I attended the Agile Unconference in Zurich and was blown away by the interest of people in the topic of “Org Smells”. We had lots of great topics and great discussions, and especially the coffee breaks ☕ were filled with great connections.
In my workshop on ‘Organizational Smells,’ we tried to discover and explore subtle yet potent signs hinting at underlying issues within workplaces.
We delved deep into some ‘smells’—latent inefficiencies, communication breakdowns, or structural hurdles—that often elude conventional detection.
I prepared this a little 1-hour workshop, with this agenda:
- What are Organizational Smells?
- Collect + Share their observed smells
- My experience
- How to find them
- What to do
- Discussion
- Diving in some of them:
- What is the smell
- What is the behaviour
- What is the unwanted behaviour
- What is the blue and red part of the policy behind it
- 2-4-All:
- What is your take away?
- Black Hat Thinking
What is an Org Smell?
An Organiztional Smell is something that seems “off”, that is hindering value creation (collaboration).
Examples from participants:
- “What is the account number where I can book my time on?”
- Finger pointing Culture
- Software Architects in different departments, dictating Software Engineers how to do their work: Tests, code, architecture, styling, …
How do you find Org Smells?
- Just ask people
- Observe people (Tip: Linger at the coffee machine)
- Use challenging hypothesis interviews to discover real examples
Collect and Sort these smells with the participants
Action?
- Be the coach and mirror back behaviour
- React to Small Things
- Change the company policies (self designing) and announce the change
- Launch experiments with explicit rule breaking mentality
- Role play behaviours with participants in the room
- Define Acceptance Criteria and ask powerful questions:
- How would you measure the Change in the System?
- Be aware of Goodhart’s Law 😁
- What did we observe if this problem is gone?
- How would you measure the Change in the System?
Iterate
Something I did not do enough myself: Go back to organization and re-evaluate the impact.
Tips
Definition Of Gone –> For Consultants
Definition Of Awesome -> as in Toyota Kata.
To Improve For Future Workshops;
To my future self 🙂
Dive into details and use a template to discover the “true reason”.