•••  Enabling the Agile Enterprise

Today, I am looking at the Learning Organization model Peter Senge presents in “The Fifth Discipline”. This model is interesting because there are strong corollaries between the way effective Agile teams form and the Learning Organization. The book is called the Fifth Discipline because it describes five disciplines that build on each other: Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision, Team Learning, and the Fifth Discipline is Systems Thinking.  I am going to briefly describe each discipline and how they apply to the Agile Enterprise.

Personal Mastery

Senge says Personal Mastery “goes beyond competence and skills…it means approaching one’s life as a creative work, living life from a creative as opposed to a reactive viewpoint.” In Agile, this means being very good at what you do. If you code, you should aspire to be a great coder – but not just a coder. Great Agile teams depend on Generalizing Specialists.  This means that you have one or more specialties, you have general knowledge of product development, you have general knowledge of your  business domain, and you actively aspire to improve your specialization while broadening you general knowledge.

Personal Mastery doesn’t just apply to development. It applies to all aspects of the business. Seeking personal mastery improves the performance of the team in two ways. First, each individual is competent to perform their job. Second, they are better able to understand and meet the needs of the people they work with.

Mental Models

Mental Models are a way to describe a person’s intuitive perception of the world around them.  We make decisions in order to achieve some result from the options we perceive based on our Mental Models. Learning occurs when we observe the result of our decision in the real world. If we don’t get the result we want, we will try something different. In Agile we call this Inspect and Adapt. Because you can represent this as a cycle it is also known as single loop learning.

One of the key challenges to successful adoption of Agile is changing Mental Models. This is because many Agile principles aren’t intuitive or are counter to traditional management approaches. Some of these initially counter-intuitive principles include:

• Starting more stuff faster means you will finish more stuff later.
• Striving for perfect definition up front is going to slow down delivery.
• Don’t build everything that might ever be needed right now – only build what you will need today.
• More testing speeds you up.

Changing Mental Models creates new possibilities and allows us to make better decisions. We allow the results to influence our Mental Model and not just the next decision. When learning influences our Mental Model we call this Double Loop Learning. Personal Mastery can bring in outside influences and open our eyes to improvements in our Mental Models.

Shared Vision

Shared vision describes the common understanding the team has of where they would like to be and how they would like to interact in getting there. This shared vision exists whether the team makes it explicit or not. It can just be assumed from the larger organization or it can be intentionally managed by the team.  Intentionally developing a shared vision, or shared Mental Models, about how to work together effectively and what needs to be delivered to the customer is a powerful approach to improving team performance.

In Agile, many of the practices support creating an effective shared vision. The product vision, release schedule, and backlog create a shared understanding of where the team is going.  Frequent delivery, continuous integration, daily sprints, focus on quality, co-location, and constant customer interaction all support a shared vision of how to deliver.

Team Learning

Team Learning is the next step after Shared Vision. In Team Learning, the team works together to improve their ability to achieve the Shared Vision. Individual Skills may have to be developed. Mental Models regarding how teams perform may have to be changed. The Shared Vision may be updated as the team acts and responds to feedback based on their efforts.

Agile has a number of feedback tools and learning opportunities built in. Burn-down charts, Swarming, Transparency, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives represent things Agile teams use to learn how to improve their collective abilities. In Agile we call Team Learning self-organization.

Systems Thinking

Systems Thinking is a framework for understanding that the component parts of a system can be better understood in context with each other, rather than in isolation. A core concept of systems is interdependence, the concept that the actions of any component have the potential to impact other components.

In Agile, the concept of interdependence is used to overcome the linear nature of Waterfall and over-specialization.  Rather than isolate requirements, design, development, and test into separate functional teams, Agile recognizes the interdependence and brings all the skills and competencies necessary to deliver product onto a single team.

Systems Thinking and the Agile Enterprise

Systems Thinking and the Agile Enterprise is very interesting. First, because it gives a model to follow for developing individuals and then teams into a functioning Learning Organization. Unlike software development models, Learning Organization efforts are written by people specializing in change management. So there is a substantial body of knowledge about creating this type of change up to the Enterprise level.

Secondly, development is just one component of the larger Enterprise system. Getting better at software development doesn’t always result in an improved delivery of value to the customer. There is a lot to learn through applying Systems Thinking as a problem solving tool in establishing the Agile Enterprise.

Tags: Big Agile, Systems Thinking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 3:24 am and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.