How to Apply ELSE

The Perspectives discuss the background thinking behind the Principles. The Change Perspective includes a detailed discussion of the process for applying the ELSE Scaling Principles. In summary, the list below outlines the major activities and suggested order:

1. Engage people and create the safety to surface issues and try experiments
2. Collaboratively map the current context
3. Use the ELSE Scaling Principles to analyse the context for gaps
4. Identify improvement options and prioritise
5. Shape, run and support experiments
6. Review, adapt and learn from the experiments
7. Emerge practice
8. Broaden and evolve
9. Repeat

ELSE proposes that change is an emergent and evolutionary approach. As such, at the core, it's about designing experiments that drive the change in a useful direction. But... what is this direction? Agility is about value delivery and the capability of "turning on a dime for a dime", i.e. optimising for adaptability in product development. One characteristic of many companies is to have a huge Accidental Complexity in the way they have organised their product development. As such, how products and value streams are set up is a key element to inform change. We noticed that often the work on Teams, Product Ownership and Leadership to create an agile ecosystem is severely limited by how the value stream is structured.

Streamlining the value stream usually involves also changing organisational structures, thus enabling a more effective work on the whole organisation.

To understand the best way to do it, The Product Perspective as well as the Defining Products Principles provide the basic knowledge to inform your experiments.

As the definition of Product evolves, so it open more opportunities to evolve Team structures, Product Ownership and the overall System of Work, including how Leadership operates. The Teams' Perspective and The Coaching Perspective and all the Principles will help in the design of experiments that shape the organisational environment.

To help you in the implementation of these experiments, The Change Perspective describes how to create the needed emergent evolutionary culture in your organisation based on the ELSE actionable principles, which can be summarised as follows:

1. Engage people and create the safety to surface issues and try experiments
2. Collaboratively map the current context
3. Use the ELSE Scaling Principles to analyse the context for gaps
4. Identify improvement options and prioritise
5. Shape, run and support experiments
6. Review, adapt and learn from the experiments
7. Emerge practice
8. Broaden and evolve
9. Repeat

The catalyst of this work is, of course, Leadership! In order to support this work, they need to go themselves through a change process that involves learning to work as an end-to-end leadership team, rather than focusing their individual work on silos.