How Do We Get Speed, Innovation and Engagement?
By: Erik Schön
Tags: Speed, Innovation, Leadership, Motivation, Engagement

How Do We Get Speed, Innovation and Engagement?

A Leadership Journey Guided by Alignment for Autonomy

Photo © Ericsson

“Too many organizations are trying to control the waves instead of learning how to surf.” Mary Poppendieck paraphrasing Allen Ward

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” George S. Patton

Introduction

It all starts from the simple question: How do we know if we make the right decisions and take the right actions? The profound answer is we don’t since we cannot predict the future. Now, let’s talk about what we can do about it!

Over the years as a leader of hundreds of people and leadership teams in large-scale, complex product development, I have learned to trust people and involve them by co-creating maximum alignment on our intent (what & why) which then enables maximum autonomy in actions, decisions and implementation (how) since this gives speedier product development, more innovative products and higher engagement across all teams and people in the organization.

Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity

In product development we want results and to reach results we make plans which leads to actions and decisions which will — hopefully — lead to the desired results, i.e. fulfilling the needs of our stakeholders. Since we don’t always get the desired results, we ask ourselves the three eternal questions of product development (thanks, Jabe Bloom!) as illustrated in the Figure 1 below (thanks, Stephen Bungay!):

Figure 1: The three eternal questions in product development. Source: Stephen Bungay and Jabe Bloom. Illustration: Erik Schön

Why can’t we plan better? Why wasn’t the plan followed? Why didn’t the plan work?

The simple answer to the three eternal questions is that the world is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA).

VUCA is further illustrated in Figure 2 below and the meaning of the components is:

Volatile: The nature and dynamics of change, and the nature and speed of change forces and change catalysts.

Uncertain: The lack of predictability and the prospects for surprise.

Complex: The multiplex of forces and dependencies and the confusion that surround an organization.

Ambiguous: The haziness of reality, the potential for misreads, and the mixed meanings of conditions; cause-and-effect confusion.

Figure 2: The world is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA). Illustration: Erik Schön

The common usage of the term VUCA began in the 1990s and it derives from the military. VUCA (and similar terms like friction and entropy) has subsequently been used in a wide range of organizations, including everything from for-profit corporations to education.

Figures 3 and 4 below show people waiting for the announcement of the new pope, first in 2005 and then in 2013 and illustrates how the Apple iPhone, first launched in 2007, transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. A consequence is that the data traffic in the mobile networks is doubling every 12–18 months making the growth exponential and faster than Moore’s law. Hence, this is a great example of today’s VUCA world.

Figure 3: Announcing the new Pope in 2005. Photo © Luca Bruno/AP

Figure 4: Announcing the new Pope in 2013. Photo © Michael Sohn/AP

What I have seen as a trainer in product development leadership training is that the VUCA concept resonates very well with the learners since it is consistent with their experiences from development of different types of products (hardware, software, hardware+software) in different locations globally by different types of teams and organizations.

So, given that we live in a VUCA world, how do we survive and thrive?

Alignment for Autonomy to Thrive in A VUCA World

How do you get the desired results and overcome VUCA in product development? You can change the actions and decisions, change the plans, and, create alignment on the wanted results as illustrated in Figure 5 below.

Figure 5: How to get the desired results in a VUCA world. Source: Stephen Bungay. Illustration: Erik Schön

Decide what really matters to you and your team: Use knowledge and experiences combined with interaction and involvement to work out your wanted outcome or wanted position. Formulate strategy as intent, i.e. focus on “what” and “why”. Avoid preparing detailed, perfect strategies and plans. And, remember “The Spice Girls Question” (which is not really a question): “Tell me what you want, what you really, really want!”

Get the message across to everyone involved: Communicate intent, i.e. clearly state “what” and “why”. Then ask people how they are going achieve the intent to secure that everyone involved truly understand the situation and the intent. Next, trust your people since this will make them feel responsible for carrying out their part. Avoid telling people exactly what to do and how to do it.

Give everyone space and support: Give people space within boundaries to make decisions and take actions. Encourage people to adapt their actions to realize the overall intentions and encourage initiative! Avoid too tight control mechanisms, reporting and too detailed metrics.

