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Quite as while ago I described
the idea of an Adaptive
Cell, shown in the image below:
Since then, I have revisited and rethought the idea in light of experience, and this post describes this new version of the Adaptive Cell.
Flexibility or scale comes largely from the distribution of decision making to the appropriate location within the organisation
To become increasingly adaptive, each part of the organisation needs to become increasingly self-contained and self-managed; each becomes more like a micro-organisation
The focus needs to be on what we are trying to achieve, outcomes, rather than activity to get them.
The fundamental idea is that if an organisational element is to be closer to a micro-organisation then it needs to have appropriate capabilities that cover what is needed for the element to be self-contained:
This can be thought of as a ‘stem cell’ - a cell that can be made into any other type of possible cell. The Cell can be the building block of an Adaptive organisation. While this not the only way to build a level of adaptiveness into an organisation, this concept is the way I currently think of to get to higher levels of adaptiveness.
The identified Aspects (Intent, Strategy etc.) owns decisions about their part of the overall challenge - from ‘what is the purpose of this Cell?’, to ‘how do we deliver our products and/or services?’.
In a little more detail, the Aspects are:
The Cell is a repeating pattern that builds organisations which are fractal in nature - wherever you are in the organisation, you will be in a Cell.
Cells are agnostic to the type and structure of the organisation - it is how they are organised and individually realised that determines the adaptiveness of the organisation as a whole. Remember that an organisation doesn’t have to be ‘fully adaptive’ (whatever that means), the level of adaptiveness needs to be a conscious decision about how adaptable the organisation needs to be to deliver its overall mission, and where to balance flexibility with efficiency.
The more a Cell can be a micro-organisation and have fewer hard dependencies on other Cells, then the easier it is for it to:
The more Cells, or collection of Cells, are independent then the faster and safer they can change, and therefore the more adaptive they can be.
It is important to note that the Cells in an organisation can be applying different delivery frameworks; some may be Agile, some may be waterfall, some may be some form of hybrid. As long as coordination and reporting can be aligned between dependent Cells it doesn’t matter how they operate internally. In this way an organisation can mix R&D innovation, Agile delivery and mass manufacturing in a common pattern.
All the Aspects operate in parallel, but the focus of the core Aspects is across different time horizons and levels of detail.
Intent sets the stage for the Cell; what is it we want to be or need to do. Strategy then adds more detail by articulating the Cell’s approach to delivering on its intent. Product the states what the Cell will produce to deliver the strategy. Delivery then produces the identified products. Each Aspect is aligned along a common thread, the same goal. But what does an Aspect do once it has done its ‘thing’? An Aspect is never ‘done’ as each is continually monitoring their wider environment to detect trends, technology, competitors etc. to feed into their Cell to aid decision making.
Cell roles sit within the Aspects. Each aspect has at least one role – the Aspect Lead.
That role coheres the delivery of the aspect’s responsibilities and is the point of contact for that aspect.
Roles can be full or part time.
An individual can hold multiple roles (up to their capacity)
One of these roles may be nominated as the Cell Lead if needed. This role would represent the Cell externally and have the deciding vote on decisions.
Why is this optional and variable? If you are in a hierarchical organisation then defined leaders make sense, but in smaller, flatter organisations group decisions may be better.
Who leads may be context dependent — product lifecycle stage, problem at hand or organisational ‘level’.
There is no expectation on the number of individuals who work in a Cell, this is not Agile with teams of 7+/-2. If a Cell represents a mass manufacturing capability then it may have tens, or hundreds, of people within it (although sub-cells might be useful). The important thing is that the numbers are appropriate to the type of work.
The minimum number of possible individuals in a Cell is one:
On of the factors that determines the adaptiveness of an organisation, or part there of, is how close the the consumer of decisions those decisions are made. What decisions are made where becomes a critical design choice.
In more centralised organisation, the decisions are mostly made centrally.
Skills are needed in the other parts of the organisation to understand and interpret locally, but the core decisions are taken centrally.
In this situation more decision making capacity is needed closer to the centre of the organisation.
To become more de-centralised more capacity is based closer to where the decisions are needed.
The skills are still needed centrally to own the overall direction, but not at the capacity of a centralised organisation.
In this situation, decision-making capacity is needed closer to the edges of the organisation.
The ability of an organisation to alter itself as its strategy changes is the fundamental concept of Adaptive organisations. The Cell concept can help achieve this and free organisations from having to be one form or another, or even multi-modal; they can be all of these, and the many more possible forms in between as needed by the strategy.
Other advantages are:
Consistent structural element and vocabulary.
Easier for individuals to move between parts of the organisation.
Delivery approach agnostic.
Makes organisations make conscious decisions about their form.
Organisations can be as individual as they need to be.
