Email the Author

About the Book

The way we organize ourselves in the work place today is frequently a source of human misery and suffering. Many of us are unhappy with the work we do, with how we do it, with why we do it. We are often unhappy with the outcomes of our work, and we chafe at how hard it is to get work done. As a general rule it seems that the organizations we work in bring a large amount of dysfunction to our lives.

We get directions that are woefully uninformed, and frequently defy basic common sense. We are held to task for our work without being allowed to make the most basic of decisions. We are surrounded by inane bureaucracy and senseless processes, with no means of improving them. We consign ourselves to a world of ineffectiveness and irrelevance. 

Being a boss isn't any better, we are accountable for things we have very little control over. We rely on people that seem ill suited for the work they are doing. We have top make to many decisions on way to many topics. Things are always blowing up as soon as our attention is turned elsewhere. 

 The fact of the matter is the traditional organization is a relic from the Industrial era, a relic whose time is long past due. In today's world of constant change we need a new approach to organizing together to deliver value. 

 Using Agile Teams are our starting point, we need to start Organizing Forward, to meet the need of today and tomorrow. 

 This book provides a set of thinking tools to help leaders, change agents, coaches and interested knowledge workers rethink how to get organized so that we foster self-organization rather than strangle it. Organizing Forward promotes a new way of defining and operating institutions of today based om the following principles;

Organize Around Purpose

• Elevate meaningfulness – impact and clarity
• Instill authenticity - values, beliefs, and behaviors
• Increase autonomy – decentralization, cross functional teams, outcome ownership
• Is organizational purpose both meaningful and authentic enough that people will accomplish it with maximum autonomy ?

Organize Through Choice

• Improve confidence – fairness, trust, safety
• Empower self organization – of roles, methods, process 
• Empower self management – of people, team, support functions 
• Empower self direction – solution, problem, outcome
• Is there sufficient organizational confidence to facilitate self - organization, self - management, and even self - direction?

Organize For Change

• Increase awareness – transparency, feedback, and flow
• Adapt structure – collaboration, teaming, travelling
• Evolve continuously– invitation, co – creation, experimentation based change
• Is there sufficient organizational awareness to continuously adapt structure and evolve continuously through invitational, co-creative experimentation?

Organize Forward reflects over 15 years of organizational change experience from the Agile By Design team. It integrates and extends material from many sources across agile and humanistic management domains into a cohesive set of principles and practices that will help the reader facilitate a new mode of organizing structures, one based on teams that can self-organize to meet market and higher level outcomes

About the Author

Jeff Anderson

@thomasjeffrey

My mission in life is to help technology knowledge workers be awesome at what they do. Having been in the market since 1994, I have transitioned my initial passion for agile software engineering to provide advisory services to clients that want to thrive in a world of uncertainty and learning.

Over the last several years I have been running an Agile/Lean transformation service to help clients move from command and control towards feedback and self organization.

Our team has a solid track record coaching teams on foundational agile practices, guiding end to end organizational transformation to embrace a more agile mindset, and focused coaching of product and operations teams on how to embrace design thinking and validated learning.

I admit to an unbridled enthusiasm for any method or practice that bring creativity and joy to the value creation process, and get a kick out of turning leading edge thinking into contextualized, practical tools.

I also love to supercharge complex workshops through a combination of crowd awareness, passion, and above all humour. I’ll often iterate over a vast array of models/workshops in real time to adapt to the crowd's thinking and evolving goal of the session.

My most important skill is growing the talent around me. I continue to provide passionate, motivated people with a suite of leading edge skills that take their leadership to the next level.

I have presented at numerous conferences, nominated for a Brickell Key award, and am a founding fellow of the Lean System Society. I have also wrote a book on agile organizational change, The Lean Change Method.