Spontaneous Order System (SOS)
The Next Iteration of Agile...
"the result of human actions, not of human design"
Where Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, etc. focus mostly exclusively on rigid process and frameworks, Spontaneous Order System (SOS) focuses on creating an environment, culture, mindset, philosophy to allow for Agile and Agility to flourish regardless of framework/process. Without the mindset, philosophy and culture; the processes and frameworks are useless and mindless. Where other Manifesto's failed (vague, leaving room for misinterpretation and misuse); Sponanteous Order is very explicit in ways of working, philosophy, culture, and mindset. Nothing is vague or open for misinterpretation. Spontaneous Order System (SoS) is here to help bring order to your organizational chaos! SOS is a catalyst for your entire organization to improve and suceed. Leveraging a fully trained Spontaneous Order System (SOS) Consultants (the Maestro) to ensure proper alignment to Spontaneous Order System is imperative to the success of the Spontaneous Order System. SOS can be used with any framework including Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, etc. as it focuses exclusively on explicit shifts in mindset. environment, culture, and philosophy.
Here are 4 explicit requirements an organization must adhere to in order for Spontaneous Order System to flourish:
Remove Siloes in favor of Collaboration & Cross-Functionality
Remove Hierarchy in favor of Self-Organization & Empowerment
Remove Bureaucracy in favor of Flexibility
Remove Waste in favor of Efficiency (Lean)
We only favor the things on the right and favor nothing on the left. Organizations should constantly be striving to achieve and improve to get to the things on the right and reduce/eliminate the things on the left.
To achieve the above, we have created these explicit LEAN practices and mindset shifts:
Group Creation Practices/Mindset/Environment (Community of Creators) "Orchestra Programming"-
The best way of working in a creation of a "thing/product/service/etc" is that everyone (Customer, Stakeholders, etc) that is required in building the "thing" (from start to finish) is to be in the same room (same video call), collaborating together as a cross functional team. Creating a group creation environment is a catalyst for being innovative and dynamic. SOS is based on trust, respect and collaboration, anyone not demonstrating this will be removed from the team. Teams should not exceed 7 team members since small groups have better communication (two-pizza rule). Group Creation encourages and enables Spontaneous Order. This includes innovation/improvement, "customer collaboration" and instant customer feedback in the building process of a "thing". Instant feedback, real time, immediately from amongst team members and clients is necessary to succeed in maximizing customer value delivered (there are no delays, hand-offs, bottlenecks). In addition, Group Creation ensures quality products, immediate customer satisfaction, and no bugs/defects to be resolved at a later time. The Andon Cord is highly recommended for real-time improvements (no delayed retrospectives are needed). Group Creation eliminates a need for useless, boring events or redundant meetings that provide little value in favor of authentic efficiency, innovation, maximizing value, and spontaneous order (Spontaneous Flexibility). It also assists in removing extraneous roles/responsibilities that are not necessary (Lean). The team may be long-lived or short-lived based on the business need, team member morale, a need for team members to upskill, learn something new, and if the team is high performing or not, etc. Strive to eliminate dependencies and impediments. If an organization is unable to fully eliminate dependencies and impediments, teams should spontaneously arrange meetings (if necessary) to discuss dependencies or simply "pop in" to another team's room. The removal of dependencies and impediments allows more agility and flexibility and reduces delays. The more overlap of work, and the less hand-offs; the more an organization can achieve Spontaneous Order and efficiency. This should reduce delays and increase efficiency (Lean). Take breaks! Celebrate!- (decided spontaneously by the team the frequency and intervals). Celebrate wins! The frequent breaks should also include ideas for innovating and should occur spontaneously (as mentioned earlier with the Andon Cord). No artificial or inauthentic event is necessary for improvements as the team(s) decides when it is time to innovate spontaneously. Proper breaks are highly effective in rejuvenating a individual, team or organization. Taking a walk is highly encouraged (as a team or organization). The 10 min rule (made famous by Steve Jobs). Micro-Delivery Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)- the more frequent/shorter releases, deliveries, and integration the better (e.g. multiple times a day). Large, big bang integrations and releases should be avoided as they lead to bugs, defects, and unnecessary rework. Delivery, integrations, releases should be done incrementally daily, and at most, weekly. This ensures for less things to go wrong as we are working with smaller batches. Everything must be smaller to allow flexibility/Simplify to remove waste- Smaller teams, smaller bodies of work, incremental delivery, etc. "Smaller is better!" is the mantra of Spontaneous Order. In addition, always strive for simplifying, removing waste. The simplest approach is always the best approach. Team pair programming with AI is highly encouraged as a best practice. The only Metrics that matters- If employees/teams are not happy and passionate about their work (de-moralized), Spontaneous Order was not properly implemented (they must feel their work is purposeful). If clients/customers/stakeholders are not happy and passionate about the product (valuable), Spontaneous Order was not properly implemented. Re-evaluate the above criteria for missed opportunities and improvements. High quality, working software/service/product is the only metric that matters.
