This document discusses improving communication and collaboration in organizations. It recommends changing collaboration patterns to reduce multitasking and increase cooperation. It suggests helping alter team habits such as improving information flow through pairing and reducing queues. It also stresses the importance of working on visibility patterns by providing public information and recognizing social interactions to improve recognition and prediction. The overall goal is to improve how people communicate, make things more visible, and influence behavioral patterns in the organization.

1. How to improve the communication flow
Change the collaboration patterns
Help alter the team habits
The organisation as you have never seen it before
Work on the visibility patterns
Erich Bühler
Agile Transformation Coach
+34 609369263
erichbuhler@Agilib.org
Today: Successful Social Designs for Agile & digital
I.T. Companies
V1.0

2. Organization

3. What is the Social Model?
●How people communicate inside the company
●How things are made visible
●Behavioural patterns (i.e. how we act under pressure, what is right or wrong)
Sense of Urgency
●End of a cycle
●“bad” economic news/pressure
●Continuous delivery
●Fixed date, etc.
How do you measure it?
●Enterprise Social Density
●Enterprise Social Visibility
●Entrprise Blocking Collaboration
●Etc.
What impacts the SM?
●Cultural beliefs
●Accepted way of work (i.e. Methodologies
●Number of people, Scaling
●Fluctuation between economic costs
& benefits
The organization as you have never seen it before

4. What is the company’s mindset?
●Very high level foundation of abstract ideas & beliefs
●Learnt, inherited or evolutive
What impacts the MS
●Scaling
●Merges
●Strategic partners
●Etc.
How do you measure it?
●Alignment with Lean, Agile principles or any other mindset.
The organization as you have never seen it before

5. What is the formal organisation?
●Structures
●Control artifacts
●Shapes information to give sense
to the company
What impacts the FO
●Market pressure
●Economic factors
●Etc.
How do you measure it?
●Company’s compliance reports
●Alignment standard reports
●Etc.
The organization as you have never seen it before

6. What is the value creation layer?
●Where the value creation resides
●Structures that create value
●Are customer/results
oriented
How do you measure it?
●Compliance with the chosen framework
●Compliance with desired practices, etc
What impacts the vcl
●Framework compliance
●How queues & batches
are treated
●How you see value
●Scaling
4 layer organizational structure map
(c) Erich Buhler 2015
The organization as you have never seen it before

7. What adaptive organisations do
Irradiate information quickly
●High bandwidth
●With lower information deformation
●Uses variability in favour
Reduce queues/batches
●Accelerate innovation
●Reduce transaction and transportation cost
●Scale without pain

8. ●Constant flow of learning
●Reduce complexity & structures
●Easier to Scale
●Lower cost per transaction
●Truncate wrong paths
●Increase adaptation
Improve the communication flow
Enterprise Social Density
flow of relevant, honest, informal
and effective information/knowledge
between people in an organisation and
environment where they feel safe.
Improve the communication flow
Benefits

9. Improve the communication flow
c

10. Improve the communication flow
●Optimising bandwith using
entropy information theory
A lot of information in the
system but low probability
1/6
2 options (less uncertainty)
–highest chance (high
probability), less uncertainty,
less information in the system
Improve the communication flow
Find the maximum ESD
without congestion Use the Expected Monetary Value (EM

11. Improve the communication flow
We will be moving offices to a new cool
place
Stay in the current offices & allow people
to work from home
Stay where we are, some minor changes
Cost ProbabilityReturn of
Investment
60.000
150.000
10.000
1.000.000
300.000
200.000
50%
90%
100%
(1.000.000 x 0.5) = 500.000 – 150.000 = 350.000 (EMV)
(300.000 x 0.9) = 270.000 – 60.000 = 210.000 (EMV)
(200.000 x 1) = 200.000 – 10.000 = 190.000 (EMV)
Improve the communication flow
What to communicate?
We rather communicat
this two

12. Change the collaboration patterns
Collaborating with another person using
a high level of multitasking
Cooperating with departments which
do not communicate with each other or
do so by exchanging documents
Cooperating intensely to create reports
that provide no value to the customer
(vanity reports)
Performing collaborative tasks when you
are at over 90% of your personal capacity
Actively collaborating to increase
bureaucracy or local optimizations
Change the collaboration patterns
Enterprise Blocking Collaboration

13. Change the collaboration patterns

14. Modify the team habits
Improve information flow
●Pair is the new unit
●T-shape absorbs variability
●Reduce queues & transaction
cost in the medium term
●Minimise blockades
What impacts the pairing?
●Structure to incentive
●Not the right people
●Hiring process
●Cognitive Dissonance
24/7 pairing for responsible
knowledge
Help alter the team habits
Cognitive dissonance: mental stress/discomfort experienced
by an individual who holds two or more contradictory
beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, performs an
action that is contradictory with some of them, or is
confronted by new information that conflicts with
existing beliefs, ideas, or values

15. Cost vs. benefit
Devs Devs/ POs
4 months 8+ months
Devs UI UX
1+ year
Devs Devs + other roles
Value (pairing)
Effort
Waste
Value (no pairing)
Help alter the team habits

16. Work on the visibility patterns
Work on the visibility patterns
“Visibility is not about placing physical boards
but giving a lasting and broad organisational
visibility”
What is the Enterprise Social Visibility?
●Public information radiators
●Social interactions
●Viewing actions and movements for
recognition and prediction
●Recognition of facial expressions

17. Work on the visibility patterns

18. How to improve the communication flow
Change the collaboration patterns
Help alter the team habits
The organisation as you have never seen it before
Work on the visibility patterns
Erich Bühler
Agile Transformation Coach
+34. 609369263
erichbuhler@Agilib.org
This is what you learnt today:
Download the e-book about social models
agilib.org/2015/11/05/free-booklet-about-successful-social-
designs-for-agile-and-digital-it-organisations/