Agile and Lean Leadership

31.01.2012 - 01.02.2012

Program

We approach Agile and Lean by studying typical dysfunctions in current organizations, for example overspecialization and coordination chaos:

Overspecialization is a management pattern. A Configuration Engineer is set to manage product configuration problems; a Quality Manager ensures that products are defect-free; an Experience Manager is accountable for the customer experience, and so on. The paradox is that these workers cannot actually do anything on their own in their responsibility area – i.e. the Quality Manager can find but not fix defects – and just by existing they give everyone else a good reason to disregard the problems.

An organization that tries to solve its everyday problems by overspecialization ends up in coordination chaos. Initially project managers are able to coordinate the work, but eventually there will be too many specialized resources and parallel projects and the project managers become overloaded and are blamed for the dysfunctions. Managers feel helpless and frustrated and are pressed to make impulsive and rash decisions. Productivity declines and profits fade.

Coordination chaos leads to the following common symptoms:

Lack of visibility
Lack of dialogue and trust
Lack of learning and competence development
Lack of well-being

How can we do things differently? We approach the Lean and Agile alternative under the following themes:

Creating change at the individual, group and organizational level
Lean product development: pull, flow and cadence, queues, work in progress, waste and value in knowledge creation
Changing the organization by building productive teamwork
Coordination and decision-making
Lean startup: fast feedback, customer collaboration