Have you ever witnessed an organization alternating between lack of alignment and control and regulatory committees enforcing Process-with-a-capital-P? I have, and more than a few times. We all know none of both work, but how can we avoid the constant swing between the extremes?
What follows the heavy handed control attempt is also interesting. Typically it is a backlash of equally epic proportions. Individual teams burdened by the bureaucracy cannot get the job done and they are forced to circumvent it. Often they prove to be more resourceful and ingenuous than anybody thought possible, bending rules and finding backdoors.
Bureaucracy and the teams’ indiscipline, or their autonomy if you prefer, are neither the problem nor the solution. Many companies in this digital times compete on the basis of speed, and anything that delays our go to market gets in the way of our success. For us the goal is sustainable fast delivery, and the impediments become apparent as delays, often caused by poor decisions, low quality and other wastes.
Let’s get down to the specifics, shall we? In a large portfolio, we have to choose the decisions that can be taken at the individual program level and the ones requiring a central decision maker so that we achieve our goal of sustainable fast delivery.
The fastest way to deliver a product today may be not to worry at all about any future concern. But our goal is not fast delivery today, it has to also be sustainable over time. If we focus on create an ideal future in which we can deliver our products very fast it makes sense to invest most of our efforts in strategies that will pay off in the long run. The trouble with such an approach is that the future we are working so hard to build may never happen. We may not be able to survive in the short run, and even if we do, we will not be successful enough to create enough resources to invest in our strategy.
We need a balanced approach, balancing short term speed with enough investments in our own sustainability. That is unlikely to be produced by central committees and heavy processes, but also unlikely to happen if we just create a fleet of completely autonomous teams, owners of their hypothetical individual destinies.
Unfortunately there is not a pre-defined balanced approach that will work for every situation, but for any given situation we can say, at least theoretically, that there is an optimum solution. The chaotic behavior of these complex systems make some people believe we should hold no hope of finding that sweet spot. The good news are we do not have to find the optimal point. We can expect that a range of solutions exists, laying in between both extremes, that are much better than any of the extremes. And what is even better the difference between the optimal one and the ones close to it are likely not dramatic, at least not as dramatic as the difference between a reasonable balanced approach and the governance and decentralization extremes. We may not be able predict upfront the exact effects that every approach will produce but through cycles of thinking, doing and observing we can find our way to a good solution.
In most portfolios I have studied, the good approaches include a generous amount of decentralization and also significant alignment efforts to keep chaos and noise under control. In the fastest solutions I have seen governance is typically enabled by using automated checks and balances. Bureaucracy by automation. Bureaucracy as an enabler of speed. I did not see that one coming!
The Adaptive Executive 