Quick Reads (Under 5 Minutes)

Stride is running our cash preservation plan and Striders are one in focusing on our clients and taking care of each other. So many small businesses had no chance. Stride was lucky. We won’t squander it.

Here’s my experience of organizational change. It feels chaotic. Both too fast and too slow. Hidden conflict surfaces. Reasons why not or more immediate than why to. Performance gets worse for months. But people start to go with it. You keep going (rare) or you don’t (common).

Stride made BuiltNYC’s 50 BEST SMALL COMPANIES TO WORK FOR IN NYC 2020 (#25). It’s hard for a small company, especially a consulting company, to have our people’s backs. That is our commitment. Much work to do. https://bit.ly/2tYZ1cg

For my weekly company updates, I write a draft, record audio and transcribe. Feed the private pod, publish the transcript, announce on slack and email and then repeat in person when I can. It’s a small piece of our expanding internal communication practice.

I hope to reframe the top down / bottom up quandary in agile transformation: won’t impose across the organization rather will form cross functional, self organizing leadership and strategy teams approached as I’d do with a product team. Increase transparency across the company.

To do my work with passion, I try to take more joy in what is going well and hope for what will go better than regret at what is not. That’s in aggregate. In the moment, I feel what I feel.

Sociocracy consent process will take practice. Biggest learning this time is how critical proposal scope is to success. I also need repetition to better parse the boundaries between approval, consent and objection.

There’s a contrail of mistakes forming behind me as I play my role in our business. I own the impact of that, embrace the learning it represents, and carry on to our destination.

Today is our first experiment with sociocratic consent. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

So, how do I explain individual accountability and shared responsibility within self-organizing, cross functional business teams?

It delights me how a guiding principle followed to its logical conclusion challenges me to momentus change.

Attending the #agilefluency gathering while reflecting on my first quarter running our business has given me direction for how we need to change to honor our values. #agilebossanova