Management 3.0 Mindset: Part II - The Six Pillars of Martie

By Diane Brady, CSM, PMP, PMI-ACP

This is the second article in the series. Catch the first one here.

I have long been a fan of the Management 3.0 mindset.  It is grounded in science and leans heavily on the complex systems theory.  I like the Management 3.0 concept because it is a fun and engaging way to work with teams.  It also has the benefits of unleashing amazing results.  

Last month I talked about “Managing the System, Not the People” and how I used this concept and subsequent materials to launch projects. This month I want to introduce you to Martie.  Martie, the six eyed monster, hangs at my desk to remind me every day of the different perspectives of managing complexity in our organizations.  In today’s ever-changing, living, breathing organization, we need to set the stage for engagement and motivation, and think carefully about how to promote discipline and improvement practices.  Martie is really a model, but monster sounds better, don’t you think?  Martie represents the different views we need to consider to develop a healthy system.  

Think of developing the system the way you would plan out and nurture your garden. You prepare the soil, obtain good seeds and plant in a location with good light and space to grow.  Figure out how frequently to water, measure results and adapt as needed, prune plants to keep them healthy and to encourage greater growth.  Continue to measure at regular intervals and make environmental adjustments as needed.  A key Management 3.0 principle is that teams are responsible for the projects they work on; managers are responsible for the environment they work in. As managers and project managers, we are responsible to set the garden up for growth.  

Last month we talked about setting a goal, a big vision, establishing boundaries and constraints, and setting the stage to help teams form their own rules and self-organize.  As we talk through the eyes (views) of Martie you will see the correlation.  Anyone managing creative, innovative teams needs to understand these views.  

 Martie, the Management 3.0 model, Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders by Jurgen Appelo 

Six Views of Martie, Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders by Jurgen Appelo

 The term “view” emphasizes that it is one system but with different perspectives needed to use to grow a healthy system.   

Energize People

To make the “system” of people work, you need what is called the Five Cogs of Innovation: knowledge, creativity, motivation, diversity and personality.  

Knowledge – Teams acquire knowledge and turn this knowledge into new and creative ways to solve problems, and enhancing business value.

Creativity – Individuals are more creative when certain environmental factors are present.  It is okay to take risks and failure is good if you learn something. Games are encouraged as they help challenge people’s minds and practice creative talents.  Make people’s creative results visible and work to make routine work less, so if possible.  Challenge people to move past their comfort zone to the edge where creativity and innovation happen, resulting in changes and more innovation.

Motivation – Research has indicated that creativity (the link between knowledge and innovation) can best be brought out with intrinsic motivation.  Further, extrinsic motivation methods can kill intrinsic motivation, which can lead to demotivation!  Understanding what motivates individuals and teams is a crucial aspect of growing the system.

Diversity – The diversity of team members will stimulate stability, flexibility and innovation.  Research shows a person’s performance is largely determined by the system in which they work and their connectivity with other people involved.  

Personality – Yes, diversity is important but so is shared value.  This value is the glue of teams.  Research shows that creativity is a product of knowledge, motivation and personality.  Part of setting up the system for success is helping shape the shared value so that creativity can emerge.

Consider a team workshop with a facilitator to set the stage for the working environment, and then collaborate on shared values.  It is crucial to spend a little time planning for this type of session so that it goes well.  I typically follow up the session last month in Part I I talked about where we define our values.  Come to the team session with a few examples, flip-chart paper if a whiteboard is not available, lots of stickies, dots and sharpies.  Ask the group to brainstorm on possible values, group them if necessary, ask the group to rephrase or summarize if it seems appropriate and prepare a good list.  Ask the group to use 5 to 7 dots and vote for their top values.  The top 5 values will surface and become your teams starting “team agreement”. To further team cohesion, I use Management 3.0 “Moving Motivator” cards and “Personal Maps” to uncover what motivates team members and help them see shared hobbies, practices and values.   See the Management 3.0 Resources section below for more information.

Empower Teams

Empowerment is often seen as a tool to motivate people.  The real reason to empower people is to improve manageability!  The more complex a system is, the less capable we are of managing the structure.  To better guide an organization, a manager has to give up the belief that they are in control.  (I know this seems crazy but keep reading.)  The system’s network (everyone collectively) has much better information than any one individual.  You need to push decisions and responsibilities down to the lowest level possible.  

