The Shaping Forces of Transformation: Growing a Learning Organization

Hi, my name is Ganga Narayanan. I work for TELUS.

Today, I'm going to talk about what I have learned called the three shaping forces of transformation.

I have been in the role of an enterprise agile coach at TELUS for about five years now, and if I had to use a picture to describe my work, I think it would look like this.

Over the years, and especially before the pandemic, my days used to look like this. Of course, crossing the country every now and then, facilitating training workshops across the country with teams all over the country and overseas. And I was running a number of workshops and facilitating trainings and so on.

Over the years, I've learned that we could divide the ingredients that shape the transformation journey into three parts, three ingredients that make up a learning organization. And here, I'm drawing inspiration from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, the renowned psychologist, creativity and innovation in organizations and societies are the products of three shaping forces: the social institution or the field, the domain, which is the body of knowledge, the cultural institutions, and the individuals who bring about the change.

So we have the field, which is the community or the team, and the domain, which is an accumulation of knowledge, accumulation of practices and ideas, and the individual who makes the change happen in the field and in the domain.

Looking at it through these three shaping forces, this is what our transformation looks like. Some time ago, we used to call them the three pillars. Now I'm calling them shaping forces because the forces are more dynamic, pillars are static. But their essence is the same.

So I've put together these three as the flywheels. They are constantly in motion. The individuals, the change agents, the enablement champions, these are the people who make the change happen.

The field, the community, in the form of community. Here, I'm going to talk about communities and book clubs, the conversations, the ideas that are generated through the community. And the domain, where the knowledge gets accumulated and continues to build. In this case, I'm going to talk about value stream networks.

So it is through these three forces that I'm going to talk about how we went about, what I have learned, what we have learned, and so on.

First thing: enablement champions. I'm using the term enablement champions in a very broad sense. The champions, they could go by different job titles and roles. They could be agile coaches, Scrum Masters, evangelists, project managers, architects, developers, and so on and so forth.

Their job titles may vary, but from my experience, what I found is that these are the people who are driven to drive change. They are passionate about what they do.

And I love this quote by Jim Collins, where he talks about a level five leadership trait, which he says is a paradoxical combination of personal humility and professional will. They are humble about themselves, but they have the grit to succeed. They have the will, the indomitable will, to do the right thing for the organization. They are passionate about learning, they are passionate about sharing that learning, and they have the thirst to make that difference.

So these are the enablement champions, which is the first shaping force.

Over the last few years, we have seen different approaches. We have experimented with different ideas. We have had a lot of conversations and trialed different approaches.

For example, up until a few years ago, we had an agile center of excellence. Now we have somewhat gravitated towards a leaner enablement team, but a more decentralized team of champions rather than having one pool of center of excellence. I think there's no one best answer, but it's just that maybe a leaner enablement team with a decentralized approach has somewhat worked better, where you have champions in every area and they come together to share their ideas. So that's one approach, one thing that we have gone through.

Training versus coaching. There was a time when we were running a lot of training sessions. We had something of an academy. We would have a catalog of training offerings. We still run training, but not as much as we used to before. So coaching, hands-on support, building the community has taken precedence over a series of trainings.

We are also continuing to invest in the internal capabilities, internal skills. So we are building our skills among our teams. We are building our agile coaching capabilities, DevOps coaching capabilities, and so on. And that has a much more significant payoff than having to rely on external consultants all the time.

Structure versus culture is a debate sometimes we have in the organization, and my observation is that, yes, we need structural alignment in order to enable the cultural transformation. And structure and culture, I would say, are two sides of a coin.

Some time ago, we ran a poll among our teams, among our leadership team in our area, on what they wanted. And this is the theme that we saw.

A lot of our teams needed help with value stream mapping because of how we were positioning ourselves now. The teams needed help with the newer ways of working. They needed help with getting started in terms of agile practices, DevOps practices. They needed help with alignment across our stakeholders. The teams needed to know, how do we measure success? How do we know what metrics should we be looking at?

And because of the journey we are going through, we still have a number of legacy teams. There is a cultural shift that is happening. So that's where they needed some help. And there was a strong interest in a community of practice.

Meanwhile, we have these people who were hungry for more, who had the thirst to make a difference. People who were not satisfied with the status quo. People who went through an existential crisis: What am I doing here as a project manager? What is the role of a project manager going to look like in this new world? How can I do something more? What am I doing as a business systems analyst? How can I help my team? And so on and so forth.

