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InfoQ Homepage Podcasts Andrea Tomasini of Agile 42 on Influencing Change in Complex Environments

Andrea Tomasini of Agile 42 on Influencing Change in Complex Environments

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In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Andrea Tomasini on organisational change, sense-making, leadership and organic agility.

Key Takeaways

  • Organic Agility is a way to help make organisations more resilient by making culture explicit and visible
  • You can’t design culture, you can only influence it
  • Interviews and questionnaires give a limited a biased view of culture – you need other tools to make sense and truly understand organisation culture
  • Organisations need to be seen as complex systems and analysed from that perspective, not through mechanistic view
  • You influence culture by making the stories visible and letting people move in the direction that makes the stories more positive

Show Notes

  • 00:00 Shane Good day, folks. This is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture podcast. I'm at Agile 2019 in Washington DC, and I'm sitting down with Andrea Tomasini from Agile 42. You came across from Europe. You said you're Italian but came from Germany. And we're in Washington, DC.  I came in from New Zealand, but I did get here earlier, so I suspect you got more jet lag than me at the moment.
  • 00:30 Andrea: Yes, I might be. And if you want as an interesting study to be an Italian in Germany, allow me to understand complexity quite well.
  • 00:39 Shane: Cultural differences. If we can, let's step back a tiny bit. Will you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Agile 42.
  • 00:47 Andrea: Okay, so I have a technical background, so I'm coming from software engineering side and been always passionate about complexity and complex adaptive system as well, which is also been part of my studies in the past.
  • 01:00 And I actually shifted away from the topic of complexity in the software fields, and I started looking at complexity in human relationship. And this is why I became passionate about leadership and culture shifts and everything, which is related to seeing the organization more as an organism, as a network of individuals, rather than a machine which has defined processes, roles, and things like that.
  • 01:25 So the last 4  years of my time I spent at Agile 42 I helped co-develop the organic agility framework with other thought leaders.  Organic agility is a way, if you want to help organizations become more resilient. So,  it's nothing really to do with software delivery or product delivery per se, but it's really about making organizational cultural explicit.
  • 01:49 And provides you a lot of tools to influence that culture to move in one direction or another. And at Agile 42 which is an international company, we have presence in 13 countries around the world. We really spend a lot of time on our self as well to understand what the impact of the culture in the organization was, both from a creativity perspective, from an innovation perspective.
  • 02:13 But also from a coherence perspective, and we learned that trying to align culture or to design culture simply doesn't work, but you can influence the culture. You can measure the culture as a product of behaviours, of stories of success and failure, of rituals, of many other things. But you can't actually design culture.
  • 02:31 The moment you try to design culture and you ask people to comply to that design culture, or you try to write values and principle on the wall and tell everybody, this is who we are. In that moment, you're taking away the soul from the people, you're taking away part of their identity. And there's a lot of theory and science behind identity and how identity develops over time and over relationship.
  • 02:54 But fundamentally speaking, the problem we learned to cope with is related to being able to leverage those relationships and those influences to our advantages. And we invest a significant amount of time on these things at Agile 42 we have coach camps that we run internally every two months in every continent around the world.
  • 03:18 So we have one in South Africa and one in Europe, and one in North America, and we are also running every year in innovation sprint, we call it. And we fly everybody from all over the world in the same place, including families, kids, partners, and everybody. And we stay for the whole week in the same place because we learned that culture requires time and requires to bond the through relationship.
  • 03:42 And we also learned that this relationship needs to be in a work context. It can be just a fun context because our identity shifts also depending on the context. So it's not enough that me and you are having a conversation is probably our identity are forced by the role we are having at this moment in time.
  • 04:00 Probably this evening in front of a beer is still me and you. But the context change and our role change. And so the behaviour we will manifest more are the one which are more appropriate for a different context, but it's still me and you, so this is what is basically behind the identity theory. And is this is what we learned at Agile 42 and we practice on ourselves.
  • 04:21 We practice with clients. And in the past four and a half years, we experimented in all 13 countries. We had a lot of multinational company to deal with, and we've been able to appreciate these differences also and see how we can actually influence culture to really change.
  • 04:37 Shane: 04:37 I know that you've been doing quite a lot of work with Dave Snowden on the Sense Making stuff. Where does that come in?
