The Art of Strategy Agility: How to Sense, Adapt, and Lead in a Dynamic World

“Strategy agility isn't about waiting for a crisis. It's about building the muscle to stop, pivot, and adapt before disaster strikes.” - Mark Richards

This episode sees hosts Nikolaos Kaintantzis, Stephan Neck, Mark Richards, and Ali Hajou conclude their exploration of SAFe’s competency framework by focusing on Strategy Agility. It's packed with insightful discussions about market sensing, organizing around value, and the need for continuous adaptation in today’s dynamic business environment.

• The Importance of Market Sensing: Ali shares a compelling story about a small electronics team that identified a market opportunity for emergency power switches. Their close collaboration with customers allowed them to innovate and adapt their strategy quickly based on real-world feedback.
• Strategic Alignment Through Market Signals: Stephan emphasizes that successful strategy agility hinges on sensing the right signals from the market. He advocates for early engagement with teams that handle market research to make informed decisions and keep strategies grounded in actual data.
• Reorganizing Around Value: Niko and Mark dive into the complexities of organizing and reorganizing teams around value streams. Mark cautions against treating reorganization as a one-time event, explaining that successful organizations constantly refine their structures to align with evolving strategies. Niko highlights that this should be seen as an ongoing process, not a major disruptive event.
• Adapting Without a Crisis: Mark and Stephan discuss how organizations often react swiftly in times of crisis, such as during COVID-19, but struggle to maintain that level of focus in normal conditions. They explore how companies can proactively build systems that allow for agile strategic shifts without waiting for external crises to force their hand.
• Advice for Young SPCs: The panel agrees that new SPCs should avoid jumping straight into enterprise-level strategy agility. Instead, they recommend focusing on smaller, more localized changes, such as helping Agile Release Trains (ARTs) adopt market sensing and lean startup techniques before tackling broader organizational strategies.

Transcript

Mark Richards: 0:01

You're listening to SPCs unleashed a shaping agility project that emerged from the 2023 Prague SAFe summit. The show is hosted by Swiss SPCT Stephan Neck and Niko Kaintantzis, Dutch SPCT Ali Hajou and Aussie SAFe fellow, Mark Richards. We're committed to helping SPCs grow their impact and move beyond the foundations. Taught during implementing SAFe each week, we explore a dimension from the frameworks competencies. We share stories about our journeys, the secrets we found and the lessons we've learned the hard way. G'day and welcome to Episode 22 of SPCs unleashed. We are on the final dimension of the final competency of the long journey we've been taking through the SAFe competency framework. And who better to take us out than Niko finally.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 0:52

Oh yeah, no. Final episode. So yeah, today, as Mark said, strategy agility and we focus on the focus on stories, about market sensing, implementing changes in strategy, organizing and reorganizing around value, and speaking of storytelling, Mark knows what now is next. If this core comments, if this dimension strategy agility, would be a kid's fairy tale. Which one would it be for you and why? Who wants to start?

Ali Hajou: 1:26

Let me start. Let me start. Hi, everyone. Happy. What is it? The 21st episode,

Mark Richards: 1:33

22nd what's the 22nd because we have an intro episode.

Ali Hajou: 1:38

Oh yes, of course. I forgot the intro episode. Happy. 20 seconds. So if this dimension is a kid's fairy tale, I chose The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Caterpillar. I'm not sure whether you know the book. It's, I think it is, yeah, I think it's a kid's book for very young kids about a caterpillar that never has enough, it always wants to eat more and more and more. And I found some parallels with, let's say, the way organizations explain their strategy. Because every time that you're reading or that you're asking somebody about their strategy, the strategy of the company, or strategy of an approach or a product, you get a different answer. So it's always more adjustments, more alignment, different visions. It's just always more and more and more. So I thought, yeah, very much fitting cool.

Stephan Neck: 2:42

I thought, I thought when Niko was asking the question, let's get ugly I'm talking about the ugly duckling. So I think this, this tale, could represent the journey of a strategic agility in an organization, right? You start as an ugly duckling, and you're in the wrong nest, the wrong context, and you start to discover you're probably not belonging to where you are. And for a long time you you stay the ugly duckling, until you transform into this beautiful swan. So I think that could be a good fairy tale.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 3:19

So you can be at the end the beautiful swan. That's great, marvelous. Of course,

Stephan Neck: 3:24

I showed you my soul.

Mark Richards: 3:27

I have to say, I think chatgpt is getting very confused about me, given the number of prompts that I've given over the last couple of days, going give me examples of fairy tales about this, but in the end, I settled on the Ant and the Grasshopper from Aesop's Fables. And you know, of course, the parable for it is the ant works diligently to store food for the winter while the grasshopper enjoys himself. When winter comes, the ant survives and the Grasshopper suffers. And I think for me, strategy, agility, there's an awful lot of hard work you've got to do in order to be ready to be nimble when the moment comes. And you know, it's that hard work establishing the conditions in which you can actually have strategy agility. That's actually the secret of it.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 4:16

Cool. And yesterday I realized, oh gosh, I have to answer this question myself too. So I was thinking about fairy tales, and then I didn't, I don't know if this exists in English, because it never crossed my literature in English is in German. The revolve from this even guys line. I tried to google it up what it is in English, and I answer was the Wolf and the Seven hostages, I think was a translation error. It's and the seven little kids, so it's a goat and her little kids, and she leaves the house and tell them, Don't open the door, because there's a wolf outside. And the wolf tries to come in the house. And what the wolf is doing, he has a vision, go to the house and eat, yummy, yummy. All the little uh. Uh, hits there, uh, kittens, uh, baby goats, or kid goats. And it changes each time the strategy to fulfill his goal, to uh, pass the door. And that's why I've chosen it, uh, having a vision, and change the strategy to make this vision possible.