So these are the people who started asking questions. We started forming a team, a loosely formed team, as a sort of a network, who could champion big changes in their respective areas. And that is working out very well. So that's something we are looking to continue to build and grow. These are the champions.

Where the champions formed a sort of inner circle, the communities I'm using in a broader sense, where we are looking at building, growing our learning community.

Here, I'm looking at inspiration from Ikujiro Nonaka, who has written about ba, as I'm sure many of you are familiar with it. Ba is that shared space of knowledge, work, and the individuals. Ba is that Japanese philosophy, the philosophical term for the space. Ba simply means space. It's a shared space for emerging relationships. It is where knowledge creation happens. It's where knowledge comes out of the interactions. This is where the physical space, the virtual space, and the mental space all come together.

So this idea of ba, where knowledge is unified, where we build that collective knowledge, is something that we wanted to draw upon in building our learning community as part of a learning organization.

I like this model by Ikujiro Nonaka, where he talks about the spiral evolution of knowledge, where knowledge in the organization transcends from the individual through socialization, between people talking; socialization; externalization, where the conversation goes from the individuals to the group; combination, where it spreads across the broader organization; and back to internalization. Going between explicit and tacit knowledge, it continues to evolve.

So this spiral evolution of knowledge is what we aspired for in the communities that we were building.

So how do we make this happen? For me, one of the simplest forms and the most powerful forms of making these conversations happen is book club. Book club conversations are really powerful. Getting people to read and having a thriving conversation is a very impactful way of making this change happen.

This is me at home telling my nine-year-old son, who I'm sure is playing Roblox in his room right now, telling him to read. And I always ask him to read, and this was his response on the chat just a little while ago. He said, "I'm reading."

And this is me at work encouraging people to read. I love to get people to read. I love to recommend books.

A couple of years ago, when we formed a group of project managers turned agile coaches, project managers transitioning into the world of agile, we started with a book club with "Coaching Agile Teams" by Lyssa Adkins. We got people talking about what it means to transition from a traditional project role to being an agile coach or a Scrum Master type of role. So that was a good conversation starter, and it got people interested in the agile ways of working.

Over the years, we have also seen a few other books through our book clubs in different pockets of TELUS. "The Phoenix Project" has been one of the early books from a few years ago. "The DevOps Handbook" has also been read quite a bit, quite extensively.

And this year, one of the most popular books in our book club that has generated a lot of buzz was "Project to Product Transformation," Nick Cusumano's book. Back in the holidays last Christmas, our vice president ordered a bunch of copies of this book, sent it to all of us in our team, and at the beginning of this year we started a book club with this.

We had an online community where we had some discussions and questions posted, and every two weeks we would meet over Lean Coffee chats. This was interesting for many of us because of the journey we were also going through, as we started going from a project-centric organization, which is still very much a journey, towards becoming more product-centric.

We started looking at questions. We started to talk about: What does it mean to go from the traditional project centers of excellence, project management teams, to project management organizations, to becoming more product-oriented? Why do we need to do that? Why is traditional project management, why could you say that it's probably outdated? What needs to happen? How can the funding model evolve? How do we organize ourselves? What is the product? What is the product that we are delivering?

What is the product? And this was a simple but a profound question. What is the product? And how do we organize ourselves? Are our teams organized the way we want them to be ideally? Do we need to revisit the structure? Do we need to look at the value stream for our flow? What are the value stream metrics for our team?

So these questions came up, and as we started talking and talking, this conversation continued with a couple of other books. "Value Stream Mapping" by Karen Martin, because as we started to build value streams, Karen Martin's "Value Stream Mapping" became a handy reference. "Accelerate" spoke to DORA. What a very powerful add-on, because as we started mapping the flow, the "Accelerate" book offered tips on what it means to be a DevOps organization. How do we benchmark ourselves? What are the best practices? I have to say good practices, because there are no best practices. The practices are dynamic. But what are the good practices out there? What might we use to improve on? So on and so forth.

"Sooner Safer Happier" is another book that is picking up. A few of us are reading because it spoke to the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. We have teams that are following plain Scrum. We have big programs, a couple of programs that are very much invested in a scaled agile approach. We have Scrum, Kanban, customized versions, and so on. And that's okay. We don't want to impose a certain framework on any team or project.

So these are some of the journeys that we have been going through as part of our book club communities and conversations, where you would have something like this: an online community within Google Currents and our biweekly Lean Coffee chat. This was inspired by what I saw at the DevOps Enterprise Summit conferences also. Having these conversations generated a lot of interest.