Self-organization is not self-direction.  As we discussed in Part I, teams need purpose and direction as well as boundaries.  Self-organization is the process where a structure or pattern emerges in a system without a control authority or external element imposing it through planning.  Teams will struggle, this is normal, but the need to have control over their environment and the uncertainty they face will push them to self-organize.  Managing the environment so that self-organization will emerge is important, but managers must learn they are in charge, but not in control.  It is a subtle difference, but an important distinction in the Management 3.0 mind-set.  

Empowerment is more than simple delegation.  It goes further and includes the support of risk taking and personal growth.  A wise manager delegates as much as possible and looks for opportunities to coach teams and, makes it safe to experiment.  Don’t forget to celebrate wins.  

Align Constraints

There are at least three responsibilities that project managers\managers should do themselves.

• Develop a self-organizing system

• Protect people and resources

• Direct the group toward a purpose

As the project manager/manager you sit outside the team and your job is to make sure the environment is is such that it allows people can create their own rules.  The most difficult thing is to know when to feed, when to prune, and when to replace things in your garden.  You need to give teams the space to experiment, to fail and to grow.  Sometimes it is hard to sit on your hands and let the team struggle.  However, it is a necessary journey, this collaborative effort that allows the system to find its way to the edge of chaos (the edge of chaos is right between order and anarchy, where creativity lives – scientists refer to this as the ledge of chaos).

Remember, your job is to focus on configuring the high-level parameters like diversity, communication flow and team connectivity.   What you do need to do is set basic controls to make sure it is a healthy and safe place to work…that people are treated fairly.  You must also watch what emerges to verify it has value. Beware, self-organization is not necessarily a good thing.  As we have seen in recent news with demonstrations, self-organizing groups can go from peaceful to destructive very quickly.  As a manager, you are responsible for both promoting self-organization and protecting people if it becomes necessary.  

Another key area you may need some constraint in place is around shared resources.  Self-organizing teams have a tendency to act in their own self-interest and exploit any shared resources.  You or someone else should keep an eye on these shared resources (budgets, supplies, equipment, shared services) to make sure teams are not optimizing them for team performance at expense of whole organization performance.

Teams need direction and purpose.  This is not directing as in command and control, it is direction in terms of business value.  This is alignment in terms of the team’s work and the business value they need to produce.  Management defines the direction, and self-organizing teams will figure out, in their own way, how to get there.

Develop Competence

Competence has two parts, 1) discipline and 2) skill.  Although competence is a personal responsibility, when team members aren’t capable or motivated to develop competent behavior themselves, you must stimulate craftsmanship and discipline.  

Management 3.0 has the Discipline-Skill Grid.  It depicts the competency maturity of the team.  I like to use this to bring awareness to gaps in skill and subtly set the team in motion to hold each other accountable for taking action on their own in acquiring needed skills.  On a flip chart or whiteboard draw nine boxes as show below.

Discipline-Skill Grid, Management 3.0, Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders by Jurgen Appelo

I will challenge the team to list the top 5 skills needed for the upcoming or current project.  I often set the stage for this exercise by talking a bit about cross-functional team competency with each member having a primary skill and developing/maintaining this while also doing the same on a secondary skill.  This shows the discipline and maturity of team members as well as their commitment to a healthy team.  I will then ask each team member to write each skill needed for the project on a sticky and then vote by placing the sticky in the grid based on where they think the team as a whole actually is on the scale.  After everyone is done, I pose the question, “So what does this tell us we need to do next?” The next question might be, “When do we check in as a team on progress?”

Developing competence spans seven approaches as shown below.  The first approach is the default we would hope for and shows the highest maturity of team members.

The above exercise uses a little coaching and sets the team up for the Self level approach.  When the team doesn’t take responsibility for their personal development, use the next subsequent level down the list.

Plant the right seeds with a little fertilizer and the self-organizing team can manage its own internal standards of competence.  This bottom-up standardization will happen when goals and metrics make it clear that this is the right direction to go.  