Leaderships Role Mindset/Practices-
A mind shift must change in a leadership role from top-down/command-control to empowerment of teams. Feedback with Psychological Safety is the crux of Spontaneous Order. Leaders should be asking questions and listening to the team, rather than dictating orders . A visual representation of this leadership mind shift change is taking the traditional hierarchy and flipping it upside down, will all management supporting the people doing the work.
Gemba Walks are highly encouraged to observe the work allowing for leaders to ask questions if needed. In addition the leader should meet with the team periodically (when the team feels best) to listen to them for improvement ideas, provide resources, listen, remove systemic roadblocks, collaborate, assist in vision/strategy/dependency coordination and trust empowered teams to solve problems closest to the actual work. and anything else they may need (better tools, more team members, upgraded systems, etc), Boss Centric versus Customer Centric- More than anything else, value delivery to the client is the most important thing within Spontaneous Order. Everything must be done in favor to satisfy customers and customer value; continuously seeking to improve the customer experience. If the customer is not the center of the organization (Customer Centric), the organization seizes to exist and will fall into Orwellian bureaucratic dystopia only servicing itself with little regard to gaining new customers or customer retention (Boss Centric). Customers will leave for a better product/service offered by the competitor. Employees will leave because they have no purpose. Practice integrity and ethics for the customer and for the organization to attract and retain customers and workers. Do what is right!
General Organizational Philosophies, Mindset, Culture
"Fearless Organization"- As mentioned before Leaders, listen to the teams; the people actually doing the work! Leaders of any sort must establish a Psychological Safe environment. Without Psychological Safety, Spontaneous Order cannot take root. Servant leadership and empowerment of self-organization is required. There is NO micromanaging, command/control within Spontaneous Order. This means that those doing the work are at the top and the middle managers and senior leaders are supporting/assisting the teams. Leaders must listen and implement what the team thinks. This is known as the "institutional yes" (made famous by Amazon). See leadership role above for further information.
Bold Vision- you may or may not start with a bold vision and work backwards in creation. The bold vision can evolve and change on tight (incremental) feedback loops, but gives a "north star" to the team and organization to start working and striving towards. The "vision" is not a deadline or "set in stone" as a hard date, rather it is something the organization or team may leverage to work towards as guidance. Always learn often, learn early rather than later which can be achieved with a bold vision.
Culture of Experimenting and Refining- We should be making a commitment to continuous improvement, the more frequent we can improve, the better. We are not perfect, because of this we must experiment, experiment, experiment with everything. Then refine! Evolution, experimentation, failure, risk taking, inspecting and adapting along the way with a goal of flexibility. Then Refine again! Continuous learning is paramount to a Spontaneous Order; we are never "done" in improving and evolving. We are always striving for improvement, there is no end state of Agility. Again, the Andon Cord is highly recommended for teams. Late learning occurs in Big bang (waterfall approach) where as SOS emphasizes learn often, learn early! Is something going wrong early on? The risk goes down if we catch issues early.
In addition to this Spontaneous Order System, please reconsider everything put forth in the Agile Manifesto https://agilemanifesto.org/
**This document is an ongoing evolutionary document that must be updated from time to time as new information is learned.**
Please provide feedback as this document should NOT be created in a silo, but with a experienced Community robust with new ideas and perspectives.
Contact TruAgile for ideas, suggestions, edits, comments, questions, etc. so we may discuss adding them here! Stay curious!
What is Spontaneous Order? Learn about it's rich history here....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_order
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