[Book] Wholehearted

Inspired by Matthew Skelton's comment on Wholehearted I decided to read the book. This is not a review of the book, merely a note of the most important (to me, at least) take-aways.

Being "whole"

Why is it called wholehearted? The answer is given in the introduction and this helped me file the book in the right "box":

a thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, [...] it is unwhole.

Mike Burrows then gives examples of situations in which we experience that "magical chemistry" that makes performing (in a group of people) effortless. This is (at least to me) a powerful revelation and a great way to define what I get to experience from time to time when my organization just performs. When that happens we are whole.

And it's an awesome experience.

The other insight that I got is that a business is always "at war": with the market. But when it also goes to war against itself because of internal contradictions, then it is fighting on two fronts. Fighting on two fronts will tire and drain any business, no matter how big or strong.

Actually the bigger the business is, the bigger the internal war will be.

Increasing decision-making

To increase decision-making capacity [...] there must be move away from people serving the process and toward the process serving those who do the work.

While this is not easy to achieve as it requires context to be pushed down where the work happens and competence with those who do the work (and are trusted to decide), it certainly resonates with me, so much so that the first (and only) rule of my R&D department at Proemion is "rules are meant to serve us, not for us to serve the rules".

Constraint 6: Sense of self (Identity)

A team's identity constrains (and preserves) the team itself. Like most thing it can be good or it can be bad when taken to its extremes. The passage in the book that made me include it here is this:

I have seen some team identities get so bound up in their undoubted technical prowess that they lose empathy for their customers or show contempt for other teams whose cooperation they need. The strain on those relationships soon impacts negatively performance.

Outcomes before solutions

While discussing change-related strategy, Mike Burrows offers an approach that puts agreement on outcomes before solutions. I love how simple and yet effective that can be, as it completely flips the usual change management approach that relies on monolithic solutions, while maintaining or increasing the ability of the organization for decision making (as described above).
Or, how Martin Fowler puts it: problem -> context -> solution - emphasis mine.

Five networks

The five networks idea is described here and the part I love and can relate to is the following observation:

The more that networks 2, 3, and 4 are healthy, the more that networks 1 and 5 look after themselves.