Stephan Neck: 5:15

Again, very ugly, right?

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 5:18

Of course, yeah. Fairy tales, the old fairy tales usually ended ugly, so he fulfilled his goal and the next step? Yeah, you can imagine what happens.

Mark Richards: 5:27

I thought about a lot of ugly ones, and then I rejected them, and I went, it's just too tempting to be way too naughty. But we should remember that Eric Willeke, who never joins us for this particular show because it's in the weird hours of the night for him, heard the question went, I've got to play as well. So he gave us Jack and the Beanstalk. And you know, his prompt was, what do you do when a whole new dimension opens up for your business to play in, full of giants and dangers?

Ali Hajou: 5:55

Yeah, I like it. Nice, new perfect.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 5:59

So we have an idea where this dimension and this episode goes to thank you for this intro. And let's dive in a little bit in theory and into your experiences and your stories. So when we go through the dimension and read this part of the article, where it's about strategy agility, there's written that it's the ability to sense changes in the markets and to implement new strategies quickly. And for that, for instance, you need some kind of abilities, like market sensing, like innovating, like a Lean Startup, like implementing changes in strategy, innovation, accounting, ignoring some costs, organizing, reorganizing around value and agile contracts, changing them, having a more flexible approach. So when you hear all these bullet points or read all these bullet points, what resonates more with you and why? And do you have any story about this? Let's start with Ali, yes,

Ali Hajou: 6:57

I, I was thinking about this one because, you know, I think every big organization is just constantly in flux. Things change so quickly, and this dimension essentially, sort of addresses that, that that you could also form a structure in, in, let's say, have a, have a way of working in how to sense the market and how to respond to that. But just an example that popped into my mind was something that I experienced in an assignment that I had, or collaboration that I had, where there was a small team part of a large organization creating electronics, who just understood the customer very well. We're in very close contact with the customers. And just like in every big organization, strategy changes everywhere. And depending on who you ask, that person would mention, you know, a different strategy has a different approach, a different vision, whatever. But you know, the company wants to create good, qualified products that are novel and innovative in the electronics market. And they just, they sensed that there was an opportunity in the with their customers who used batteries in their, in their in their factories, rather than just getting electricity from the grid. And you know, whenever the electricity stops, there would be a sort of a switch in, like an electrical switch, that would power on a diesel generator so that, you know, companies like hospitals would continue to have electricity. But that takes some time, because, you know, electricity stops, there's a switch diesel generator needs to power up, and then only after, whenever the diesel generator is powered up, there is electricity, so it takes some time, and that switching is tricky for especially for critical electrical infrastructure, such as in hospitals. So with more businesses having batteries, they thought, you know, what? What if we create another type of switch that just the moment that there is no electricity from the grid, it sends a direct signal to the electrical battery to provide the rest of the electricity and then isolate so basically, in a way, disconnect the grid, because the electricity that can come in can come in at a very high peak. So, long story short, they thought, let's just build something quickly, see whether there is a market there. Why? Because we have a close collaboration with the customer, and see whether, whether, let's say, the product vision that we have, or the vision that for our products that we have, can be achieved in a different way, with different products or with a different. Approach to the market. So in a way, they've created a small little exercise of how to call it an experiment tested it very quickly figured out that that worked. Because customers were like, Oh, this is fantastic, because we can use that in our hospitals or in our nuclear plants or in our whatever critical infrastructure. So we want to buy that kind of stuff, which, which meant that all of a sudden, you know, if a customer says we want to buy that kind of stuff, you know, all type of people are like, Okay, that's it. There's, there's a market. So let's, let's get that done, and let's get that, let's build that thing. So strategy changes based on what the market needs, but what typically remains the same is, is the product vision. So I just add like, I really like that, that example illustrating the agility in strategy. So

Stephan Neck: 10:55

listening to you, Ali, I heard the word signals, and when it comes to innovation and the new new signals, is important for me, so I would choose market sensing. Why is that? In every transformation context or mandate I am what I do very early, I ask the people, let's go and visit those who are close to the market to do market research, who do marketing? Let's have in Switzerland, we call it a shoela wisely, a school trip. Let's go to these entities, to these people, and let's ask them to open whatever they have regarding market research, what they know about the market. And interestingly, and we talked about that in recent episodes, bring the right people together, and all of a sudden they talk about the important stuff, right? How can we make informed decisions? Oh, these guys know more than we do. Why should we reinvent the wheel? Or, hey, there's a lot of innovational details in it. What we see on paper, what we see on graphs, what we see on on research, we can use that right? And as you said, Ali, how to create the prototype, how to do an MVP. You need some signals. You need some you need some basics, and that then has also kind of, or is a signal for the strategy process, should we drift? Should we stay? What does that inform? And I like market sensing perfect.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 12:29