This is summarized in Figure 6 where we see how we use both alignment and autonomy as explained by Stephen Bungay.

Figure 6: Alignment and autonomy for thriving in a VUCA world. Source: Stephen Bungay. Illustration: Erik Schön

Alignment for Autonomy Gives Speed, Innovation, and Engagement

The reason we get higher speed is that we avoid searching for more information to make the perfect plan, potentially ending up in analysis paralysis. Instead we focus more on a clear description of intent, i.e. the “what” and “why”. Moreover, we avoid specifying details in the plan and instead we give people, teams, or organizations freedom within boundaries and in line with intent to figure out “how” to make it happen. Also, we avoid too tight control, follow-up and reporting of metrics, and, finally, we encourage initiative: when you know “what” and “why”, you can quickly figure out what to do when the situation changes without going up and down the chain of command asking for permission and directives.

In addition to higher speed, we also get more innovation since when people truly understand the intent (“what” and “why”) and are given autonomy within boundaries to figure out “how”, they will surprise you with their ingenuity in figuring out solutions according to Bungay and George S. Patton. This is delivering value from ideas which, by definition, is innovation. Additionally, Amabile and Kramer’s research shows that making progress in meaningful work ignites joy, engagement, and creativity. The speed in reaching results is equivalent to making progress and that the work is meaningful is a consequence of clearly communicating the intent or purpose, i.e. “what” and “why”. The creativity will generate ideas and turning these ideas into decisions, actions, learning, and ultimately products — and these all have value, which, again by definition, is innovation.

Finally, we also get more motivation and engagement, since as Pink has shown, autonomy, mastery and purpose motivates us. Here we have autonomy on how to act and decide, and, purpose from the intent (“what” and “why”). Additionally, as we saw in the previous paragraph, making progress in meaningful work ignites, joy, engagement, and creativity. Here, the work is meaningful thanks to a clear intent or purpose; that we make progress follows from the speed in reaching results, thus we get more engagement. Moreover, Deming has stated that instead of extrinsic motivation people only need to know why their work is important, which follows from a clear intent, i.e. “what” and “why”.

Why Do You Need Boundaries or Constraints?

You need boundaries or constraints to interact and cooperate with your surroundings in an effective way and to provide clarity; when boundaries or constraints are unclear, most people will not explore, but rather keep their head down and play it safe. Specifying boundaries is like marking out a minefield. If land mines are known or rumored to exist but are unmarked, people will not move.

What Happens If Your Boundaries Are Too Tight?

The boundaries (or constraints) should be as few as possible, to avoid becoming a “straitjacket” that slows us down and kills innovation and engagement.

How Do You Balance Alignment and Autonomy?

You don’t have to since this is not a balance act or a trade-off curve. You can have both high autonomy and high alignment as shown in Figure 7 and explained below.

Figure 7: Alignment for autonomy. Source: Stephen Bungay. Illustration: Henrik Kniberg

The bottom left quadrant is low alignment and low autonomy which is a micromanaging organization with an indifferent culture, i.e. follow the orders without being given a purpose.

The top left quadrant is high alignment and low autonomy. Here leaders are good at communicating what problems to solve and they are also telling people how to solve it. This is an authoritative organization with a conformist culture where the people are expected to follow the orders, understand the purpose, but not really thinking for themselves and try new things.

The bottom right quadrant is low alignment and high autonomy. This is an entrepreneurial organization with a chaotic culture where teams do whatever they want and the managers are clueless what to do and what’s going on.

The top right quadrant is high alignment and high autonomy. This means that leaders focus on what problem to solve and let the teams figure out how to solve it. s. This quadrant is where the magic happens and the result is more engaged employees and more innovation in both ways of working and products; hence this is where we want to be: aligned autonomy or alignment for autonomy.

Examples of Alignment for Autonomy

Alignment for autonomy is scalable and it works on individual level, team level and organizational level. Here are three examples from a product development organization (2000+ people in 10+ locations) where I worked that achieved the following overall results over a five-year period:

Throughput: value delivered increased by 400%

Speed: Median feature lead-time decreased from 100 to 36 weeks

Quality: Faults at customers decreased from 250 to 40 per month

Motivation: employee motivation increased from 67 to72%

Alignment for Autonomy for Individuals

Figure 8 below shows how our product development organization worked with alignment for autonomy for our managers.

