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053 Scale the Good rather than the Mistakes
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053 Scale the Good rather than the Mistakes
Dhaval: There’s no industry today that is safe. In other words, the taxi industry you got taken over by Uber and left. The media industry has been taken over by napster and then later by all the streaming devices. So there is no company on the planet that can not be taken over by a small group of seven, eight people who are working in a startup trying to basically take your bread and butter. The way organizations have historically solved this problem is by hiring more people, having more talent, and then compartmentalizing it so when they look at how am I now going to cope with all of the threats that are coming at me, which is probably 100 start ups. You can’t tell which startup will take you over, but you know one of them will. So how do you compete with that? And the way people are choosing to do that is by trying to do whatever they’ve already been doing, but only faster. So if you look at the problem that the organizations have, they’ve tried to solve a typical competitive problem by trying to more put more people at the problem. In other words, we keep doing the stuff that you’ve already been doing only now do it faster, right? They don’t change the underlying system and that underlying system is a very tayloristic mindset of compartmentalizing people, compartmentalizing their function, and trying to compartmentalize even more whenever they want to try to increase throughput.
When we talk about scaling, LeSS especially, it talks about descaling because it’s about going back to the basics of why you have this system that you have and that there must be a better way of doing what you’ve been doing without taking on the overhead.
Bas: A lot of those startups that are disrupting the industry, they grow and they become the same big inefficient company. So why does that happen?
It happened because they didn’t get out of that mindset. Even when they were a small group, somewhere in the back of their head is still a large scale development shoot [like a plant] to work that way. Luckily we’re not that way yet, but when they grow, they make the same mistakes. If you wait, they follow the same assumption, the effect of ending up with the same kind of organizations has more to do with the assumptions that they have about how work should be done. And if lots of people have the same assumptions, then even if they think it’s a bad idea, they automatically fall into the same traps over and over again.
Dh
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By Lancer Kind
4.6
1010 ratings
CONNECT
Visit Agile Thoughts and register to receive free development, analysis, or leadership and management materials and learn to excel at developing software. I’ll also send information on my low cost email courses you can take via the internet.
053 Scale the Good rather than the Mistakes
Dhaval: There’s no industry today that is safe. In other words, the taxi industry you got taken over by Uber and left. The media industry has been taken over by napster and then later by all the streaming devices. So there is no company on the planet that can not be taken over by a small group of seven, eight people who are working in a startup trying to basically take your bread and butter. The way organizations have historically solved this problem is by hiring more people, having more talent, and then compartmentalizing it so when they look at how am I now going to cope with all of the threats that are coming at me, which is probably 100 start ups. You can’t tell which startup will take you over, but you know one of them will. So how do you compete with that? And the way people are choosing to do that is by trying to do whatever they’ve already been doing, but only faster. So if you look at the problem that the organizations have, they’ve tried to solve a typical competitive problem by trying to more put more people at the problem. In other words, we keep doing the stuff that you’ve already been doing only now do it faster, right? They don’t change the underlying system and that underlying system is a very tayloristic mindset of compartmentalizing people, compartmentalizing their function, and trying to compartmentalize even more whenever they want to try to increase throughput.
When we talk about scaling, LeSS especially, it talks about descaling because it’s about going back to the basics of why you have this system that you have and that there must be a better way of doing what you’ve been doing without taking on the overhead.
Bas: A lot of those startups that are disrupting the industry, they grow and they become the same big inefficient company. So why does that happen?
It happened because they didn’t get out of that mindset. Even when they were a small group, somewhere in the back of their head is still a large scale development shoot [like a plant] to work that way. Luckily we’re not that way yet, but when they grow, they make the same mistakes. If you wait, they follow the same assumption, the effect of ending up with the same kind of organizations has more to do with the assumptions that they have about how work should be done. And if lots of people have the same assumptions, then even if they think it’s a bad idea, they automatically fall into the same traps over and over again.
Dh