What do guerillas and agile practitioners have in common? They are there to stay in the game for an indefinite time, to create more freedom and to take ownership for their own life. With this idea in mind, I co-facilitated two workshops yesterday together with Han Slob, at the #SmarterTogether gathering of Eneco, VGZ, and ABN-AMRO in Amsterdam.
The question was: ‘Why is transforming your organizations towards a self-organizing Agile organization so tough and what can you learn from guerilla tactics to make progress bit by bit?’
In a 45 minutes workshop, we explored this question and the participants came up with over 30 ideas. This is what we did.
The agenda
Some theory
After a short welcome, we started with some theory about the evolutionary phases of organizations according to Frederic Laloux and his great book ‘Reinventing Organizations’. Most of us work in ‘orange’ organizations with top-down management structures, which makes it challenging to change. What can we learn from the 4 basic tactics of guerillas?
The guerilla tactics
Tactics:
1. Create a local force majeure
['wherever you can do things your (agile) way, do it!']
2. Win the support of the population
['use the support of agile minded colleagues']
3. Armed propaganda
['show that agile works and use those examples to spread the word']
4. Use the ammunition of the enemy
[' actively seek topics outside of your current activities to take up and transform to an agile approach']
Several Liberating structures
After this theory in 10 minutes, the participants of the workshop formulated a challenge in their own work environment. With a 1-2-4, groups of 4 came up with one great challenge to explore more in-depth.
The groups of 4 explored this situation, using the Wise Crowds format from the Liberating Structures. They got good advice and shared them with the other groups.
After that, every participant took 2 minutes to recall what they had learned in this workshop and what tactic they could use in their organization to make a little step towards more agility. (We used 15% solutions for that). After discussing this in pairs, the participant put their idea on an A4 paper and put it on the wall. The result of all these ideas can be seen in this picture.
The result
Use this format or more info
If you like the set-up of this workshop, feel free to use it. If you have any questions or remarks, feel free to let me know.
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