Readings Preparing for First Call

There's better-than-even odds that if you're reading this, you think you want to learn an approach to scale agile development.

Surprisingly, LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) is about not about scaling. It's about descaling and simplification of the limiting organizational structures so that many teams can work together on one product as simply as possible to towards the system optimizing goals of (1) highest value from global perspective and (2) agility to change cheaply based on learning.

But there's a problem that you the reader are part of...

If I had to boil down about 40 years of this work to one key idea, it is:

You must own, not rent, your organizational design.

Wrapping of end-quotemark plus &#160: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs"  (typewriter exercise).

Welcome to learning more about Systems Thinking and creating a Learning Organization!

Who's Asking?

For background, I'm Craig Larman, the creator (along with my friend and colleague Bas Vodde) of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), the author of the several books on scaling lean thinking & agile development, and have focused the last decade on helping organizations succeed with scaling (or more precisely, descaling) with LeSS (see LeSS.works). Broadly, I'm trying to reduce suffering in development — for customers, your economics, and developers. There's no good reason that development can't be successful, useful, and fun.

Why Read and Learn Before the First Call?

Before I start any discussion with a management team that is interested in introducing LeSS and becoming a learning organization, these are the pre-readings I ask to study before we start.

Why? Real lean thinking and systems thinking adoptions are the exact opposite of the "copying without knowledge" and "install this solution" sales pitches associated with fads and consulting-company grand solutions. Rather, this involves real thinking ;)

If I had to boil it down to one key idea, it is: You must own, not rent, your organizational design.

This needs senior managers taking the time to deeply grasp

• the nature of their system,
• the root causes of its issues,
• the complexities of its system dynamics,
• the deeper concepts of LeSS, with a focus on why not what, and only then
• create a situationally-appropriate organizational design experiment based on these ideas and principles — instead of the common "you don't need to think deeply and figure this out yourself, just adopt our solution" sales pitch.

And one of the simplest and quickest ways to identify senior manager groups that are serious about wanting for themselves to (1) learn and teaching others, (2) cultivate a learning organization based on Systems Thinking, and (3) starting the learning, is by starting with the following readings.

Adoption Process

I recommend you do not simply decide to adopt LeSS. Rather, I recommend that you take the time to carefully learn, apply sober reflection, and then make an informed consent decision to try a non-trivial experiment — or not. Therefore, I recommend that the starting process is this:

1. Carefully study these pre-readings.

2. Discuss them amongst yourselves.

3. Participate in a 2- or 3-day "Informed Consent" workshop with me, where I will help you learn more in depth, explore your system with you, and answer all your questions about the implications and next steps.

4. After I leave, you together take a careful and considered decision to consent to the next step, or decide to decline continuing.

5. If your group decides with careful informed consent to go forward with an experiment, then I will help you in the next major phases: (1) LeSS Preparation, and (2) LeSS Sprint1.

The Preparation Readings to Learn From

1. HBR: Six Myths of Product Development

2. The following chapters from our book Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools with LeSS:

Systems Thinking (or the equivalent Systems Thinking chapter at less.works)
Lean Thinking (or the equivalent Lean Thinking chapter at less.works)
Queuing Theory (or the equivalent Queuing Theory chapter at less.works)
False Dichotomies
Be Agile
Feature Teams (or the equivalent Feature Teams chapter at infoq.com)
Teams (or the equivalent Teams chapter at less.works)

3. The following chapters from the book The Fifth Discipline:

Give Me a Lever Long Enough
Does Your Organization Have a Learning Disability?
Prisoners of the System, or Prisoners of our own Thinking?
The Laws of the Fifth Discipline
Personal Mastery
Mental Models