Grow the Structure

The structure of an organization is hugely important to how people work with each other and how communications flow.  Complex adaptive systems will find their optimal communication level, but we can help influence what information is available, making connections between people and how they work together.  One thing is clear, teams need time to learn how to work together and should not be broken up too frequently or performance takes a hit as they start over to develop their sensory filters and team relationships.  

In complex systems, structures emerge on their own.  As we discussed earlier, you need to monitor the direction that self-organizing systems take, in case a little steering or intervention is needed.  This greatly depends on the maturity of the people on the team.  

Here are some factors to consider for promoting healthy structures:

1. A group acting as a team has a permeable boundary.  It is clear, but also sufficiently open to allow new ideas, energy and resources.  It is neither open nor closed.  There is a need for connectivity inside the system, but also a boundary around it.  It is a balancing act and should not be too rigid, allowing for change when needed.  

2. Widen people’s job titles to improve organization adaptability and not lock people into a narrow job responsibility via their job title.  

3. Cultivate informal leadership.  People earn this over time from past performance and commitments realized.  They are not managers themselves, but they have natural influence over others and often are champions for change.  

4. Functional silos have a high interaction penalty.  More attention must be given to cross-communication and alignment.  It can also lead to bottlenecks when functional specialists are in high demand and are not easily supplemented.  On the other hand, cross-functional teams have a tendency to sub-optimize at the project level and inefficiency or lack of coordination across projects may occur.  With cross-functional teams, the penalty is often a lack of synchronization of standards, methods, and approaches within a functional discipline (designs, developers, testers).

What is important, regardless of structure, is the delivery itself – value to the customer.  And, the next most important thing to work toward is organizational adaptability, the ability to change quickly.  Complex adaptive systems will continually rearrange and change as they learn, grow and gain experience.  The less that is defined and frozen in procedures and process, the easier change will be.  

Improve Everything

Things in our world today are changing faster than ever.  Products, services and organizations are coming and going at a blink of an eye.  We have strong reason to continue to improve, to stay ahead of the competition and postpone our inevitable decline.  To improve, we need regular feedback loops.  By this, I mean frequent inspection and adaption.  Find ways to do this with regular cadence and then make changes quickly based on what is discovered from those inspections.  

Also, we need a strong discipline toward a continuous improvement process.  Continuous improvement here means adaptation, anticipation, and exploration.  

• Adaptation is reactive, responding to a change in the environment.

• Anticipation is proactive, looking ahead for what is likely to change and moving in that direction.

• Exploration is interactive, doing something just to see what effect it will have on the environment, an experiment.  

Anticipation and exploration are key concepts in our organizational health because we need to improve by solving problems, get ahead of new ones on the horizon, and try new things to innovate and develop new solutions and products.  

People should be accustomed to changes and want to change.  You can help by turning the environment into one that embraces change.  Do this by talking about continuous change as the default behavior in your organization.  A system that is healthy and robust today may not be prepared for the environment of tomorrow.  We need to assess, look for problems to solve and ways to improve from every view Martie provides.  This is a journey and not a destination; we must make continuous change part of our culture.

I hope you have enjoyed this review of Martie, the six eyed monster.  Next month, I will spend time talking about energizing the team and unleashing potential by using several interactive games that promote some of these Management 3.0 practices.  These games are fun and engaging for the teams, yet bring out good performance and team behavior, and promote improvement practices.  

Concepts and images for this article are taken from the Management 3.0 Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders book by Jurgen Appelo and from Management 3.0 website.

Management 3.0 Resources

Why Management 3.0?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LPkbGpWMNs

Management 3.0 website:

https://management30.com/practice/moving-motivators/

https://management30.com/practice/personal-maps/ 

About the Author

Diane Brady, CSM, PMP, PMI-ACP, is an Agile Project Management Professional working in the Pacific Northwest with 18 years of project management and consulting experience working in the Information Technology industry.  She is passionate about using agile techniques to create and improve systems, building dynamic teams, and serving teams to achieve amazing results! She has served on the board of the PMI Portland Chapter in the capacity of President as well as active in professional development portfolio for the Chapter and is currently an Agile Instructor.