How to Swarming..
Last year, I published my first book, and it took me three years to write it. One month to compile fifteen years of notes, experiments. Thirty-five months to make it simple.
“The new normal. AO concepts and patterns of 21-st century agile organizations” are grounding an agile organization’s high-level concept.
Hundreds of digital books have been sold worldwide, and I’m not still decided to print them. I didn’t stop experimenting. I’m still challenging my concepts.
Last week, I published my new book:
AO is the visualization of the five stages of an agile organization. It helps to “design the alliance” between Agile coaches and the company. It answers the questions :
- what kind of agile is your agile?
- And how far do you want to go without harming your structure?
One point remained open. One end hasn’t been addressed deeply. That point is, what kind of behavior is agile behavior?
There are two ways to address change in an organization: colonization or assimilation. Colonization believes that the initiator knows it all, and the whole universe has to comply with that belief.
Assimilation is another way where groups or individuals constantly reshape size and dynamics until they find their balance. That balance never stands forever, and it is evolving.
In my mind, complex systems (of people, not technology) are organic. They are constantly evolving. For example, you are a global company with headquarter in Switzerland. You have a large number of customers spread out the world. You have offices everywhere. Is your company still a swiss one? The answer is not valid. You can set a corporate culture mainly to comply with the initial beliefs. The problem is that compliance has limits. Those limits are usually limited to your office. Once you ask people to follow the rules, they adapt their reports to your management. But they never reflect reality.
Swarming is a new word coming in digital transformation as a new word for initiatives. On the other hand, some developers renamed Mob programming into swarming for marketing reasons.
Swarming is a natural behavior when birds leave their nests to experiment a couple of things, such as migration, nesting, fooding, or whatever.
I explain how it works in my book, and I included the agile digital enterprise model as a swarming model. That model or process describes how to swarm from ideation to production in two weeks.
In conclusion, Swarming should be considered a “business spike” to experiment with a concept, collect data, and engage all stakeholders in a short period to test your assumptions.
If you understand that Agile means sooner and not faster, this booklet is for you.
XO from Zürich
Pierre
