Behind most unproductive Agile implementations are feeble feedback loops and impotent decision making processes. The most visible manifestations are seen in longitudinal observations of common feedback loops such as “Daily Standups”, “Iteration planning meetings”, “Iteration retrospectives”, “Iteration Demo”, “PI Panning”, “Agile Dojos”, “Scrum of Scrums”, “Risk Reviews”, “Agile Steering committees”, “Strategy reviews”, “Communities of Practice” etc.

Active Sensemaking helps you continually capture insights that matter most and supply them to who, where and when it matters.

As a Lean-Agile coach or a process improvement change agent working in Lean-Agile implementations, you’ve seen the growing imperative for agility enablement among companies’ internal teams. Today’s organization climate experiences include rapid changes where there are a growing number of unknown unknowns.

At ScrumDo, having learned from coaching over 200 organizations and thousands of teams, our Agile coaches come across some common success factors - Awareness of the real pains of customers, designing policy change connected to the real factors affecting the organization, engaging workforce and distributing the thinking and decision making process, and effectively identifying and addressing risk landscapes. The more organizations learn and think the better risk hedged and resilient they become.

The institutionalization of Agile has not scaled well. It has lost its focus - Instead of enabling understanding of contexts and leading with outcomes, unfortunately it has largely become predetermined solution driven, creating recalcitrant organizations. This serious downgrade needs revival to the first principles of Lean, Agile and Kanban - to create this psychological shift in organizations - to create thinking, learning organizations. And at the heart of such organizations are healthy feedback loops that catalyze evolutionary change by learning what is really happening in a system—smoothly, continually, quickly, and with validity!

Failure to capture such qualitative and quantitative research through narratives at scale typically results in organizational fragility.

Active Sensemaking in organizations reveals patterns and trends by investigating and interrogating narratives. Far more probing and insight-generating than a survey, by combining qualitative data (individual stories) with quantitative data (collective responses), Active Sensemaking yields richly nuanced insights into why your organization is operating the way it is and, more specifically, what’s hindering agile enablement.

Join an Active Sensemaking coach
for a free live demo.

Because you get far more nuanced feedback, in gathering specific stories, you can analyze for emergent patterns that reveal commonalities across the company. You’ll see the trends and weak signals. You’ll observe what most of the stories were about and how respondents viewed them. You’ll see concerns in sharp relief and gain a deeper understanding of their relationship to agile enablement. By looking in-depth at enough aggregated data, the current hold-ups will become apparent and you’ll be able to form a plan of action for how to address impediments. Correspondingly, your team will feel your sense of urgency and care as they recognize the value of agile enablement and begin to internalize its importance for themselves.

Active Sensemaking recognizes that every voice is unique and every voice matters. Typical surveys ask for opinions and results lack detail and context. With Active Sensemaking, you can identify a particular research objective and then develop a sensemaking framework that allows you to obtain worthwhile data. Unlike narrowly-focused employee survey questions, an Active Sensemaking instrument would encourage respondents to share a recent work experience related to agile enablement, followed by a prompt that leads them to interpret the stories they share, expanding on what they mean. Because questions are not entirely open-ended, they invite non-standardized responses that can then be used to look deeper at the nature of the work experience. Other prompts might include:

After respondents have shared an experience related to a story prompt, they are then able to answer signification questions that relate back to the experience they just shared. These questions are designed to allow for the storyteller to interpret the meaning of their story.

Active Sensemaking has been implemented to analyze micro-narratives within several global software organizations. The software supplied a framework for managing impediments within the flow of the organizations. Notably, it was able to expose patterns within the fabric of the organizations and identify common yet little-known impediments rearing their head across departments. Spryng went a step further to actually examine those impediments and provide a context through which to resolve them—both for the immediate present and the future.

You can take the first step to revitalizing Agile in your organization with an Active Sensemaking Pilot. You will have an Active Sensemaking consultant to work alongside you and your organization in an apprentice-like model, following Active Sensemaking principles on the Spryng platform. You do not need an understanding of the platform to learn Active Sensemaking, as the consultant will guide you through the steps.

What will the process look like?

Join an Active Sensemaking coach
for a free live demo.

Sponsored by