Ever feel like your great ideas for improving work get stuck in quicksand? You’re not alone.
In our workshops, we often invite participants to complete this prompt: “We’re going to struggle to apply this here because we…” Every group can come up with at least a dozen potential organizational roadblocks.
Fortunately, those roadblocks aren’t insurmountable. Here’s a practical 4-step thinking process we walk our clients through to find breakthrough solutions to their biggest impediments…
The 4-Step Roadblock Buster
- Understand the Current State
- What’s really happening? (No judgments, just facts)
- How did we get here? (Again, as objective as possible. “Our past leaders were stupid,” probably isn’t useful or accurate.)
- Who’s benefiting from the status quo?
- What were the original good intentions?
- Characterize the Challenge
- Where’s the conflict between “what is” and “what could be”?
- What’s the core tension we’re dealing with?
- Brainstorm Possibilities
- How can we get what we want without losing the good stuff?
- What wild ideas just might work?
- Craft an Experiment
- What’s our hypothesis?
- How will we test it?
- What will we observe and measure?
- What results would validate our hypothesis?
- What would invalidate it?
- What side effects should we watch for and/or take steps to mitigate?
Let’s see this thinking process in action with a scenario we often encounter…
Imagine a team eager to adopt Scrum, but they’re hitting a wall. “We can’t complete anything meaningful in a sprint because we depend on skills outside our team, and those folks have their own priorities.”
Sound familiar? Let’s break it down:
- Current State:
- Team structure based on functional specialties and system components
- Dependencies on external teams for critical skills
- Multiple priorities competing for attention
- Teams are frustrated waiting on dependencies
- Original intent: Optimize for efficiency within specialties and build useful shared components
- Benefit: Deep expertise in specific areas
- Challenge:
- Tension between specialized skills and end-to-end delivery
- Conflicting priorities across teams
- Long cycle times as teams wait on dependencies (compounded by long cycle times for rework that has to go through the dependencies again)
- Desire for faster, more predictable delivery clashing with current structure
- Possibilities:
- Create a fully cross-functional team
- Implement a priority-based staffing model
- Use a Kanban system to visualize work across teams
- Adopt a “swarming” approach for high-priority items
- Implement regular cross-team planning sessions
- Experiment:
- Hypothesis: We believe a fully cross-functional team focused on the highest-priority initiative will dramatically reduce cycle time for valuable features and will be more engaged in their work
- Test: Form a pilot team with all necessary skills to work on the top initiative for 2 months
- We’re right if:
- The average cycle time for a feature drops from 25 days to 5 days
- Most pilot team members would recommend this kind of team structure for others
- We’re wrong if:
- No significant reduction in cycle time
- Most pilot team members would not recommend this kind of team structure for others
- Side-effects to watch:
- What are the effects on others teams and initiatives?
Remember, the goal isn’t to completely overhaul everything overnight. It’s about making small, intentional changes that can lead to big improvements over time.
So, the next time you hear (or think) “We can’t because…”, try reframing it as “How might we…?” You might be surprised at the solutions you uncover.
To help you find breakthrough solutions on impediments you face, we’ve created a Probe Design Cheat Sheet.
Download the Probe Design Cheat Sheet
What organizational roadblocks are you facing? Give this approach a try and let us know how it goes. We’d love to hear about your experiments – or help you brainstorm if you’re stuck!
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