  • 04:43 Andrea: 04:43 That's an interesting question. We've been looking for a long time, so let's start this way. When we help client and we go within an organization, the first thing we try to do is to understand where this organization stands at that moment in time. So what are the capabilities that the organization is able to leverage to their own advantage and what instead are maybe those capabilities that are not well used or well utilized by the organization. Or even if there is any negative behaviour or negative approach that is kind of dragging them down. It's not basically allowing them to be as effective as they would like to be.
  • 05:20 And in the past we have been experimenting with values approaches to kind of, let me say, assess. But it's not really assessing because we have no defined model or defined the structure against which we can measure thing. But it's more like exploring if you want. How is the organization working?
  • 05:38 And we have been trying; conducting interviews to individuals and do all the classical things that  agile coaches do, but inevitably when you go and confront your result or your guesses based on few interviews, there's a lot of problem with that process itself. There's a confirmation bias -  after two or three interviews we make up our mind already because we are experts in this domain, so we fall into the trap, Oh, it must be this, and then we keep an only looking at confirming our assumption in the next interview. So, whether we interviewed 20 or 300 people wouldn't make much of a difference after a while. That's one problem.
  • 06:12 And the other problem is depending on who you're picking the interview, you might get completely different perspective with the interview. So, we faced situation in which we basically went back to the organization and said, look, this is a picture of what we see in your organization. And many people didn't identify themselves in that.
  • 06:30 And so we went, Oh, we need to do something different. And I've been talking to Dave Snowden, we know each other since 2007 so it's quite a long time in the meanwhile, and we always had the little bit of discussion about how can we improve this process? And he came up with the idea, well, perhaps we can use sense-making technique to do that.
  • 06:48 And I was kind of intrigued about it because if you look most of the other consulting companies or even software company are moving toward using machine learning or AI to do this type of job. But I mean, I've been fascinated always by his approach and my understanding of culture is that culture cannot be interrupted by a machine.
  • 07:10 Not yet though,  it will probably take a long time because it's about the meaning of a word within a context, in a specific moment, and what machines do, they are very good at understanding pattern, but on an average level instead of getting the outliers. And you can program a machine to find the outliers for sure, but it will be very hard to understand the jargon of a specific organization. 
  • 07:35 So you would need a massive large training set to get a machine understanding the culture of a specific organization and normalizing it like per industry, and say, everybody in this industry has this average culture profile is not really going to help much because it's taking away the individuality.
  • 07:53 And so the idea that Dave thrown on the table is we should use a sense-making approach. Sense-making is about allowing people to interpret data themselves. And is based basically on micro-nality , which gets self-interpreted by the person who actually explains the story or tell the stories against a defined set of signifier that you can develop over time.
  • 08:15 So we have been doing exactly that approach with Dave and we came up with an approach which is integrated in organic agility, which we call organizational scan and organizational scan basically uses the sense-maker technique. Combine a little bit with, of course, artificial intelligence in some areas just to create clusters faster.
  • 08:34 But fundamentally, we are not filtering out the culture because we allow individual to interpret their own story by themselves. So, they have the right, if you want, cultural glasses. And then it's a process which starts by capturing the impact of decision making within an organization. So you know that decision making is probably the most common process happening all over the place, independent of the job or the branch you are in.
  • 08:59 And the decisions happen every second on every minute and every day. So, there's plenty of those happening.  What we are asking people to do is every time they are impacted by a decision. To capture that decision and tell us how that the decision process affected them, both from an emotional standpoint, but also to describe if possible, through the signifier, how did that decision making process happen? Was the leader deciding, was the team, was you, how long did it take to make the decision. Did the outcome of that decision meet your expectation or not? Do you feel positive or negative about it, so it says plenty of meta-data, if you want, that you can extract by a simple narrative stories.
  • 09:40 And that's fascinating because we created a now a software also, which help us doing it and allow us to enter in touch with the client. And for example, everybody who uses organic agility can start this organizational scan and in a time of four to six weeks’ time. You will have so many data that there is no doubt that the cultural profit of the organization is quite accurate because it's not just the result of listening to 12 or 20 people interviews, but it's really a big and thorough analysis if want the data.
  • 10:10 So there is this aspect of quantitative and qualitative analysis which comes into place. And the good thing about sense-making is that is not an evaluative method. I'm not asking, “giving a scale from zero to five, how would you feel about something?” Because that would mean you are evaluating something.
  • 10:28 I'm just asking you to describe how you perceived or leave the specific decision process. And there is no right or wrong answer. It's just about if you want telling the truth. And the fact that it is all anonymized encourages people significantly to be very honest and true about it. Also the way we collect the data and create reports or use the report to drive the analysis within an organization is actually, is not transparent, is not straightforward. It's not that if you move something in one direction, that means a score will be calculated because we are not evaluating actually.
