415. Untangling Organizational Design with Gene Kim & Steven Spear

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Could the secret to organizational success be as simple as going back to basics?

Gene Kim and Steven Spear’s new book, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification presents practical, grounded research on organizational management and design. Gene is the chair of the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit and Steven teaches at MIT Sloan.

Gene and Steven walk Greg through the three mechanisms of successful organizational design: slowify, simplify, and amplify. They also discuss how the field of organizational design has evolved and what still needs to evolve with management education.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Three mechanisms of a successful organizational design

We now have everything we need to be able to describe the three mechanisms that must be in place in any high-performing system. You got to slowify, meaning we move the most difficult problems from production into planning and practice, where work can be redone. We can do experiments. We can learn where we can simplify where we actually divide up the problems. We partition them so that they are easier to solve. And there's three dimensions of that. And then there's amplification, this overlay of how do we create a system that can amplify even the weakest signals so that when someone needs help or when there's danger that we can quickly detect and correct or ideally prevent from happening again.

What the term ‘slowification’ means

38:39 The reason why we had to create the word ‘slowification’ is that we have a lot of adages for slow down to speed up or stop sawing to sharpen the saw, and the absence of the word prevents us from doing it or thinking it. (38:46) But the whole notion is creating time to be able to solve tough problems not in production but in planning and practice. To solve architectural problems, not during the normal sprint or what have you, but actually making time for the architectural spike or the period of technical debt reduction to enable people to do their work easily and well.

The wrong way to measure success

A lot of these metric-driven organizations, the pit they fall into is they don't account for the return on investment of discovery. They measure activity but not accomplishment.

The great advantages of technology in management education

And now, because we can do education at a distance, we can do asynchronous education, we can have education which is interspersed with either structured experiences or just natural experiences that people have. We can now actually teach one by one as needed as ready situation where information is pulled from the instructor to time and place and situation where it's needed, rather than being forced by the instructor in a formulation that the instructor thinks is right but may have nothing to do with the readiness of the student.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System | Harvard Business Review
• Christina Maslach on unSILOed
• Gary Klein on unSILOed
• Dr. Richard Shannon
• Ron Westrum
• Kim Clark
• Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem

Guest Profile:

• Gene Kim’s Website
• Steven Spear’s profile at MIT Sloan

Their Work:

• Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

Gene's Books:

• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
• The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
• The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

Steve's Book:

• The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition