Pattern for Agile Organizations

Read this text to see the idea of sociocracy as a form of organizational design. This is a way for organizations to transcend the traditional approach to organizational change. While the model is primarily applied to software organizations, it can be used by other organizations that want to be sure that information flows to and from the appropriate parties and ensure that experts can participate in the decisions that affect them. The text considers governance, teams, and collaboration internally and externally. The graphics make the complexity of the linkages easy to understand as the author presents consent decision-making, double linking, and governance in iterations.

Key Concepts for Making Sense of Organizations

Drivers

A driver is a person’s or a group’s motive for responding to a specific situation.

Drivers:

  • can be used to derive goals, objectives, aims, mission, vision, purpose
  • can change over time

Drivers, Value and Waste

Value is the importance, worth or usefulness of something in relation to a driver.

Waste is anything unnecessary for - or standing in the way of - a (more) effective response to a driver.

By adopting the concept of value and waste, many practices and ideas from lean production and lean software development can be utilized by organizations pulling in S3 patterns:

  • value stream mapping
  • various strategies for eliminating waste
  • the Kanban Method