So thank you for both the stories about about sensing the markets doing experiments. So I completely agree with that. But when I read the whole bullet points, I thought, oh, agile contracts is also something nice, because one of my first mandates I had with SAFe was a company 10 years ago, and they had really cool contracts with suppliers. And cool for them, because you got something in Germany, call it werkvertrack, so you have a contract about a piece of, usually art or a piece you buy. And for this thing you buy, you have a warranty, but they the external contractor was not part of the team, part of the art, because they just said, this is our piece of contract. We deliver you this piece of software, and you have a warranty for the next two years. When there's a bug in the system, we repair it for our costs, for our own costs. But it wasn't really easy to integrate them in the in the yard, in the teams, because they were just for this part and not for the whole, for the system thinking part. And they really had starting change in the contracts. So how can we deal with them more in an agile way? How can we integrate them? And at the end, they were treated like internal people, just with an external batch. And they really had to come to the office work on site. 10 years ago, no Corona on site. Working was the standard. And they really changed the contract to be able to work more agile and to be able to switch faster directions, because if you order a house, it will come in two years. But if you're agile, you order something smaller, you have to switch people around, you have to work differently, and you also have to change contracts. And that was my story about what resonates most with me. Mark,

Mark Richards: 14:10

I feel like we're bringing the tone down one by one. Niko, we started with, you know, innovating with electricity for emergency power supply for hospitals. We went to market sensing, and then you're like agile contracts, and I'm the most boring guy of all, because if I think about strategy, agility, you know, if you're going to implement a new strategy quickly, you've got to have the ability to stop other things to make space for the new strategy. And for most organizations that can only really do this in a crisis. And you know, I had had two clients covid, of course, created a crisis for many, many organizations. And I had two clients that just was straight in my head when I started thinking about prep for this episode. And in one case, it was a large enterprise, and all of a sudden. And they had to get 40,000 staff working remotely SAFely. And you know, for six weeks, nothing else mattered to their technology group than can our people work. And every single executive in technology that was their focus all day, every day, and everything else just had to get held because the only thing that mattered was that they could keep working. And they got to that end of that six weeks, and they looked at each other and they said, We can't believe how much we just got done in six weeks. Yeah, they looked at all the work they'd done, they said, normally, it would have taken us two years to do this. And I remember a conversation with the CIO, and he's like, just imagine if we could hold that level of focus in a normal world. But then, of course, the crisis was over, and life went back to normal. And then another company, they're a smaller company, and they had a supply chain issue. There was a chip that was at the heart of their best selling product. And the factory that built that chip was instantly, virtually overnight, repurposed because, of course, many supply chain issues during covid, and the consortium that owned this factory said we'd need that capability for something else. So the chip production was cut off. And normally, when a company does that, they give about two years notice we're going to cease production of this chip, because it gives all the companies who rely on it a couple of years to do the r&d for a new generation of product. And you know, they can establish stockpiles to get them through it. And these guys were stuck right the number one selling product, they couldn't ship it because they couldn't assemble it, because they couldn't get their hands on the chip. And they did their two years, R D in three months, and got a new version of their core product out based on a new chipset. And again, it was that ability to just go laser focus every priority in the company became second to, how do we get the new model out with a new chipset? And they managed to hold on to it. They looked at themselves at the end of that three months, and they'd been really struggling with prioritization and making ruthless decisions, but they looked at what they did in that time, and they went, That's incredible. How do we hold that? And so it's, it's that you know, what strategy agility, can you achieve that kind of laser focus on a new opportunity, and can you shut things down to make space for that focus as a part of your life, rather than waiting for a crisis,

Ali Hajou: 17:38

indeed, and doing that consistently or with discipline? Yeah, yeah.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 17:43

So what hits me is that often it happens when there's an emergency and you cannot, you cannot have, you shouldn't have, each time covid, change your strategy. So have you any experience in how can we do this proactively? So what can you so we heard a little bit from Mark that it's possible that you learn, but you have more ideas what you can do proactively, and not only crisis, the strategy, agility. Do you have any

Mark Richards: 18:09

stories? So for me, this comes back to the story of the app and the Grasshopper. So if you're wanting to live in a world that says, I need to be able to stop things to seize new opportunities. How do you why your system to be able to stop things? And the metaphor that I will always use is if you think about professional investment, when somebody's instructing an investment portfolio, when they're placing things in that portfolio, one of the things that they think about is liquidity. How easily can I get out of a position that I take? Because it might be a great looking share, but if all of a sudden I want to exit it, can I actually trade out of it rapidly enough, given the volume it normally trades at, or if I'm investing in real estate, then perhaps the time it takes me to get out of a real estate investment is a lot longer than it is out of a share. And this idea of liquidity, when I buy into something, how easily can I get out of it? Translating that through to the way in which you construct and approach your work and your big pieces of work, let's say your epics to be able to say, I can stop this and move to something else, because that's not a muscle that organizations have. Every big enterprise I work with, if they've got a bigger initiative, you know. And you say to them, when was the last time you stopped a project? The answer is, generally never right. They slow them down and they speed them up. It's a three year project, and it's not the priority books next year, so it's only going to get a third of the funding rate, and then we'll speed it up again the year after. But that doesn't really free the focus space. Frees a little bit of money. So how do you start to set your work up and frame your work that. Definitely comes into the way you shape your epics and you think about your MVPs and your incremental strategies for them, so that you can say, I'm going to stop this, I'm going to stop that, I'm going to stop that. And in doing those stops, you free up not just money, but people, and if you've done the work for that, you get the options.

