularly reviewing and streamlining processes and procedures to remove unnecessary steps and complexity. It also means empowering employees to make decisions and take action without going through multiple levels of bureaucracy.

Another critical step is to create agile roles, rules, and processes. This means designing systems that are flexible and adaptable to change. It also means giving employees the freedom to experiment and take risks.

Finally, organizations need to create an environment where it is safe to try and fail. This means providing employees with the support and resources to learn from their mistakes. It also means creating a culture of accountability where employees are held responsible for their actions but not punished for taking risks. By following these steps, organizations can avoid the pitfalls of organizational debt and create a more agile and adaptable workforce.

[^]: Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

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Unrelated: Transforming Organizational Culture and Workflow

A complicated system is a causal system subject to cause and effect. Problems with complicated systems have solutions. Organizational culture isn't a problem to be solved; it's an emergent phenomenon we must cultivate. To the legacy leader, everything still looks like a factory. And all our problems can be fixed if we work long enough hard. But our bureaucracies are different from complexity. They can't handle the surprises we face every day, and worse, they'll never surprise us with an unexpected breakthrough. This brings us to one of the most important things leaders and teams need to internalize: our way of working is made up. This is different from how it has to be or has always been. We can thank them for what still serves us and change the rest. Every organization has a purpose. But not every organization ensures that its purpose is fractal—that it shows up at every level. 

The team's purpose serves the same function as the organizational one. Legacy Organizations are obsessed with measurement, often using it as a form of control—to find and punish weak performance. You're doing it wrong if you aren't making decisions and taking action based on your metrics. Ask every team in your organization to articulate their essential intent. Clarify your purpose so you can see it three decades later. Then tighten up your road map for the next half year. Purpose enables freedom and autonomy by ensuring coherent action. The sense at the top is that even more compliance is needed—that everything must be specified. The reason at the bottom is that leadership doesn't trust anyone.

The second is that many firms try to use OKRs as a form of top-down control, ensuring that each subordinate's OKRs fit with the OKRs of their superior. While this feels like alignment, it eliminates any chance of divergence or serendipity. Once people set their OKRs, they will do everything they can to hit them, including things that aren't good for the business.

A healthy system will not cascade in a perfect hierarchy of intent. Every ninety days or so, gather your team and try to generate a few strategy statements of your own (or review and update the ones you have). Think about what you need to focus on to succeed. What has been implicit that you can make explicit? What necessary trade-offs don't come? 

Scenario Planning. This happens at every level: the organization, the team, and the individual. Your purpose is clear. Your essential intent is well-defined and tuned. Using these beacons, people are "voting with their feet" and energizing the projects that matter most. 

One process that stands in the way of reinventing our way of working is the annual planning process. Let teams take ownership of their local expression of strategy and operations. Gather any colleagues and ask them to design the competitor that would bury you. You'll be amazed at how they jump to the task. Their enthusiasm is proportional to the amount of org debt you're carrying.

This will leave space for the emergence and harness the full potential of your membership. What is our current strategy? How does our purpose inform our approach? What critical factors will mean the difference between success and failure? What are the trade-offs we're willing to make? How do we develop, refine, and refresh our strategy? How do we communicate our system? How do we use methods to filter and steer day-to-day? How does our approach inform our planning process? Recognize that sound strategy depends on our ability to perceive what's happening. 

Accept that in areas of rapid change, your strategy is only as good as your ability to learn and adjust course. If "our money" were our money, who knows how well we could deploy it to serve our collective purpose? The tragedy of the commons is that we can't share.

Recognize that people are not resources. They are people—capable of directing their time and attention to where they can add value. They're also capable of delivering performance without fixed targets or individual incentives. Let relative targets and a share of the wealth created by the business guide behavior. Accept that you cannot predict the future. Choosing how and where to spend your money a year in advance is folly. Cut long-term commitments where appropriate to maximize discretionary funds. Ignore annual rhythms and divide resources based on real-time information.

Have the discipline to make bets in good times and bad. Workflow is the fuzzy logic between our value-creation structure and our value-creation process. It's how the work flows through the organization. Since the team working on the project isn't a team, we appoint a project manager to shepherd the herd. Of course, they lack the authority to lead the effort because all the participants' allegiances lie with their functions. Still, it gives us someone to hold accountable. And while we're at it, wouldn't it be nice if all these projects used the same "efficient" process? This is what passes for workflow innovation in corporate America today—an extra layer of bureaucracy. You're hurt if your team is structured and doesn't reflect how your organization creates value. Flow Interrupted.

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