And all this led the way to what we started building together over the last few months.

As part of a leadership mandate, we have been going through a very illuminating series of exercises. And what has happened is we have had dozens of our teams going through value stream mapping activities and workshops over the last two or three months.

We've been looking at development teams. We've been looking at teams that are more self-contained as an agile team on their own. We have been looking at bigger cross-functional teams, operational teams, and so on. So we have been looking at value streams that are more strategic, are broader in scope, and some which are more focused.

And the exercise has been profound for all the teams that have been going through this because it helped them start from where they were. There is no prerequisite for doing a value stream mapping workshop. So all that we said: just identify what is your value stream? We started with identifying the team structure, identifying the team. What about the value stream? We organized the team, we organized the people accountable for that, brought them together.

We went through an exercise of mapping and simple questions like "What is the product?" generated a lot of discovery-based conversations. Where does your idea begin? What is your trigger? What is happening? What is the first step? What is the last step? And so on.

So as opportunities started to unravel, we would connect those with the DevOps toolchain, with the DevOps practices, and so on.

The workshop itself has been a very enriching experience. It's not about the tools or the format, but it's about the conversation. So when we had all the people involved in the conversation, it led to some interesting questions. What is the lead time here? Why is it taking so long? Why is this percentage complete and accurate not high enough? So it generated those conversations.

So when we mapped all this stuff for everyone to see, when all the bottlenecks became exposed, when the toil became visible, that's when opportunities started to unravel.

There were questions like, can we do this for big one-time infrequent projects? Sure, why not? What about parallel activities? Yes, we could map them for parallel activities. How deep and how broad should we go?

We had value stream mapping workshops for more strategic initiatives to more tactical initiatives. So a combination of value stream mapping, project-to-product ideas with flow metrics and all that, "The DevOps Handbook," and "Accelerate" all started to come together.

So now using DevOps, using the ideas from this, this has been a very valuable resource. Using ideas from DORA, using this conversation from the "Accelerate" book, we have started to put together pieces.

Change approvals was a very popular topic that led to some idea, some improvement. The need to reduce rework, the need to become more lean, investing in the continuous delivery technical practices, that's all been happening over the last several months.

I would say this has been more impactful than running training sessions on DevOps. So this time, we would have a value stream workshop, help the teams see where they are, and then boom, strike with, "This is what we can do. These are the opportunities we can focus on." And we would go through the ideas from DevOps practices, and that has been more impactful.

Now we have been making a lot of progress. We are still early. We still have a long way to go. We have a committee that has been helping with our value stream work. We have been using DORA and the opportunities. As each team identifies the opportunities, they prioritize them. We hold each other accountable. We've started to act on them. So the journey continues.

So what have we learned? When we're looking back on these three shaping forces, the change champions, enablement champions, we have moved from a center of excellence to a more decentralized model. Enablement is better than excellence because excellence was more elitist. We have started to invest in homegrown skills. We have been developing internal change agents.

When it comes to communities, books matter, book clubs matter. Book clubs can be the simplest and the most powerful forces of revolution. And people read, people still read, or at least people like to have read, because peer pressure is a strong factor. But one thing is, don't let up. Because it's all voluntary, it's easy to lose track, to lose the momentum. Don't let up, and I have learned this. So hold each other accountable, support each other, keep going.

Value streams: the power of value streams is in conversations. It's the time that is spent together in workshops that is worth the investment. You don't have to wait for the perfect structure to get started. Don't always compare lead times and process times. Sometimes it helps to think outside the box. We are not using value streams to judge a team's performance. We are looking at where they are and what we can do. So it's a journey. It's a journey of continuous improvement.

So I'd like to close off with this: living our values. I talked about value streams, but now more importantly, I'm looking at values, because any transformation, enabling a transformation, cannot be successful without making the connection with the organization's values. And for me, these are the TELUS values, as you can see on the left. These are the values each and every team member at TELUS believes in. We strongly believe in this.

So one of my favorite activities in workshops is putting the TELUS values on the left and, say, the Agile Manifesto values and principles or the activities that we do when it comes to DevOps, and inviting the teams to map what they do with the TELUS values. And that has been a profound exercise because these values are our North Star. They guide us in everything we do.

So in closing, like I was saying at the beginning, this is not a completed story. We are continuing this experiment. And I hope to be able to share these findings, more of such findings in the future with all of you, and I hope along with more people from my organization also.

With that, I would like to hear from you. What questions do you have? What resonated with you? What worked for you? So would love to hear from you. Thank you.