  • 11:02 And that is the moment where David Snowden's  seen or helped us develop the organic agility scan and he has seen the potential, and then we started working together  with Cognitive Edge more and more in looking at how can we use complexity intervention method to, actually, I'll put a  on the change, but we want to do that from a complexity standpoint instead of from a system thinking standpoint. Which means if you want, one of the common mistake we see is that organization tried to depict what would be a future image of themselves.
  • 11:35 Then they make the gap analysis with where they are now. They make a plan or the strategy on how they can move from that current state to the future ideal state, and that ends up being a quite frustrating exercise in many organizations. This is why you see organizations start to reorganize more and more often, even many months before now, every six to nine months we see some reorganization.
  • 11:56 And the frustrating part is the moment you design your future state, you have a certain set of information and perception about how the market is or the client outside there are looking at you. But why you start the journey toward implementing that ideal state, all of these market conditions and client conditions shift again or shuffle around themselves.
  • 12:16 And so there is always this conflict between should we keep on following the plan or should we continuously adapt? But when you talk about organizational design, that is not an easy step. It's not like refactoring software that you go on, buy it, and then every time you adopt a new refactor and make it better.
  • 12:33 When we talk about organizations, there's people involved, there's culture involved, there's processes involved.  There's a lot of structures which need to be adapted over time. And so that is what makes organizations fragile today. And our goal with organic agility is really to increase organizational resilience by increasing autonomy on one side, which can be done through agility, but also by allowing organization to be able to react faster to changes and also to recover from failure quicker. Because if you're able to do that, you can outpace your competition. Especially in today's market situation where we have a very high level of volatility, the markets are unstable, and if you look in the past 15 years, almost every market cycle shrink down to less than half. Which means from the early adopter innovation phase to the laggard phase.  
  • 13:24 If you look at 30 years ago, we had market cycles, which were spanning between 15 and 25 years from the moment someone had an idea until the market was saturated.
  • 13:33 If we think about televisions or fridges at homes or things like that. So, commodity goods today, but at the time they were luxury items. So, if you look at the sixties or the fifties even.   If you look at the consumer electronics or later the consumer goods, in the past 10 to 15 years, we've seen that the market cycle are shrinking dramatically.
  • 13:53 So if you think of smartphone, the iPhone is a generation 12 and the first one was presented in 2007 so we have 12 years of time and they're already at the 12th generation and the market is highly competitive and saturated already and is not after 12  years, was already five years after launch or even three years reached more than 50% market penetration already.
  • 14:15 So all our companies, including Agile 42 are living in market times, which are very difficult to predict. And it becomes very, very challenging to drive your organization and your business using the approach that we have been using 10 years ago. Like defining. a strategy, putting down a master plan for the next five years, defining KPIs or OKRs, and start moving in a common direction.
  • 14:39 What we realized is that the volatility is so high that we needed to find a different way to describe how organizations work. And the whole idea behind organic agility is really to shift the metaphor from the organization as a machine, if you want a bunch of cogs and the processes, roles, scripted artefacts, which are all structured, which we need to keep alignment and governance.
  • 15:02 But when we exceed, in defining those structure, the organization becomes more fragile because every time something happens, which is outside of the purpose for which it was designed in the first place, the organization breaks apart. Breaks apart means you need to start instantiating escalation processes or task forces or whatever, which in their nature are not scaling because they demand full attention and full resources and full budget.
  • 15:27 And you can't have one or two of these running at any moment in time. But you cannot have the whole company becoming a giant task force with the highest priority on everything. So that's just simply not working.
  • 15:38 And so we worked hard and we looked at different areas of science to determine what is it that we can do to find a different metaphor, to describe an organization, and also to find a way to describe and implement organizations design, which allow us to shift and to be refactor very, very quickly if we need to.
  • 15:59 And so we came to the conclusion that we needed to shift from alignment on structures, which is what many people tried to do. So process compliance if you want, or even agility helps a little bit, getting away from defined processes and stop looking more at coherence, but on a value and principle base.
  • 16:19 Because if we really look at the core of agility, it is about having common values and principles, and then derive the practices.  Keep on evolving the practices with the certainty that through the coherence that we create through values and principle, the system will still remain governable and stable, right?
  • 16:37 So this is how agile teams work. They can self-organize because there is a foundation of values and principle, which helped the team identifying and adopting new practices every day because they want to improve every retrospective a team defines something new. So, our challenge was how can we do that on a company level?
