Create the environment for people to thrive

Description

Leaders critically consider and continually improve how the organisation's environment enables its people to sustainably generate value for customers and stakeholders. In an Agile organisation, value generation is serviced by self-managing teams, allowing leaders to switch their focus from directing people's work to catalysing the continued evolution and improvement of the organisation.

In this context, "Environment" includes:

• Psychological Safety
• Purpose - strategy, objectives, goals, etc.
• Organisation, Product and Team structures
• Language, values and behaviours
• Performance management
• Policies, processes and procedures
• Facilities, tools, locations, physical and online environments

Rationale

Organisations evolve organically over time, along with occasional reorganisations (more revolution than evolution) to reorient themselves to better cope with changing markets, capabilities, competitive threats, mergers and acquisitions, and many other factors. The course of change is often meandering, reactive, and optimised on a short-term horizon with a local perspective rather than a holistic system view. The resulting organisational environment will be one with plenty of Accidental Complexity and not what you would design if you started from a clean sheet.

Leaders have a duty to unleash the human capital in their organisations so that they can focus on value creation rather than fighting against the environment that is supposed to support them.

Improving the environment should be an inclusive approach, engaging those people impacted and in possession of valuable data and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the current context. However, changing the environment starts with leaders, as they have an asymmetric impact on the environment. For example, leaders' language can create empowerment and psychological safety to engage experience and brainpower, or it can quickly close it down and have passive people waiting to be told what to do.

Related Principles

• Evolutionary over revolutionary change
• Maximise engagement
• Organise around value streams
• Minimise unnecessary complexity
• Leadership supports rather than drives the work
• Optimise the system of work for the majority of cases rather than the exceptions
• Foster a high trust environment
• Catalyst for change
• Involve those affected by change
• Create a Learning Organisation
• Own your own approach
• Provide an impediment removal service
• Are lean practitioners