Why Most Organizations Produce Brittle Teams Instead of Elastic Teams

On the Importance of Brittle vs Elastic Teams

We could visualize how teams perform work to deliver value as follows:

The Team executes Work to produce the Results We Want. A pretty simple visualization, right?

It’s important to keep in mind that the ‘Results We Want’ vary and depend on context. They may range from delivering features to creating or capturing value, or any other situational outcomes of interest.

The key thing to keep in mind is that the goal of our work is NOT to complete the work itself, which is self-referential and pointless, but to achieve something upon completion of the work.

We all know the above simple and straightforward visualization is a lie. Building software and delivering value is not simple, linear, and clean. Otherwise we could all ride off towards a beautiful sunset in waterfall paradise while sipping on our V-model daiquiris.

It would also mean the Agile Manifesto would never have been written.

Not Linear, But Messy

Delivering valuable software products is complex, messy and difficult. We could visualize it much more accurately as follows:

Our teams must deal with many surprises and obstacles that suddenly appear. This happens even if teams have lots of expertise, experience, and have been working together for ages. It’s impossible to prevent all surprises and obstacles, because we can’t predict all of them and see them coming before starting the work.

Complexity is hard to understand. Sometimes even team members with decades of experience building software products don’t fully grasp the implications of what it means to be building complex systems. Given this fact, you can imagine how difficult it is for leaders and executives far removed from the work to fully realize the ramifications of doing complex work.

Complex Work is Misunderstood

The messy nature of the work is where things begin to go down-hill. Our leaders and stakeholders often misunderstand the nature of complex work.

First, experiencing messiness and surprises doesn’t mean we are incompetent, much like the person who creates the weather forecast isn’t necessarily incompetent when their weather forecast turns out to be wrong.

Second of all, when we try to create a way of working and process around trying to prevent sucking at predicting, we will guarantee to suck at adapting.

Complex Work: You Can’t Prevent Sucking at Predicting

The theorist Russell L. Ackoff has phrased it much better than I can:

“The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger, than the wrong thing righter. If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.”

- Russell L. Ackoff.

Getting better at prediction is trying to do the the wrong thing right. That’s also why sucking at adapting is far worse than sucking at predicting. If we suck at adapting we won’t be able to ‘Do the right thing wrong and correct it’ to get better.

When doing complex work, trying to get better at predicting often makes us worse at predicting. We’ve injected our plans with speculation and noise, which slow us down and may decrease optionality - limiting our available options to respond to changes as they present themselves. As a result we make less progress than expected and become less predictable.

If we get better at adapting, we will make more progress, which is the thing that matters, even if we’re unable to predict said progress accurately.

Enter the Misery of Brittle Teams

When trying to prevent sucking at predicting, what happens is that organizations end up creating Brittle Teams. Brittle Teams are teams that focus on doing the wrong thing right with ever-increasing efficiency - getting better at prediction at the expense of adaptation.

Brittle Teams are overstretched and overtaxed by their organization. Their primary concern is to be effective at dealing at the internal obstacles and bureaucracy by the organization. Their elasticity – the ability to be flexible and adaptable – is significantly reduced. Much like an elastic band that becomes brittle when we stretch it too far. Brittle Teams are more occupied with organizational hurdles than wrapping their head around how their messy work can produce the results we want.

Brittle Teams are constrained by their organization and incapable of being flexible and adaptable enough to produce the results we want. They are primarily occupied with internal obstacles, meetings, rules and processes. As a result, the connection between the team, the work and the results we want is brittle and likely to break - which means we won’t get the results we want.

Brittle Teams Are The Victim of Trying to Prevent Sucking at Predicting

In Brittle Teams, organizations are unwittingly limiting their degrees of freedom by forcing them to produce highly detailed plans and checkpoints that soothe leaders by creating the illusion of predictability and control.

Leaders and managers have the feeling they are doing a great job. Everything looks smooth and clean on paper. Except the only thing they are doing is sweeping the real challenges and complexities of the work under the rug. They are trying to hide the mess we will inevitably encounter, which only means we’ll notice the real problems that matter later.

When the rug inevitably bursts from all the mess we’re trying to Marie Kondo away, the teams are blamed. Leaders mistakenly believe they should have seen all these problems coming and conclude our teams must be incompetent.

As a result, more rules, controls, and even more detailed plans will be imposed on the team. This means the team becomes even more brittle and the resulting inflexibility and lack of adaptability results in even less progress and predictability. And then, the cycle continues, to make the brittleness of our teams even greater.

I want to stress that these Brittle Teams would work perfectly fine if our work were linear, simple, and clean. In that case, our teams would not need elasticity to deal with surprises and messiness.

If the work would be highly predictable, plannable, and without many twist and turns. Our team's static, internal and brittle configuration toward our organization would not be much cause for concern.

