Get the work done, now and in the future

Skilful design aligned with Strategy

Our 25-year experience of Agile movement crystallizes to
1) Competent and empowered front-line teams
2) Iterative work with fast feedback from reality.

Lean is optimizing the system using flow and continuous learning.

Surprisingly few organizations reach these and the expected benefits.

Why? The fragmented or superficial organizational design leads to bureaucracy instead.

Learn to see what works for you, using our library of thinking tools and organizational patterns. Choose the best patterns and avoid expensive pitfalls.

Enguire about our training, coaching, and workshops.

Software Product Development

LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) aims to simplify the product development organization, even radically.

For organizational units with seven or fewer teams, it provides an elegant process, which optimizes teamwork, learning, and business value creation. This is the starting point for adaptive improvement.

The larger organization requires a unique analysis and solution. For those, LeSS provides several hundred reality-tested organizational design patterns with a recommendation to try or avoid.

Inquire about Certified LeSS Practitioner training

Examples of our thinking

These topics are often referenced and not easy to find elsewhere.

Coordination Chaos

Every organization declines to Coordination Chaos unless the leaders know what to do. Without wise use of power, the organization will take the broad path of short-term optimization.

Management thinkers have given their warning. Gary Hamel , Allen Ward, Konosuke Matsushita, Clausewitz and von Moltke, Joseph Tainter, and Chris Argyris all explain the same pattern from different perspectives.

The death of NOKIA Mobile Phones

Nokia Mobile Phones fell from 40 BN revenue and 9 BN profit to zero in five years. A warning story for fast-growing companies.

A careful study by INSEAD and Aalto University claims that the root cause was management by fear. A concrete business reason was the reluctance to challenge the cash cow product internally.

Our intimate experience suggests that the missing competence to lead software product development led to deep Coordination Chaos. It reduced productivity and intensified both abovementioned patterns, causing the final failure to produce a working product.

The cultural story of NOKIA Mobile Phones.

Dreaming - Thinking -Doing

Dreaming-thinking-doing is the fundamental development process, giving the helicopter view and context for designing the details. It

Explains fetching coffee, building my new house, or creating a new car
Provides a base for mapping Agile and product design practices
Provides a collaboration-friendly thinking compared to "requirement management"
Is easy to draw and understand
Sticks fast in the vocabulary

Elaboration and interview video

Bureaucracy versus Teamwork

William G. Ouchi identified three control mechanisms in organizations:
1) Market system, make a deal, choosing the best option;
2) Bureaucratic system, an organizational machine; and
3) Clan system, in practice Teamwork.

Bureaucracy is like a machine that efficiently produces the same results in stable conditions.

For novel, ambiguous, and interdependent work, only Clan control (Teamwork) succeeds. This concerns service, product development, organizational change, and of course top management's challenges.

So Teamwork is the only antidote for bureaucracy. Unfortunately in case of failure, organizations usually increase bureaucracy.

Path from Bureaucracy to Teamwork