  • 16:54 So where do we have to shift coherence away from processes and start creating coherence on a cultural level? Because we learned, while agile people come to the agile values by choice, at least they used to do, which means they already identify with those values and principles. So there is a buy in, which is very deep inside, and the will to change the way of working is driven because our value drivers are already married, if you want, with the value of agility.
  • 17:26 But if we look at organizations and we see different disciplines, not just software development or even, or even product development, but we started looking around at finance, at all the departments, which organization have, it's extremely difficult to find a set of common values to which people can really kind of attach and engage. So, we need the common value drivers, or we need value drivers to drive change because we need to be motivated to change the status quo by something which is already there.
  • 17:55 So shifting coherence on a cultural lever for us means let's try to understand what is the current existing culture at an organization  level and let's  draw it, let's visualize it because we can measure it and the fact that we can measure doesn't mean we can design it the way we want to,  but, adopting complexity intervention techniques, we can try to do multiple parallel experiment within the organization and see what is the effect of these experiment almost in real time.
  • 18:27 Because the whole idea of having this organizational scan, it becomes a kind of journaling system where every employee, maybe twice a week or three times a week, spends five to 10 minutes of time to capture decisions that affected them. And then by doing that, we can calculate almost real time what is the cultural profile.
  • 18:46 And how it shifted from the previous week or the previous two weeks. So, we are not imposing a specific culture, but by creating more awareness in the organization about, look, this is what your cultural profile look like. We are encouraging people to start talking about it. Start coming together and about, you know, how can we become more coherent on a cultural level?
  • 19:08 It's not a choice you can make and say, yes, we want to do it and it's going to be this culture, but still you can see that in some pocket of the organization, there are behaviours which people consider negative, which are in a certain cultural connotation; there are behaviours that people consider positive, which are in a different cultural connotation.
  • 19:28 So then the conversation you're going to have is not how do we implement this culture, but you just go to the leadership of the organization  or to everybody in the organization and we talk about, Hey, how can we get more story like this of positive success behaviour and less story like that. So, what is it that we can do to avoid that people report this decision as negative because of the process, because of the context, because of whatever reason they describe in their own narrative.  What is it that we can do to reduce this and to amplify that.
  • 20:00 And by working in this way, you basically would see that after a while, the organization culture starts to become more coherent. It moves toward what is scientifically called the adjacent possible. Which is the closest possible cultural profile, which requires the minimal amount of energy to be achieved, right? This is how complex systems work. So if we try to put a lot of energy into a system, we can alter the state for a while, but as soon as we stop applying that energy, the system will tendentially go back, which is what in jargon is called organizational gravity.
  • 20:33 So you are trying always to put the organization out of their trajectory, but inevitably, as soon as you stop applying that energy, it goes back to the place where it was,
  • 20:42 Shane: How many failed agile transformations are there...
  • 20:45 Andrea: Exactly. And that's probably the primary reason. Another quote is like, culture eats strategy for breakfast, and that's exactly what happens.
  • 20:53 Everybody tend to focus too much on processes and our new way of working and new tools, and you spend a lot of time trying to create alignment on that, if you want, operational level. But you don't spend enough time creating coherence on that cultural level, which is what happened is then as soon as the consultant or the coaches are stopping putting energy into it, inevitably the culture wins again, and all those tools and artifacts in principle just disappear or just get forgotten sometimes.
  • 21:23 Shane: That was really, really interesting. You've given us a whole lot to think about here. If I think of our audience, technical influencers coming to the podcast to hear about how can I support the people on my teams? How can I help my organization achieve better outcomes? What does this mean for those people?
  • 21:46 Andrea: 21:46 Very good question. There are many ways that people can basically improve. Our goal has always been to improve the work life balance for everybody because that gives you, even in the keynote we heard yesterday morning, we need a little bit of slack time. We need our brain not to be busy because then we find the energy again to be motivated and engaged.
  • 22:05 And you can do that on a team level without having to do it on a whole organizational level. And there are other tools and techniques which are also part of organic agility. In particular, there is organic leadership framework that we developed as well, which is an approach to leadership, which is a bit innovative.
  • 22:22 So the reason why we needed to build one is because we didn't find anything like that on the market, which means most of the leadership which are on the market today are still anchored to the hierarchical metaphor of an organization. They come from the, if you want the last century, but the assumption in many leadership models is that there is an underlying organizational structure of a certain type. And those models are based on either personal evolution and is a journey from the inside out, which is a valuable approach.
