Slide deck from my talk at Lean Kanban Central Europe 2015 in Munich. The talk covered sense making, complexity, deep democracy, the CDE model, and how to connect these to understand what is happening in your organization. Some of the analysis in this talk has a particular focus on using these approaches to understand strategy and organisation impediments.

1. Managing complexity for organization effectiveness
Making Sense of Organization Impediments
Ken Power
Principal Engineer, Cisco Systems
Monday November 16, 2015
@ken_power

2. 2© 2015 Ken Power
Let’s look at some examples

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• How do you feel?
• What does it mean to you?
• What does it mean for what you are
working on?
• How would you respond?
For each example:

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My manager did not show up
for our 1:1 meeting
yesterday.

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I was in Frankfurt with Team
X last week.

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Our last release exceeded all
expectations.

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Satir Interaction Model: Our human processing
systems have 4 parts.

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11. 11© 2015 Ken PowerThree factors shape patterns and form the conditions
for self-organization in human systems

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probe sense respond
“More stories like these;
fewer stories like those”

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Brené Brown
“Maybe stories are just data
with a soul”

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We want to see and
understand the soul of our
organization through the
stories we tell

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Sent Received

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Tea/Coffee
Milk/Cream Sugar
N/A

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Meat
Vegetables Spices
N/A

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Concern
Anger Empathy
N/A

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Collection Methods
Paper Web Apps

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Use of Catalytic Material
More likely to fail when
used to
Reduce or resolve inquiry
Achieve conformity and end debate
Reduce exposure to detailed content
More likely to succeed
when used to
Multiply and energize inquiry
Achieve diversity and stimulate debate
Facilitate and guide exposure to
detailed content

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Three Basic Approaches
Group Led Push Pull

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• Anecdote Circles
• Peer-to-peer
• Small Groups
• Retrospectives
• Ceremonies (Daily standup, Planning meetings)
• Manager interviews (Manager as Scribe)
• Manager/Director broadcast (“This week I want experiences that
relate to working with customers”)
Methods for Collecting Stories

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Sense Making is a form of
Deep Democracy process.
We are giving every voice in
the system a chance to be
heard.

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77%

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77%
~70%

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77%
~30%

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37. 37© 2015 Ken Power
!!

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!
!

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Systemic Impediments

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Implications for leaders,
managers, change agents

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Power, Ken. "Sensemaking and Complexity in
Large-Scale Lean-Agile Transformation: A Case
Study from Cisco,” in Proceedings of the 49th
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
(HICSS 2016), Kauai, Hawaii, USA, 2016. IEEE
Computer Society Press, 2016.

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• Sense-Making provides valuable insights
• These insights lead to actionable interventions in the organization
• A complexity perspective helps inform action appropriate to context
• Specific things that are useful to monitor:
• Progress on strategic objectives
• Level of organization agility
• Types of impediments that make work more difficult
• Quality of customer engagement
Conclusions

47. @ken_power
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kenpower
ken.power@gmail.com
http://kenpower.ie/
With some
graphics by