In this episode, Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita talks with Rowan Bunning, Scrum trainer and long-time Agile practitioner, about designing organizations for real adaptability instead of copy-pasting "big framework" solutions. Drawing on experiences from Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, Rowan explains how to align org design with strategy, choose clear optimization goals, and avoid the Spotify/Safe cargo-cult trap.

You will learn:

• why copying popular scaling models often fails,
• how to start from strategy and define the capabilities your org actually needs,
• how to use the Opposite Test to validate if your strategy isn't just a buzzword,
• ways to reach executive alignment on optimization goals,
• how to visualize work and constraints using value stream mapping and sense-making to support decisions,
• why providing solutions without understanding the right capabilities isn't a good idea, and what to do instead,
• how tools like Org Topologies and the Star Model help make options and trade-offs explicit.

This episode was recorded during the LeSS Conference in Singapore.

Resources mentioned in the conversation:

• Org Topologies (by Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm): https://orgtopologies.com/
• Creating Agile Organizations (by Cesario Ramos and Ilia Pavlichenko): https://creatingagileorganizations.com/
• Large-Scale Scrum (by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde): https://less.works/

You can learn more about Rowan at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rowanbunning/ and his website https://www.adaptws.com.au/.