Figure 8: Alignment for autonomy for individual managers. Illustration: Erik Schön

The intent was to use alignment for autonomy as a leader and/or manager to get speed, innovation, and engagement. The product development organization achieved a common understanding of the intent through several interactive seminars for all leaders and managers.

Given the intent of using alignment for autonomy and the boundaries being the boundaries of the organization’s leadership framework, the leaders defined the manager role in a Lean/Agile context (the “how”) as follows.

We teach, coach and challenge: individuals, teams and organizations regarding Agile/Lean and end-to-end flow based on own learning and experiences.

We develop organizations: “manage the system”, develop the culture e.g. creating conditions for “continuous improvements” and “innovation”.

We develop teams: team composition, framework for high-performing teams, team rotation between programs, …

We develop individuals: recruitment, targets, feedback, development plans, salary, …

To adjust the “how” in line with intent, i.e. adjust the manager role, a coaching training program was established together with a coaching network open for both Lean/Agile coaches and managers to share and learn from experiences, theory, games, and simulations, and, a Community of Practice (CoP) for line managers to give time and space to reflect together on the new expectations on the manager role, how it works, and, how it could be further improved.

The result was higher motivation and engagement in the organization as measured in employee satisfaction surveys.

Alignment for Autonomy for Teams

Figure 9 below shows how our product development organization worked with alignment for autonomy our cross-functional, co-located, semi-permanent development teams.

Figure 9: Alignment for autonomy for development teams. Illustration: Erik Schön

The intent was high-performing teams (“what”) to outlearn competition (“why”) and this was emphasized whenever a new team was started and regularly by the head of the product development organization.

The constraints (or boundaries) were: start with either Scrum or Kanban, use Git as the software version control handling system, and, the expectation that all teams to spend 30% of their time on learning, improvements, and innovation.

To outlearn competition, we setup a regular sharing and learning cadence: the second Tuesday of every three-week-sprint was “Learning Day”. This was an internal multi-track conference with internally created content, e.g. customer feedback, tools presentations and training, inspiration sessions on new ways of working, coding dojos, … Additionally, developers and agile coaches started Communities of Practices (CoPs) based on the needs of the development teams, e.g. for ways of working and tools.

To adjust the “how” in line with intent, all teams did retrospectives to learn and improve at the end of each sprint, irrespectively of if they do Scrum, Kanban or a hybrid.

The result was flexible, confident and innovative teams that dare to go into new areas, products and technologies and get up to speed within 1–3 months!

Alignment for Autonomy for Organizations

Figure 10 below show how we used alignment for autonomy to develop strategy and making strategy happen in our organization.

Figure 10: Alignment for autonomy for an organization. Illustration: Erik Schön

The intent was to secure understanding of the “what” and “why” of the overall strategy in interactive workshops with everyone in the organization. Before this, a revised strategy had been formed in collaborative strategy development workshops with leaders of the organization.

We converged to a quarterly challenge rather than Balanced Scorecard (BSC) or Objectives and Key Results (OKR) for “how” to make the strategy happen. The boundaries for what we wanted was the following:

as few targets as possible, preferably only one

every person and team in the organization should feel that they could contribute to the target

the target(s) should be based on current (biggest) need(s) of the organization

the target(s) should contribute to making the strategy happen

The strategy was then revisited and adjusted, if needed, in quarterly strategy retrospectives. Then, as a part of the strategy retrospectives, a new quarterly challenge was set if the previous challenge had been fulfilled or the organization’s needs had changed. If not, the quarterly challenge continued during the coming quarter.

Here’s an example of a quarterly challenge that we used: Every sprint deployed to a live network with added value and higher quality.

Our programs and development teams then used the quarterly challenge to come up with activities that they wanted to do in order to contribute to making the challenge, and thus also the strategy, happen.

Alignment for Autonomy Exercises

When training product development leaders in using alignment for autonomy, we have found the following exercises useful.

Where’s North?