Brittle Teams Are Bound to Fail

When dealing with the messiness, complexity, and unpredictability of complex problems, then Brittle Teams set us up for failure. Brittle Teams lose their elasticity to deal with real-world problems because they are over-stretched by having to deal with internal obstacles, like:

• Big Room Planning

• Release Trains

• Feature-driven roadmaps with timelines

• Elaborate spreadsheet victory business cases

• Predictability and Velocity theater

• Coordination over collaboration

• And much more internal bureaucracy and policies that impede swift decisions and actions ultimately resulting in long feedback loops.

As a consequence, Brittle Teams score poorly on context, collaboration, autonomy and alignment. Team members are distracted and pulled away from their team to engage in silly side quests that don’t bring any value.

You can recognize them with the following characteristics:

Transforming Brittle Teams Into Elastic Teams

Instead of Brittle Teams, we should be trying to create an environment for Elastic Teams. Elastic Teams are high-performing, empowered teams capable of solving complex problems. They are not scared of ‘doing the wrong things wronger’ and figuring out the right thing to be doing.

Elastic Teams are flexible and adaptable which means they are capable of dealing with the messiness of the work to produce the results we want. There is an elastic connection between the team, the work and the results we want, which deals with the mess through short feedback loops and adapting every step of the way.

With Elastic Teams, organizations let go of their desire for paper victory plans that produce the illusion of predictability and control. Instead, we focus on configuring our teams toward maximum degrees of freedom towards obstacles and swift progress toward real-world results. Executives are fully aware that chasing predictability is a false siren that diminishes our adaptability and hurts progress.

Instead of our teams losing elasticity by dealing with internal obstacles, we allow them to be elastic toward any real-world obstacles they may encounter on their path to the results we want. We don’t bother them with silly bureaucratic hoops to jump through to provide the illusion of control.

Elastic Teams are flexible and adaptable by primarily concerning themselves with:

• Humble planning. As they do the work, they discover the work they must do. Teams start with simple and light-weight plans they inspect and adapt as necessary. Not because their stakeholders expect those plans, but because they enable the work.

• Supporting a team of teams environment. If teams need help from each other, they help each other as necessary. No fighting or stress because it’s clear what matters most to the company and the business.

• Collaboration over coordination.

• Doing discovery together with lightweight business cases and small experiments to test assumptions.

• Increasing adaptability and the ability to deal with surprises, instead of foolishly obsessing over velocity or predictability.

• Actively working to reduce rules and bureaucracy so that we can take swift decisions and actions to produce the short feedback loops that are necessary to deal with surprises.

Elastic Teams score high on context, autonomy, context and collaboration, and possess the following characteristics:

If Elastic Teams are superior to Brittle Teams when doing complex work, why do most organizations end up with Brittle Teams?

Most Organizations Are Designed to Produce Brittle Teams

In short, most organizations are busy setting themselves up for failure by ignoring Ashby’s Law:

“The variety in the control system must be equal to or larger than the variety of the perturbations in order to achieve control.”

Ashby’s Law is sometimes phrased as: only variety can absorb variety.

Most organizations are actively working to reduce variety in their teams, because that helps with providing the illusion of predictability and control. They are busy actively undermining their teams by creating internal obstacles that reduce the variety of possible states a team can be in to deal with external obstacles.

By trying to make the picture of the work to be done clean and smooth, they are busy over-fitting and creating plans that are filled with noise and speculation, which only serve to create Brittle Teams.

How do we begin our journey from Brittle Teams toward Elastic Teams?

Let’s Stop Sabotaging Our Teams

If we don’t trust our teams, we will create an environment where we can’t trust our teams. Distrust breeds distrust. In short, we are setting teams up for failure by not trusting them and limiting their degrees of freedom through process, rules and policies.

We’re trying to control things we can’t control, and as a consequence, we create Brittle Teams. They’re stretched too thin by being busy with providing the illusion of predictability and control. The connection between the team, the work and the results we want is brittle and likely to break.

While Brittle Teams look smooth and clean on paper and GANTT charts, only Elastic Teams produce reliable progress and are capable of handling the messy reality of complex work.

Elastic teams don’t look as pretty on paper, but the ultimate question we should ask is whether we want to celebrate paper victories or actual progress and real-world gains.

If we want the latter, Elastic Teams are the way to go. We must stop with all these silly release trains and big-room planning nonsense.

We’re only sabotaging our teams by making them brittle and inelastic to the real-world conditions necessary for deal with the messiness and surprises associated with complex work.

We’re undermining our teams by forcing them to jump through organizational hoops until they’re too exhausted and crippled to jump through the real hoops necessary for the work.

The question you should be asking: Do you want your plans to look great, or your teams to be great?

Do you accept that you will suck at predicting, or do you want to prevent sucking at predicting so that you will guarantee to suck at adapting?

If you optimize for the former, you will create Brittle Teams that produce slow, expensive and inadequate results, because they are inflexible and unable to adapt.

But boy oh boy, do they look stunning on a PowerPoint slide!

Special thanks to Jon Odo, Pawel Huryn, Tanner Wortham, Eman Mifsud, Akolawole Mukhtar, Bartosz Rakowski, Jasenko Ramljak and Robin van Golen for their feedback on this article.