Stephan Neck: 20:18

This really triggered a few flashbacks, Mark, when you talked about focusing crisis and if I think crisis management, a lot of people talk about it, and that's where the ugly duckling comes in, again, right? I've experienced in the army as an officer, you have training where someone as the director of an exercise takes an ache and puts it in a context you never thought about it right. And now you have to deal with this crisis in exercise. You have to learn to focus, and you have to bring strategic intention, tactics, operational context under one roof. And what you do through training is get used to the uncomfortable situation of an ugly duckling. You're supposed to be a swan, but you're in the wrong vicinity. You're in the wrong context, and now you have to really get out of there. You need resilience, you need to stay focused, and that needs a lot of training. And what I experienced quite a lot, and I tried to bring that in as a change agent when I start the transformation, introducing SAFe. I'm not talking about SAFe, I'm talking about, okay, let's get out of the comfort zone. Here's the egg. I'll put it in a context, guys, what does that mean for you? And that forces people to focus in a stronger way, to start talking to each other. And most of the time, we end up with, oh, what does the strategy say? And the strategy is more bullshit bingo than helping us. And now let's talk about, how do we get out of that nest, and where do we become this beautiful swan? And I liked what you said, Mark, and Niko mentioned it as well. It's a pity that we need crisis to act accordingly, or to act in a stringent way, and and probably leadership when it comes to strategy, has to learn that's not a one hit wonder. Once a year you do it. And then let's, let's work accordingly. It's, it's an ongoing thing, the what if, what if this happens? And let's, let's anticipate crisis, because crisis is part of change. There's always something that doesn't work the way you intended it to do. And for me, back to your question, Niko, I try to bring together under one roof, not only strategy and tactics and operations, everything that's included, bring the people together again, and let's try it out before we then go to the customer, to the market, to our products, and see how we apply strategy in a stringent way.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 23:15

Great, perfect. I know now what we do in Washington. We just take our guitar and make a one hit wonder about strategy so we can play the whole our whole lifetime. No, what resonates a lot with me, and I have a similar experience like, like Stephan is, is canceling things. It's really, it's really, it's really difficult. So people tend to, yeah, it's like, when a bus is driving 200 miles an hour. Can a bus travel so fast? I don't know, you don't can't stop it immediately. But not stopping it is also some kind of a sin. So I always ask my people, do you cancel your things? Do you know that a healthy portfolio has a healthy cancel rate? And usually say, we don't cancel at all. We just slow them down, like Mark said. And what resonates with me is what Stephan said about, how can you make this happen? So we know we should have but knowing we should doesn't change. And what I do is similar as Stephan is train people. It's important thing, but the other thing is exercise, and exercise again and again. So I try in the in the portfolio things, when we are in a portfolio level, to cancel things, to not bring things forward as long something is blocking them. So you have to remove something if you want to bring something new in. Because usually when I start, everything is completely full. Every web limit is booked several times than it should be. And then you start with, okay, let's arguing which things to remove, to put the focus on new things. Yeah, having this extra exercising. And then going next to the strategic portfolio review, going next to strategy, so gained in experience on a lower level, which is for usual. Portfolio sync in this case, and then getting this muscle memory that, hey, wow, that was cool. We stopped this and this, and then we could finally finish something very, very important that was really an exercise you needed, and was really cool to have this, and realizing how people change their behavior. And suddenly this muscle memory comes and comes, but it needs time. My wife works, worked in a sector with people who had who had needs, special needs, and she once told me, you need the same amount of time to change your behavior, then they have used the old behavior. So when she had kids who were 12 years old, she needed 12 years until the new muscle memory, the new behavior changed. So imagine we're working with people being 40 years old. 40 years old. It's really difficult. So don't expect, as a coach, they change after one training. They will need exercises, they will fall back to the old pattern. So it's really, yeah, you need patience too. Patience too,

Ali Hajou: 25:57

if I may, that's I've once heard of this was not the CEO, but he was, I think, was a VP for product development who created a target for his back then project leads. Some of them became epic owners. Some of them still remained a project lead, but made a, made a target that was project budget not spent at the end of the year. So for every person you know, there's an there's an incentive, so you are performing well if the budget that you had is not spent, which basically means, if you figure out very early on that you're not living value, stop it. And I found that fantastic, but I've, I've have no idea how that sort of played out. Great

Stephan Neck: 26:43

measurement. Ali, really cool.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 26:46

Let's dive into a completely new direction. It's about organizing and the reorganizing around value. It's one of the bullet points in the in the article. And there was a nice question that originally Mark wrote down a week ago, and I really loved it so much. It's when you say organizing and reorganizing, for some people, it sounds like, Oh, we're doing a reorganization. We have also our hierarchies, and you start mixing up the network with the hierarchy, and it's really some kind of, yeah, it's difficult, because now you have also the deal with stuffs you never deal before. Maybe you have these boundaries of the hierarchy. And the question is, have you seen people approaching this successfully, this organizing, the organizing value, with the influence of hierarchy, without the influence of hierarchy? How do you do this?

