Systems Of Work

Changing one thing at a time rarely works. Org improvement is not programming.

We all adhere to a system of work. That system may or may not be chaotic, but it’s a system nonetheless: a collection of components and subsystems that work in concert to achieve a single goal—in our case, to produce a product.

Removing or changing any part of that system impacts the system as a whole, sometimes leading to its collapse. You cannot, for example, remove the carburetor (or even a spark plug) from a car—an automotive system—and expect to still achieve the goal of moving from one point to another at speed. Even positive improvement can be a disaster. You can go faster by adding a bigger engine, but if you don’t also beef up the brakes and the drivetrain, swap in different tires, modify the chassis to handle the extra load, etc., your car will not be able to handle the added torque.

I’m bringing this up because yesterday’s post said that you don’t need stand-up meetings. That DOES NOT MEAN “do what you’re doing now, but without standups.” The standups are a component in a larger system of work that does not stand alone. Simply removing the standup could break the overall system of work. Put another way, don’t remove stand-ups; instead, change your system of work to one where stand-ups are no longer necessary.

You cannot make even small changes to a system of work without considering the system as a whole and making systemic adjustments.

So, if you want to remove that standup, you need to adjust the overall system to compensate. For example, organizations that use mob/ensemble programming 100% of the time do not need standups. (And, just to cut off the inevitable uninformed complaint: no, that is not less efficient. Many ensembles work faster than they did when they were working as individuals. If you think you know what mob/ensemble programming is but have never done it, there are many great learning resources at [https://t.ly/7wEhf].)

However, for that ensemble to function, you need an overall system that promotes ensemble work. Things like individual performance reviews, a requirement for a single sign-off on a “ticket,” PR-triggered code reviews, a lack of team autonomy and psychological safety, a “hero” culture, etc., all fight against ensemble work. Put another way, you cannot just drop ensemble programming into your existing system and expect it to work any more than you could drop a new engine into that car. The overall system will guarantee its failure and pull you back to the previous status quo.

So, to get rid of that standup, you need to change the way you work. You need to change your system of work to one that does not require standups. That’s certainly possible, as is proven by many organizations that have done precisely that, but it’s not the mindless removal of a single component.

An “experiment” in which you change only one thing (e.g. remove the standup) will fail unless you change the other parts of the system that were dependent on that one thing (e.g. replace scatter/gather with an ensemble). You can’t apply a debugging strategy (change one thing at a time) to organizational improvement.