Blog /

Simplify Organizations by Creating Teamwork

Teamwork Wisdom Leadership

15.1.2022 — Our talk at LeSS conference in Prague explains the essential perspectives on building teamwork, and how teamwork helps to reduce bureaucracy. 

Simplify Organizations by Creating Teamwork
Author
Ari Tikka
Ari TikkaFounding Partner

We had the pleasure to join the in-person LeSS conference in Prague in September 2021. Our topic was appreciated by the audience. The talk started 15 minutes late and went overtime, but no one left for lunch before the end.

LeSS is designed to enable teamwork for product development.

Please download the slides

The table of content for your convenience. Please click the time to jump to the point in the video.:

  • 0:00 Introduction. Teamwork in 30 seconds. It happens naturally, and there is much more potential.
  • 5:29 The control mechanisms in organizations: Market, bureaucratic, and clan system. The dominant mechanisms at different organizational layers, and how teamwork can help. Contrast with the control mechanisms in Scrum.
  • 10:56 Blackstone's advice for having team goals at the top management team.
  • 12:51 The preconditions and selected tips for teamwork by J Richard Hackman.
  • 15:24 How to create the enabling organizational conditions.
  • 18:18 Human interaction in teams: Wise feedback, coaching dialogue, and Nonviolent Communication.
  • 27:45 Group dynamics and team life-cycle (Tuckman's *orming model corrected).
  • 37:57 Examples of process coaching.
  • 40:55 Extending Teamwork skills to other organizational units: communities, projects, even remote teams.
  • 42:34 Case Cowboy coaches. The essentials for launching and leading the internal coaching community (or change community). How skipping the learning destroys the community.
  • 47:26 Checklist for launching a team.
  • 48:04 Craig Larman's comment and a word about training programs.

Ari Tikka
Founding Partner

Before finding Agile, Ari built software for embedded distributed fault tolerant software for seven years. For the next decade he worked as an organizational therapist with cultural change, teamwork and leadership. Since 2006 he has contributed to LeSS-flavoured Agile transformations including mechanical engineering, market automation, and embedded system development. For the last couple of years Ari had international coaching assignments ranging from teams to board.

All posts →