I recommend reading The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay on this particular topic.
A line in this presentation about loosely coupled, highly aligned teams is a major idea straight out of this book.
I saw some questions in threads here about how to achieve this: unfortunately, I have no bulletproof answers on this front, because what I've seen in practice is that large teams really like to talk about ideas/read books/get training on all these great ideas, then pantomime some of the behaviors from source material, then give up shortly thereafter without actually achieving results and only adding to the chaos and dysfunction.
In my experience, it takes hard organizational resets to achieve new results, with either major leadership shakeups or senior leadership truly, completely, deeply buying into a new way of doing things and seeing it through; such successful transformations have been a very rare occurrence across my career.
I am unfortunately living through "what not to do" when you have a messy bottom-up style organisation. Our org has been messy but culture has been good and progress has been steady, but not fast enough or predictable enough for the new big boss that came in last year. As a result, he has gone all in on a new way of doing things which involved hiring a new delivery lead to establish a process for the whole (several hundred strong) organisation to follow. Naturally all this has done is add more headwind, reduce ownership and morale, and upset the vast majority of our people. Last week they announced a RTO mandate in an attempt to fix morale by having people collaborate more closely. People have never been more upset. It's actually quite sad watching a great place to work devolve into a hellscape over the course of a single year.
Comments
I recommend reading The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay on this particular topic.
A line in this presentation about loosely coupled, highly aligned teams is a major idea straight out of this book.
I saw some questions in threads here about how to achieve this: unfortunately, I have no bulletproof answers on this front, because what I've seen in practice is that large teams really like to talk about ideas/read books/get training on all these great ideas, then pantomime some of the behaviors from source material, then give up shortly thereafter without actually achieving results and only adding to the chaos and dysfunction.
In my experience, it takes hard organizational resets to achieve new results, with either major leadership shakeups or senior leadership truly, completely, deeply buying into a new way of doing things and seeing it through; such successful transformations have been a very rare occurrence across my career.
I am unfortunately living through "what not to do" when you have a messy bottom-up style organisation. Our org has been messy but culture has been good and progress has been steady, but not fast enough or predictable enough for the new big boss that came in last year. As a result, he has gone all in on a new way of doing things which involved hiring a new delivery lead to establish a process for the whole (several hundred strong) organisation to follow. Naturally all this has done is add more headwind, reduce ownership and morale, and upset the vast majority of our people. Last week they announced a RTO mandate in an attempt to fix morale by having people collaborate more closely. People have never been more upset. It's actually quite sad watching a great place to work devolve into a hellscape over the course of a single year.