Mark Richards: 27:35

So I've never seen anybody do it truly well at an enterprise level. Yeah, I've seen pieces of the puzzle, but yeah, it's such a challenging change. What like? You know, you can do it reasonably easily, locally, within a certain boundary, but when you start to cross boundaries, it's so hard. And Eric has a lovely version of the the SAFe, you know, hierarchy versus network picture, and that series of slides that goes, you know, you still have a hierarchy. You started with a network. You became a hierarchy. And you've got to have two of them. And his picture is a provocation that the mistake a lot of people fall into is to map a new value network and then just replace your old hierarchy with a new hierarchy. Yeah, we'll map the value streams, and then we'll do a reorg to fit the new structure that aligns to the value streams. And, you know, I have, I've never been involved with a company that does that, or if they had chosen to, I would have left the company very fast, because I so passionately, wouldn't have believed in it. But I'm certainly aware of a few have tried that. For me, the first secret is that you will, over time, probably drive changes to your hierarchy to support the nimbleness that you'd like, but knowing that you're going to be constantly reorging around value the changes you make to the hierarchy. When you make them, you're going to be making them to enable that reorganization, rather than to lock into a new structure. So having that kind of mental model that says, you know, certainly don't think about a physical reorg on day one. But look for as you learn, and as you you know, you make your first set of reorganization around value in some kind of matrix way, probably, what do you learn from that? And then what do you learn from the next one? And the next one, then you start to go, oh, you know what? If we shifted this physical boundary, life might get a little bit better. And there's a piece goes hand in hand with that that I've seen. It's a pretty popular thing that I see is people use the Spotify chapter type construct down at the team level. And you know, by there's. Lot of people misuse it, but that core notion that says I'm constructing teams cross functionally, therefore I'll have some kind of cross functional vehicle, such as a chapter which represents my hierarchy, so that I've still got a hierarchy that's organized by functional discipline, and I have a way of keeping things in place in that hierarchy. So you know, devs actually report to a dev, and you've got some clarity and some nimbleness that way, because you can reorganize teams without having to reorganize your hierarchy. And your hierarchy is set up for that concept. There's a lot of traps to getting chapters right. If I thought about some secrets to pay attention to there. One is be really clear and explicit about the delineation and the expectations right. If your hierarchical lead is your chapter lead, what are the responsibilities and accountabilities of the chapter lead versus the scrum master and product owner, or the RTA or, you know, so the Agile leaders and the hierarchy leaders, what are their joint accountabilities in terms of caring for a person's career and wellbeing in the workplace, really leaning into being explicit about and continuing to examine and refine the way in which those two structures interplay. And then you probably start to think about that in terms of your physical reorg as well. I saw one client do this really cleverly, so they had and we'll take scrum master chapters as an example. They followed. You know, the general model people take when they look at what Spotify did was they say, okay, for a train, I'm going to have chapters, and the chapters all fit within the boundaries of an art. So I've got a scrum master chapter, which is all the Scrum Masters for the art, and that's my physical hierarchy. And if I have a scrum master moves to another art, then they're going to have to move to another chapter, which means going to have to move to a different place in the hierarchy, which means I'm triggering HR, because I've got change of role, I've got change of reporting line, and it makes it difficult for my SCRUM masters to be transportable. And what this client did was they said, Actually, I'm going to establish capability areas, and they did that at a divisional level. So all of the Scrum Masters actually, and the scrum master chapters sat in a capability area that was agnostic of the arts, so that they could now easily reorganize their Scrum Masters around the entire division without breaking the hierarchy to give them more nimbleness of being able to put the right scrub master in. Scrub master in the right place at the right time. So as an example of going I'm going to make a slight hierarchy reorg that positions me to be able to be a bit more flexible with my value reorg, which would take me to, you know, my last hint in this space is anywhere you're leaning into organizing and reorganizing around value. You've got to get your HR or your people, people involved. Because not only, like with so many traps, when you start playing with people's lives in your organizational structure, that you've got to have experts to help you navigate those traps. And I know as a young Agile coach, I used to just try and fight the system, and I just there's so many things I didn't know to think about. And sometimes it's a really simple thing, like, your organization has some kind of org chart, right? And whether it's a global address list or something, where you go you know who works for whom, and what is their home? And you're set up for that to be the hierarchy. If you're using Outlook, you look it up in Outlook, and you go, you know, who does this person report to? And who else reports to that person? You can figure out where they live in the world, but you've generally got no way of figuring out where they live in your values orientation world. But if you work with HR departments, they'll go, oh, actually if, for example, you're using workday, which is very popular here in Australia. Workday enables you to actually have double reporting lines and simple stuff like that. To be able to go somebody has two types of home, and in my corporate systems that understand them, I can actually know what both homes are is hugely helpful for this. Yeah,

Ali Hajou: 34:24

yeah. And I've, I've seen this, this inter, no, actually, intra train chapter concept as well. So often it's just, I think the the cherry picking of, you know, when, when finding a new of where, a way of working, you know, and cherry picking from different frameworks, or something that looks nice, and let's, let's, let's use that making life indeed, very difficult for just the individual person who might want to join another train, or maybe might be more valuable in another area. Yeah,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 35:01

sometimes it sounds like choosing something that you have to change nothing, but that's a different story, I think. Yeah, finding so many frameworks to put in that you can say, Yeah, I'm doing everything, and I can stay the old way, but that's, I think, a completely new episode. Ali, sorry I interrupted you.

