Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business

Every day, across almost every organization, strategy is being hijacked by numbers, just as it was at Wells Fargo. It turns out that the tendency to mentally replace strategy with metrics—called surrogation—is quite pervasive. And it can destroy company value.

Here’s a common scenario:

A company selects “delighting the customer” as a strategic objective and decides to track progress on it using customer survey scores. The surveys do tell managers something about how well the firm is pleasing customers, but somehow employees start thinking the strategy is to maximize survey scores, rather than to deliver a great customer experience.

It’s easy to see how this could quickly become a problem, because there are plenty of ways to boost scores while actually displeasing customers. For example, what happened the last time you were urged to rate your experience a 10 on a satisfaction survey “because anything but a 10 is considered a failure”?

That request may have turned negative feedback into a nonresponse or an artificially high score, and the pressure was probably off-putting. And think about all the pop-up windows, follow-up emails, and robocalls that pester you with surveys you would rather ignore. Such tactics tend to lower a customer’s satisfaction with a company, but surrogation can lead those charged with delighting the customer to use them despite the strategy.

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Cynefin: Change of name from Simple to Obvious

If you have attended one of my LeSS courses, you would have heard about Cynefin. Even though the Cynefin have popular states like Simple, Complicated, Complex, etc.. The Simple has been renamed as "Obvious". Even though the change has happened some time back, people still are sticking with Simple.

Check this following article where Snowden explains the rationale behind the change from Simple to Obvious.

Check this article out

Some of my LinkedIn Posts that are trending...

We say we learned something when there is a shift in our mental model. The shift happens when the model is exposed to the outside world and is challenged. This is where transparency and psychological safety comes into play to enable the shift in a system. In terms of building a learning organisation, Individual learning through training helps to update the mental model. However, to make it systemic learning, one needs to build an environment such that the knowledge, skills and expertise are exchanged, challenged and updated regularly across the organisation.

Check this link

Communities of Practices(CoPs) are emergent structure and not a designed or a pre-planned one. They emerge based on the need and get dissolved when it is no longer required. CoPs are getting formed every day.

Classic example being, the parents taking kids to sports classes and when kids are playing, they engage in sharing tips about studies or tuitions. Over a period of time, they start forming communities of common interests. In the context of companies, CoPs are very popular.

However, I am also seeing a trend where CoPs are becoming a forced structure. In many orgs, it is mandatory to have BA CoPs, or Agile CoPs, etc. Such CoPs won't yield value and are brittle.

Check this link

Metrics in Large-Scale Scrum

If you are a LeSS Practitioner and have attended one of my courses, you might have heard this before..

Metrics are useful tools, but please avoid these mistakes:

having targets without clarifying the purpose
setting targets for teams
measuring for control
measuring something without knowing why > creating waste for others in order to measure
In general:

Focus on purpose, not on targets.

Teach the people who use the metric to set their own metrics. That ensures proper understanding of the metric and its purpose and eliminates wasteful work to fulfil an arbitrary target.

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