How to change an organization from silo thinking to being Agile?

Hi Bogdan,

I have some experiences of implementing change in large teams. I've seen some great examples of teams of up to 150 FTE working great together as one team, but I haven't seen large organisations really embracing the Agile/Adaptive mindset as a whole.

I do have an example that pops in mind when thinking about an organization that manages the siloes AND promotes innovation and continuous improvement. That organization is Spotify.

There are dozens of articles out there about Spotify and how they implement Agile in their organization. In a nutshell, they introduced the concept of Squads, Tribes, Chapters and Guilds.

1) Squads are similar to any regular department teams (or Scrum teams). They have their own meetings (planning, huddles, retrospectives, etc.) and have a specific mission.

They are encouraged to spend 10% of their time on “hack days”, typically trying out new ideas and sharing with their colleagues their findings.

Each squad should be autonomous and in direct contact with their clients. Also they should not be dependent on other squads to operate.

2) Tribes are a collection of squads (similarly like divisions are in a big bank). Each tribe has a lead who is responsible for providing the best possible habitat for the squads in that tribe. No tribe has more that 100 people (based on Dunbar’s number, who suggests a limit to the number of social relationships a person can maintain).

Tribes are holding informal meetings on a regular basis, where they update the rest of the tribe what they are working on, what they have delivered and what others can learn from what they are currently doing. This includes live software demos, sharing new tools and techniques, cool hack-day projects, etc.

3) Chapters are the transversal collaboration forums where economies of scale are captured.

These are transversal groups of people with similar skills and working within the same general competency area, within the same tribe.

4) Guilds are larger communities, across multiple Tribes (e.g the software development guild, the testing guild, etc.). They are there to promote knowledge sharing, problem solve on specific guild related issues and propose new innovative ways of working.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

(Pablo Picasso)

 

I hope this makes sense and you will be inspired to copy some elements from the Spotify approach, put your own changes in place and then steal it completely. 

Thanks,

Mirel