Ali Hajou: 35:15

No, no, no. It's exactly that. It's exactly that. The the, I don't know how to call it, doing thing, things certain, from part of my French half arsed. It's like doing a little bit of everything. And the same, same applies with the this reorganizing around value. I typically talk about stable teams, it is, let's say some, it's the language that I've that I feel more people understand. That might not be, let's say, very familiar with agile teams, agile working and the ideas behind it, but stable teams somehow resonates. And when stable teams are in place and have been in place for a long time, and you know, it works, it speaks for itself. But upon reorganization in because the company wants to generate different products, the value stream in itself is less profitable, and the company wants to change that. So, you know, reason XYZ, people tend to fall into the trap of, all right, let's reorganize and then, you know, re replace the the puzzle. So we're going to recreate the puzzle, which means we're going to put this person out of that team. We're going to take that person out of that team. Are going to, you know, create some new assembly of teams and and you know, you're breaking down the whole stable team concept. It's such a waste. It's so much knowledge. And, you know, I don't know team bonding that is in that stable team that has been in development for a very long time. So why not just keep that in place and in a way, ask the team to start slowly reevaluating and learning a different scope, different type of work, work, what might be related to a different development value stream. So in a way, we're not moving value streams around. What am I saying moving teams around over value streams? No teams slowly start to educate themselves, to work on a different product, in a way, starting to collaborate and be part of a different value stream. And I found so long story short, rather than moving individuals, we're moving scope, which, in a way, moves an entire team to a different value stream.

Stephan Neck: 37:42

Now the listeners understand why I love my mates and what they talk about, right? A lot of what Mark and Ali just mentioned is an inside out view. We think, if we organize this way, that's beneficial. Let me be a bit provocative, right? If you start the transformation, and that's my experience, you already have an operating system. That's what Mark talked about, right? That's your starting line. You can't avoid it. You can't push it away. And if you introduce a second operating model, people are being puzzled, and most of the time they already have a dual or triple or quadruple operating system, like, there's the line organization, there's the project management, the project organization, and some other funny stuff, right? And people don't know who to report to, and if they know to how they should report, it's done in a weird way that's inside out view and not an outside in view. The outside in view, for me, starts with, again, the keywords what's change and what is lean. So change means, what is the target we all have in common? And if that is clarified, is it a minor innovation, or is it small steps we take, or are we tackling a big leap, and that then kind of triggers? What is reorganization in brackets demanding from us? Right? I'm just, I just finished yesterday, first day of an RTE course, chapter three, organizing an art. People asked, how should we organize teams and an art and I said, guys, that's the wrong question. What's the job to be done? What's your context? And all of a sudden, 20 people in the room. It was pretty quiet, and we talked about the context, and then we talked about, why should we apply a topology in such a way? Because it's beneficial. So it's not categorization, it's not the operating system and going crisscross. It's really, for me, a stringent derivation. Or in terms of, do you have a clear picture? Do you have a. A plan, and what are your learning milestones on that timeline? And if that's not clear, why should we organize, reorganize around value, if not even the picture is clear that we try to achieve all the time perfect?

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 40:16

It's not your hobby you have. It's really you need something with a purpose to do reorganization from from my side, reorganization sounds always or reorganizing like value sounds like your organization, meaning we decided now, for the next decade, our system, and it's an important job, and we need time for this, and we have to think for for this, and we have to struggle for power for this. And what I did the last mandates I had, is tell them, it's just the first step every six months, you can just reorganize around value again, because you have your meetings anyway. You have your management meetings every six months. Sometimes every year, you go to the Swiss mountains, and we can do a slot there for reorganizing, to for learning about how is our reducing now? And this helped a lot of my customers realizing, okay, it's not the next reorganization we are doing, and then we move everything around, SAP every every HR things also, is just the next step. And what Mark also said in the in the beginning, the hierarchy should help you, of course, so you need also a hierarchy that helps you this behavior. But the first steps is really just changing the ways you are working. Like Stephan said, the project hierarchy, the project system, that's just like being a project. The first thing you're doing, value streams is like a project organization as a metrics, and then the next step and next step. And of course, as Mark said, at some point, you have to change the hierarchy, but take the feet away that what we're doing now is something for the next decades. It's just the first step. If you don't do the first step, you stand where you are, and usually standing there where you are. It's not the best decision going to our last question to young. SPC, so you are young in this field, and sorry, you want to grow in this in this area. What can you do there? Because there's a lot of big things there. A large enterprise is changing the approach, strategy, organization model. It's not so easy. What is your suggestion? Tape for a young SPC,

Ali Hajou: 42:24

if I may, I would say to the SPC, just don't. Don't. Don't. Start there. It's, I mean, we're talking about reorganizing around value, which basically means you need to dive into the data. See what kind of value streams are operating at what rate? What is the need? What is the work that is coming up? It's such a big thing if you're starting SPC, I mean, come on, let's, you know, give yourself some slack. This is really not something to dive into. It's I've, I've, unfortunately, have been part of something that was required because of there was a big organizational change that was happening, and then we had to sort of in a way, reevaluate developed value stream scope and the impact on the existing trains. But that was such a headache, and it was so difficult. And the impact of doing something wrong is, you know, direct impact on the careers and lives of people. So doing something wrong there, you know, it's, it's too tricky,

Stephan Neck: 43:34

huge impact.

