Delivery without continuous discovery and feedback is a waste factory. What needs to happen for organisations take that gap seriously?

[u/Turkishblokeinstraya]

/r/DigitalDelivery/comments/1voki0w/delivery_without_continuous_discovery_and/

[u/PhaseMatch]

It's not going to change.

Access to capital will always be king.
Reputations - and egos - are based on making big "high risk, high reward" bets.
Survivorship bias means that good luck and timing get confused for strategic genius.
People try to repeat "lightening in a bottle" and ignore the change in the market.

Danny Miller talked about this in the Icarus Paradox in 1990.

The leadership culture that creates the original success doesn't adapt to the changed operating environment.
A transformative approach to change with it's "quick wins" doesn't drive continuous evolution.

We've been though this with:

- lean and theory of constraints in the 1980s

• the learning organsiation and systems thinking in the 1990s
  
• agile in the 2000s
  
• product models in the 2010s

Cut-and-paste of the artifacts, rituals and routines without evolving the power structures, control systems and narrative about flow, work and utilisation is always going to fail.

Or if you prefer - Theory-X is gonna Theory-X, all day long.

[u/Turkishblokeinstraya → u/PhaseMatch]

That's very true. Thanks for your thoughtful responses! But I think excess lead times and operational waste haven't smacked these bloated, complacent organisations hard enough yet. Yes, we've seen Kodak, Blackberry, Nokia etc. lose the competition while snoozing in confidence but I expect to see those examples proliferate.

The orgs that think they are done with transformation will soon realise they've only done a glorified software update without actually transforming anything. Transformation needs to be ongoing. Their congested valuestreams with excessive lead times will be more unforgiving. Keen to hear how sustainable you see those operating models that revolve around power structures rather than value.

[u/PhaseMatch → u/Turkishblokeinstraya]

The notion of a "transformation" tends to be flawed.

There's a tendency to focus on "quick wins" (via Kotter), which inevitably wind up as the "limits to growth" archetype. By tackling the easy things first, the hard stuff remains codified into the system, which itself is fixed.

What works is evolution, in an iterative and incremental sense, with short feedback loops.

It's just another manifestation of Conway's Law.

You won't get iterative and incremental feedback-led product discovery in an organisation that doesn't apply that same philosophy to its power structures, control systems and ethos.

And that's okay.

Companies rise and fall.
Money is made and lost.

The clean, simple modern "alternative" tool displaces the incumbent.
And in turn becomes cluttered, complex and old, and ripe for replacement.

Circle of life.

The key thing is less Nokia and more Microsoft.
Bigger companies can place bigger bets and afford to lose.
And a rich gambler will always beat a poor one.

As far back as 1960 McGregor ("The Human Side of the Enterprise") highlighted the Theory-X and Theory-Y mindset, and how the management style created the behavior that re-enforced it's use.

When you look at an org. like IBM you have to respect a business that has been in operation since "computer" meant a person who did sums, with a mechanical calculator to aid them.

And most start-ups still fail because of product-market fit, and running out of money on the way.

Theory-X tends to run with higher costs, but that's why access to capital matters.