  • 22:50 Some of those models are based on intervention. So it's about how leaders needs to act and needs to do; some are talent based and capability based. So how do I develop the capability, or the talent based on the talent I have in order to be able to be a good leader.
  • 23:04 Some are situational based, like when the situation is like this you should, should act like that; and all of the things have a massive impact on how the team works;  how the relationship between the team member or the member of a group work, and in particular, they are also influencing the way the organizational design develops.
  • 23:22 So if I am a very demanding leader or a very directive leader, what will happen is that people will try to comply to my demand and my direction. They would see no need to actually collaborate with one another because they need to please me, so they need to comply with my wishes. As a result, what will happen is that there will be one-on-one communication line between the leader and the employees if you want, or the team member, they would see no need to collaborate with one another because every one of them will get individual goals.
  • 23:53 So if I have my own goals and you need help, I'm going to help you collegially very likely if I'm done with my thing, otherwise my thing gets priority because otherwise I'm disappointing my leader. And that results in a hierarchical structure, automatically. So, hierarchy means that there is no horizontal communication or formal horizontal communication.  There is coffee machine, there is corridor rumour, there is grapevine, but those communications are not really helping to do the work. So on a team level, what we've been working with is by studying many, many teams and situation and using the organic agility model, which is basically based on three-dimension.
  • 24:30 We have behavioural awareness. So you start becoming aware of the way I act with people is influencing the way they communicate and create relationship with one another.
  • 24:40 There is a cultural dimension. Which is about, this is the texture of the context in which I'm acting as a leader who has a precondition and preconception and expectation about my behaviour, which are characteristic of that specific culture.
  • 24:55 And then there is a situational dimension. So in a specific situation, what is the more appropriate behaviour, which will have the least cultural impact that I can use at any moment in time to drive my team in a coherent way, in a direction, I want them to move in.  Let's say more than drive is stimulate, because we said before, we can't actually design culture, but our behaviours influence significantly the people form relationship.
  • 25:21 So based on the theory and a lot of experimentation we have been running, we create an archetype model, which basically are extreme if you want convergence of behaviour with culture and organization design, which can be used very simply. So, there is an exercise we do all the time on a team level.
  • 25:40 We basically put the archetype on the table. We ask every member of the team to think about a story of success and a story of failure  that they experienced recently in their team and many people immediately ask the question, how do we define success and how do we define failure and immediately here is where sense-making puts people a bit out of their comfort zone.
  • 26:01 Because the whole point is you shouldn't define that, it should emerge. Out of all you guys, all of you as a different people tell us your story of success story or your story of failure because the meaning of success is part of the culture, is one of the culture characteristics. So, what do you mean when you say we've been successful?
  • 26:19 How do you describe that? And as you know, as human being, we are very good at narrative. We love stories. We are loving stories because stories are bound with emotions. They activate our brain, but also our heart. And they create that relationship of trust between individuals because we are able to share those emotions through experiences.
  • 26:39 So on the other side, all company grew with an engineering metaphor. And so we are kind of drawn to defining and structuring, probably over defining and structuring and trying to define what success is, and failure is, it doesn't help because people, as you know, will still interpret whatever is written on a piece of paper in different ways.
  • 26:57 So what we do is a narrative based approach. Tell us your story of success, why you consider that success and everybody listening to those stories. And then we ask people to pin those stories to the archetype that better represents the context at the moment in which that story happened. And then you can analyse the pattern and see, Oh, wait a minute, are all the story of success toward the specific pattern and are all the story of failure towards another pattern?
  • 27:24 Or they are all mixed up with one another. So what does it tell you if you're making sense of the situation? Right? And so there's many things you can do really quickly and understand.
  • 27:33 First of all, one of the biggest issues teams have with their leader is that the expectation on the leader roles and the expectation on the team roles are never aligned.
  • 27:43 Most of the time, let me say, because they are optimist or they're wishful thinkers, they always think their team stands a higher level of maturity. then when they actually are, and this creates misinterpretation, if you want on, direction, but also expectation are not met. So doing this exercise immediately allows the leader and the team to understand that, wait a minute, why you consider this a story of failure? For me was a positive one.
  • 28:08 So what is it that you were expecting that didn’t happen? So you can have that conversation based on narrative and there is no right or wrong answer. It's about discovering and creating awareness. So once all of this happens, then we can all agree, okay, how can we do to reduce this story of failure if the majority of the story of success are on another archetype, what are they behaviours that archetype describes that you would expect from me as the leader as opposed to what are the behaviours that I as a leader would expect from you as a team? What do we need to do in order to do more of that so that we don't have any more of the story of failure?
