So far, we have had a organisation definition that indirectly has been something like “Agents with interrelations”, and it was not stated just because it is a too crass view of an organisation, but also the granularity is to detailed, since we are going into interrelations.
We instead repeat the short start organisation definition for our organisation, suitable for our purpose*; “People that interact to solve activities with interdependencies for a common purpose”. The first part of it “People that interact” is our complex adaptive organisation and the last part of it “activities with interdependencies for a common purpose.” is the activities we need to do in order to make our products, services, etc., where we in a complex context of course also will have complexity that we need to reduce. With this granularity we will not go into depth of what kind of people we have (regarding motivation, intention, attitude, identity, etc.) or what kind of activity we have regarding the domain, making the start organisation definition not only domain independent, but context independent as well.
“People that interact” we will call Boats, because the Swedish saying for “we are in this fight together” will translated to English be; “we are all in the same boat”. This is also connected to resource efficiency.
Note! With resource efficiency is meant to use the employees efficiently and make them flourish. It does not mean to just fill their time with 100% work to make it look good in the monthly graphs, but where most of their work is waste; too many endless meetings, work in too many projects, etc. Resource efficiency will together with Flow efficiency, be further elaborated on in this blog posts.
“activities with interdependencies” we will name Queues, queues of activities and interdependencies, since we need to keep track of both of them in a planned time frame, like a sprint of sprints, parallel phases, a time plan or similar. Queues is also a good name because queues are often mentioned as critical to keep track of in Agile development, as well as that “activities with interdependencies.” is also connected to flow efficiency. The difference between Lean queues and Mean queues are also important to understand and will be elaborated in this blog post. See the picture below.
We will take “to solve” separately since it is really the oil that makes our organisation work efficiently. If we get it right, our waste is very low, which means that both resource and flow efficiency have higher values. Or if we do it badly our waste is high and both our resource and flow efficiency have lower values. Or half good will give values in the middle. The reason that their respective values follow each other, depends on their tight connection. I will come back to that in later blog posts.
When we are building up our set of principles, it will be done in the following manner.
1. a principle is stated
2. it will be put in a picture to visualise it more clearly, which in the end will sum up to a total picture of our set of principles
3. we negate it to get the root cause and put it in the Prefilled Problem Picture Analysis Map for organisations, which in the end will sum up to all root causes.
In later blog posts we will add the symptoms so that the Prefilled Problem Picture Analysis Map organisations, is complete for its purpose; to take the temperature of an organisation’s competitiveness and wellbeing, and also understand what to change to make it flourish more.
In the 4th next blog post we will start with a series regarding the latter part of our start organisation definition, “activities with interdependencies”.
But first, we need to state our first principles that we derived from the market need and the history, elaborate on why we are negating principles to root causes and also categorise different queues.
Can you see the principles already? In the next blog post we will go through them. C u soon.
Next “chapter” according to the reading proposal tree is the blog post about our first principles.
*With organizational purpose means; manufacture a product, service, develop a new product, etc., with a certain price and quality. We are not talking about the nowadays popular Purpose statement, that is only a continuation of the easy-gamed value and mission statements. In this kind of statements, behaviour, properties and core values of our employees are stated, which is more of wishful thinking, since they will only emerge from multiple interactions within the organization. Since the interactions in turn, also emerge from our way of working, one can believe that if the purpose of the organization is not fulfilled, neither will the emergent behaviour and properties of our organization be what one could wish for.