Ask everyone in the room to take a good look around the room and its surroundings. Then ask the participants to stand up, close their eyes and point their right hand towards north. This very simple exercise shows the importance of alignment of direction before starting to move.

Alignment for Autonomy: Current and Wanted State

Pick one topic from the following list:

something from your own organization

managing the test environment

handling trouble reports

doing product strategy

securing company wide knowledge sharing

using metrics/KPIs

For the topic of your choice, put it in a suitable quadrant in the alignment/autonomy four-field matrix and explain your reasoning for

The current situation The wanted situation

The Autonomy and Alignment Experiment

The Autonomy and Alignment Experiment by Stephan van Rooden is a great simulation that shows how people feel and react when different groups are given a simple task with different combinations of high or low autonomy and alignment.

Summary

Alignment happens when leaders and teams work towards a common purpose or goal. Autonomy helps teams to work independently of leaders and each other. The stronger alignment we have, the more autonomy we can grant. This will give us speed, innovation and engagement.

The leader’s job is to communicate what customer need or problem should be solved, and why, or, even to co-create this together with the teams. The team’s job is to collaborate with each other and other teams to find the best solution fulfilling the need and have the autonomy figure out how to do it.

Alignment for autonomy works for individuals, teams and even organizations, in fact, the bigger the organization, the more important alignment for autonomy gets — to distribute decisions in order unleash innovation close to customers, and, to close the gap between strategy and implementing the strategy.

Would you be willing to try?

For Further Inspiration and Learning

This write-up is based on the following presentations:

Erik Schön: How Do We Get Speed, Innovation and Engagement?

Erik Schön: R&D Leadership — Be Brave and Mind the Gaps

Erik Schön: Doing Strategy the Interactive & Flexible Way

Erik Schön: Ways of Working in the #NetworkedSociety — Strategy Experiments @ericsson 3G

You can find my work on leadership, strategy and Lean/Agile, e.g. the book The Art of Strategy, at Yokoso Press, Medium, SlideShare and YouTube.

Additional articles, books and videos for further inspiration and learning regarding alignment for autonomy and related topics are given below.

Articles

Amabile, Kramer: The Power of Small Wins

Bungay: How to Make the Most of Your Company’s Strategy

Richards: All by Ourselves

Roock: I’m afraid that some leaders do actually think they are God. Arne Roock asks Stephen Bungay about modern management, the Prussian Army, and the Spice Girls

Schön: Doctrine or Dogma? Challenge Your Wardley Mapping Assumptions in a Friendly Way!

Schön: Doing Strategy the Interactive & Flexible Way — Strategy as Football

Schön: Seeing Around Corners: How To Spot Technology Trends and Make Them Happen

Schön: Strategy in Action: How To Be (More) Certain To Succeed

Schön: The Art of Strategy — Introduction

Schön: The Mental Leaps — More, Faster, Better, Happier & More Innovative!

Books

Amabile, Kramer: The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

Bungay: The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

Deming: The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality

Marquet: Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

Bob Marshall: Product Aikido

Daniel Pink: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Mary Poppendieck, Poppendieck: Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point

Richards: Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

Schön: The Art of Strategy — Steps Towards Business Agility

Sinek: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Videos

Amabile: The Progress Principle

Kniberg: Spotify’s Engineering Culture, Part 1

Marquet: Greatness

Daniel Pink: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Reinertsen: Decentralizing Control: How Aligned Initiative Conquers Uncertainty

Richards: Amazing. We did it all by ourselves! (And so can you.)

Schön: Doing Strategy the Interactive & Flexible Way

Schön: The Art of Strategy — Steps Towards Business Agility

Sinek: Start with Why

Kudos

Thanks to

Stephen Bungay, Chet Richards, Bob Marshall, Mary and Tom Poppendieck, and Don Reinertsen for inspiration.

Arne Roock, Karl Scotland, Jason Yip, Håkan Forss and Hendrik Esser for enlightening conversations.

Björn Tikkanen, Henrik Kniberg and Jonas Boegård for encouraging me to write things up.

Jonas Plantin and everyone in Product Development Unit 2G/3G at Ericsson for making this happen, together!