Mark Richards: 43:36

Yeah, there was a, there's a funny feeling went through me in a lot of the prep for this, and it all came together. So the specific prompt that Niko gave us when we were doing our prep notes suggesting a large enterprise change their approach to forming and adjusting strategy in their core organization model. What advice would you give a new SPC? And it was such a beautiful way of kind of bringing to the surface and everything that had been lurking for me as I thought about this dimension, because I'm with Ali don't right as suicidal if you're a young SPC, and you go and try and start that conversation, it's going to be very short conversation, and good luck finding your next job. I But

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 44:25

the listener's number just dropped down. No. Sorry, Mark,

Stephan Neck: 44:30

you scared them away. But,

Mark Richards: 44:32

but, but, here's the thing, if you think about everything in the strategy, agility dimension, and you think, I should be market sensing. I should be innovating like a lean startup. I should be running innovation accounting. I should be organizing and reorganizing around value, actually, all of those things, and even agile contracts, you should be doing for an art, right? A good art should be market sensing for the product. Products that they're supporting. A good art should be employing lean startup techniques. And I know Niko, you're busy teaching a course about exactly that right now that you've made up yourself. A good art should be sensing and tuning the strategy for their products. A good art should be using Lean metrics, or lean metrics really well, and starting to think about innovation accounting as it surrounds the features they're shipping and the products they support. A good art should be asking itself, have we got the right structure for our teams? What's the next small change we should be making to it? And if you look at all that strategy, agility stuff and say, I should make this true for every art or team of teams that I coach, you'll learn, and one day you won't be a new SPC, and you'll learnt a whole bunch of things practicing on 100 people that might prepare you to have those conversations about 1000 people, or 10,000 people, or 50,000 people.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 46:01

Perfect. Stephan gave us more advices for young.

Stephan Neck: 46:05

I don't want to advise, but let me throw in what I've learned from Adam Grant, confident humility when it comes even to this topic. And I buy in 100% BOD Ali and Mark said, if you look at the word, strategy, comes from stategos The art of the general or the general's plan. And as Mark said, If you as a young SBC, as a young change agent, would like to be a general, you have to follow three steps. First of all, get to know the job of the general in your context. Read into that, listen carefully to understand second what I've learned in the army. Earn the right to be part of the General Staff means make your way through the ranks, and I've experienced that being a battalion commander and then transitioning to a brigade staff, where you have like, 50 smarter officers than you are, and you thought guiding and leading 840 people, I'm the smart guy. And now you come into this staff, and you start anew, making your way through the ranks, through the different work groups, be it in operations, be it in logistics, be it in strategic thinking. And then if you have done that, I've learned understand and execute the strategy process. Now you have to not only tell others what to do, you're part of it. And you go out in the field, again as a staff officer, and you make it happen. And for me, get to know the job, earn the right to be part of it and understand and then execute. That's always this kind of triple jump. You have to start and do it over and over again. Oh,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 47:53

that's really great. What I would like to add is really, you need to learn this new language. So as a young SPC, you maybe have the Agile stuff learned by heart, but now you're really talking a different language, and you have to learn this. You cannot go to France and speak fluent and say, Well, let me be your president. It's okay for me. I just learned France yesterday by a dictionary. So you really have to learn this new this new language, or giving a picture, it's easy to become an RT when you're a scrub master, it's a natural transition. But as Stephan said, you have to earn this right, being on this on this table, and this means getting a mentorship and learning this language, being first on the table before you are the one ruling the whole thing. So yeah, I like the advice. Don't do it because you're young. At the beginning, learn things, get the experience, and then, yeah, learn the new language, and then you can be part of this, and one day you can lead this. So thank you very much. Was really a cool discussion until now, Mark, you want to add something? No,

Mark Richards: 48:59

no,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 49:00

no. Okay. You're just happy.

Mark Richards: 49:02

I'm just smiling. I do that every now, perfect.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 49:06

Let's jump over to measure and grow. Who wants to start first and say which measurement he chose? My English. Now, sorry

Mark Richards: 49:16

I found it. Yeah, exactly.

