4 Lenses on Organisations

"All models are wrong, but some are useful"

This session looks at 4 different models of an organisation that can be seen as different lenses on how to organise efficiently and effectively to deliver value to customers, the organisation itself, stakeholders, and society – balancing both agility concerns with the socio-technical frameworks of architecture.

All of the models are incomplete – they each offer a different lens or perspective – but taking a multi-model approach can be more helpful than just focusing on one.

Lens 1 is the Value Stream and Team Topologies model: organising around faster flow of delivering value to customers. This model has grown in popularity with its focus on removing silos and focusing multidisciplinary collaborating teams on the journey from concept to cash – or concept to learning.

Lens 2 from Sooner Safer Happier adds a nested model of teams and value dedicated to delivering Better Value Sooner Safer Happier – for example if a single value stream in a financial services organisation focuses on payments, how does that compose up into offering bank accounts and then up to a broader suite of banking services, and how is that organised and aligned into a gestalt whole? The BVSSH model looks at leadership at all levels, down at single teams, all the way up to departments, business lines, and whole organisations, with a trio of Value Outcome Lead, Team Outcome Lead and Architecture Outcome Lead collaborating on aligning Objectives and Key Results up and down the org.

Lens 3 looks at another nested, fractal model of the organisation: the Viable Systems Model introduced by management cybernetics and systems thinking pioneer Stafford Beer in the 1960s, and adopted and refined by subsequent systems thinkers. The VSM looks at organisations as interactions of 5 different systems of concerns: from System 1: operations, through 2: coordination, 3: management & monitoring, 4: strategy, and 5: identity/philosophy. Most importantly it sees these systems operating at all levels of the org: from individuals and teams, again all the way up through departments and organisations, and even above the scope of individual orgs. Here we can start to answer questions of how governance operates – architectural, financial, regulatory, etc.; and how coherence and autonomy can be balanced, through information and decision flows, and the management of information variety.

Finally Lens 4 looks at a model of The Liquid Organisation - again concerned with the balance of alignment/coherence and autonomy at all levels. This contrasts The Frozen Organisation – one with too much alignment and too little autonomy, and The Gaseous Organisation - with too much autonomy and little to no coherence or alignment, and looks at patterns and anti patterns to maintain balance. The model also uses the concept of Thixotropy – varying viscosity of flow (like tomato ketchup!) – under different contexts.

None of these models is perfect – but elements from each can be applied where appropriate to help organisations learn and adapt to their own unique contexts.