  • 28:43 And that conversation is creating both alignment and is emerging based on team needs and current situation, which is what we call the potential capabilities of the present. How can we use those to drive towards a better future? So you see, it's a very evolutionary approach and always start from where you are.
  • 29:02 And like complexity thinking suggest is about being able to describe as good as you can, your capability at this moment in time and understand how you can leverage the  thing you are already doing good, the story of success, to evolve toward a better state. And this can be done continuously. You can do that every two months or every three months with your team.
  • 29:22 It's an unbiased conversation because it's supported by narrative. So either the story happened or didn't, and when you are in a team, everybody can laugh at that story or say, Oh my God, that was a disaster. And so you also create bonding and you are creating a higher level of coherence in term of team culture.
  • 29:40 So if there is coherence on a team culture, the advantages, no matter what happens, even unexpected, there is a high likelihood that every team member will react in a similar way. But this doesn't mean the same way because that is too much. So the same way is fragile the same way is alignment and the risk is you will reduce the chances of success because you want to explore multiple parallel options with something unexpected. 
  • 30:06 There is no expertise of previous case in the past, which can drive you to choose the right thing in that moment in time. What you rather want is innovation, which means everybody has a good idea when, how to tackle the problem. Just go ahead and try and let's keep on sharing her a little. Exactly. So the difference between alignment and coherence is alignment, is we want to go there on this path and we should all align to that path.
  • 30:31 As opposed to we want to be coherent and which is, that's the direction where we want to move. Every one of you should choose their own path to get there. So in this way, you are increasing resilience because you have multiple options you can explore at the same time.
  • 30:44 So the likelihood that one of those eventually will work is  higher, and because of the continued communication, which is what in  organic agility is called an interconnected culture, what will happen is that people through narrative will exchange what works and doesn't work, and there will be an emergent good approach. Towards which the old team will tend to converge because it's the one who brings better result, but you can't predefine it before end.
  • 31:08 Shane: This is what Dave calls the multiple safe to fail experiments.
  • 31:11 Andrea: Exactly. So you can drive that through multiple safe to fail experiments which can even be naive, small probes. It doesn't have to be a massive investment or whatever, but what is hard for leadership today or for the organization is to accept that we start moving in a direction because we believe is the right direction, but we are not knowing beforehand where we will end up.
  • 31:34 And that is what creates this sense of uncertainty. But in the volatility of the market we have today, it's a much better approach to describe an organization and design it around a coherent culture and maybe use organizational design principles, which are even also included in organic agility, a bit as a scaffolding to create that safe to fail environment.
  • 31:56 So, okay, we have an existing situation. How can we start evolving toward the direction that we agree is the best one at this moment in time? And how can we change direction rapidly? So you are starting looking at principle if you want as a safe to fail guard as a scaffolding so you can't fall, basically, you are still in there, is unstable, but is coherent at any moment in time.
  • 32:19 How can we use those to be able to change direction rapidly and you learn very quickly if you get away from structure, from processes, from role description and artefact from fixing these things because these things become impediments whenever something unexpected happen.
  • 32:34 Shane: Andrea, really interesting stuff.  If people want to delve further and explore where will they find more information about it and if they want to carry on the conversation with you, where do they get hold of you.
  • 32:46 Andrea: 32:46 Okay. So there's a couple of option for that. There is a website which is called organic-agility.com and on the website there's a lot of information.
  • 32:54 One way to get familiar with it:  we started this year and we are running organic agility conferences. We did one in Vancouver in May. Was very successful at UBC. We are planning to run one here in October in US, probably in the Denver area. We have a calendar of courses published on our website because the interesting thing about organic agility is not an Agile 42 thing is not a Cognitive Edge thing is not the Geoff Watts thing.
  • 33:22 We are looking for consultants for partners who are willing to join and explore this completely novel way if you want, of helping organizations to become more resilient. And there is a list of public classes, also foundation classes where you can really experience in a single day how this all, if you want, package works and even leave through examples and activities how can this approach affect your organization itself? I think that's the best way of getting closer to it. And of course, Twitter and those and everything and just right on Twitter. Me and a lot of other consultants are normally answering very, very quickly.
  • 33:58 Shane: Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.
  • 34:02 Andrea: Thank you for letting me.

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