Ali Hajou: 49:22

I found it very interesting. Yeah, nobody selected leadership. I chose the exact same thing as as Stephan first. But then I thought, I mean, Stephan, no, I'm going to let Stephan mention why, what he chose, and why, but. But then I was like, Wait a second, if we're talking about strategy agility, you know, that needs to come from somewhere and and rather than Mark just market research, I thought customer feedback is a more direct face to face in the face type of feedback and just market research. So I chose, I chose that So customer feedback is into. Rationalized it's there's a routine and a routine use and is fast that would be something that I would measure. Okay,

Stephan Neck: 50:09

let me throw in my one I choose market research and analysis is continuous. Why did I choose this one? For me, it's a little bit more than only customer feedback, it's more being proactive, creating the data. And as we discussed in former episodes, what do you do with the data? That's a continuous process, and why didn't I choose anything out of a leadership box? Because I think if you don't have the data, you can talk about leadership in extent you don't get it right, you're acting out of nowhere. It's just, it's just a cloud, and it's a lot of blah blah. For me, it's still this analysis and the continuous process behind it,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 51:00

and what I've selected was just the next step of what you have selected. So if you've done this job right, so if you if you really was able to get the right feedback, and not only feedback what people say, but what people do, and you did a great job in market research, you have your leading indicators providing fast feedback on epics. So it's just a combination. And one step further, that's why I selected this one. Sounds arrogant, sorry, but all good. It was the reason why I thought, I thought it's the best one mark you've chosen the same. FC, look.

Mark Richards: 51:34

I feel really bad for choosing the same, but I think it's because I kept hunting. Well, what I kept hunting for was, what are you going to do with that information that that, that was the challenge for me is like, it's great to market, Sans, it's great to get feedback. It's great to have feedback in the form of data that I can do, you know, quant based analysis on but I kept hunting for what, where's the measure and grow that says I'm actually acting on what I sense, and I'm able to act fast. And so at the end of the day, I settled for leading indicators, because if I've got hard data or I might be able to trigger action. But I wanted a measure that said, you know, when we sense a change in the market, we're able to act quickly. And I just couldn't find it

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 52:21

perfect. I have also an old world if you're interested in it, because I started this discussion with myself, and my old vote is really on the top, on leadership, the vision, mission and strategy are communicated effectively, because it's something I realize people or companies either don't have a real strategy, or what I think is a strategy, they have something like, I have it somewhere. Oh, let me search for it. You usually should know what your strategy is. You should know what your vision is. You should be able to say it by heart, and not so there is a document. Oh, it's the old version. Oh, let me check again. Ah, but we have one. We have one, I'm sure. And that's why I think it's important to communicate it. But I decided the end leading indicators is more important. But I also want to mention this to a vision communicated. You have to have it one and yeah, it should be a vision, and not something fluffy, fluff whatever should guide you when a storm is out, and not be a nice thing for a commercial with that one sentence to close the whole season, this episode and the whole season, if you have only one sentence to summarize this dimension, what would it be? Mark?

Mark Richards: 53:33

Be an Anton, not a grasshopper.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 53:36

That's cool. Mine will be changing. Strategy is normal. Anton needed these days. Ali,

Ali Hajou: 53:45

in line with what Stephan mentioned before, that leadership without data is just a lot of woozy. Boise, I don't know what you heard. You

Unknown: 53:55

mentioned it a lot of blah blah,

Ali Hajou: 53:57

a lot of blah blah. Thank you. I thought reverse engineer was what is required to allow your teams to go to GEMBA.

Stephan Neck: 54:07

Mine is data. Oh, it's cool. Cool. Mine is from a perspective of a confident and humble Ugly Duckling. Strategy happens now? Hooray,

Unknown: 54:19

hey, mark your final

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 54:21

words for the whole episode?

Mark Richards: 54:24

Well, I've just brought a little bit of Stephan's artwork on the screen. So that brings us to a conclusion of our occupancy model exploration. It's been nearly 30 episodes of SPCs unleashed. We had one intro, we had five or six in an original format, and then we changed formats a lot and went back and said, hey, it's much more fun this way. So we've now done all 21 dimensions of the SAFe competency framework, and it's been an amazing experience. So this was, well, this certainly wasn't the idea that was born when we sat together at a table in Prague at a breakout. We went, we're passionate about helping young SPCs grow. What can we do? Let's get together and figure something out. And I think at the time, we went, Oh, maybe we could write a blog post or a guidance article. And as soon as we started looking that, it was like there's just so much we want to share. And thus was born this experiment. So it's it's been an awful lot of fun. It's been a great learning experience for us. We've learnt from each other as we've gone we've learnt about live streams and LinkedIn live and all kinds of things. We are now going into a brief hiatus, but we're not done. So I am about to be traveling for a month in the well, around the Washington, DC SAFe Summit, and as the only one who can currently host, we're off the air for a bit, but we'll be back, and we'll actually almost all be in Washington, and we have many topics beyond the competencies that we feel very passionate about. And I think it's SAFe to say, if you'll excuse the pun. We'll be talking about facilitation. We'll be talking about coaching soft skills. I'm sure Ali will be teaching us how to solder and design microchips. There would be new topics we'll be we'll be kicking off again in November. And I did have a bit of a joke with my wife today, there are some changes to the competency model being unveiled in DC, and there's a world in which we could go, Hey, there's a new competency model coming. Let's start again. But I can guarantee it won't be that. But I suspect what we might be doing is at least doing one episode going what's changed based on the things that get revealed in DC. Until then, we're on a break. Hope you've enjoyed the shows, and hope you look forward to rejoining us for new topics. It

Ali Hajou: 57:21

has been a pleasure. You.