Meet the TEAL Organisation Built on Agile Foundations
In the first of our AgileBeyondTech articles, Richard Hilsley looks at how an agile software development methodology can work for your business.
Let’s start with an honest truth: Agile is not new. We’re way beyond those youthful early years when the movement first started and then quickly took hold, to great promise and excitement of a ‘better way’ of building software – an antidote to waterfall.
With the launch of Agile came new ways of planning, team empowerment, servant leadership, a whole new lexicon (sprints, daily’s, definition of done, planning poker, etc.) and then a slew of books and frameworks to help guide us all. Undoubtedly, we’re better off for it.
However, despite the supposed simplicity of it all, enshrined in the agile manifesto, agile remains rather beguiling. Organisations often struggle and are invariably on a ‘maturity journey’: two steps forward, one step back, go again. Adopting agile ways of working in software development is certainly not easy. Or at least, there’s much more to it than first meets the eye.
As an agile organisation ourselves, at Mindera, we’ve wanted to explore this topic for a while. But with so many academic references, opinions and ‘experts’ out there, we weren’t sure another voice would be welcome. In fact, we’d forgive anyone for glazing over at the prospect of yet another guide to scrum! But after some thought, we decided our insights are worth sharing because they’re real, lived experiences, and a little different to the usual fodder. Simply shining a light on how we operate gets to the heart of several crucial factors behind any successful agile team. So let’s start with us…
An agile philosophy
Fundamentally, Mindera is agile. We’re not talking about the mechanics of scrum or kanban or other frameworks and tools in software development; we’re talking about mindset, culture and ethos. We subscribe to an organisational theory known as TEAL.
As conceptualised by Frederic Laloux in 2014 in ‘Reinventing Organisations’, the TEAL paradigm sees the organisation as an independent force. Self-organisation and self-management are vital characteristics. Hierarchical control is replaced with small teams, each taking responsibility for their own governance and interaction with the broader organisation.
Unlike the static nature of other organisational models, TEAL organisations subscribe to an evolutionary purpose, which is more about sensing the way forward and how to change and adapt. It’s a very refreshing and liberating concept and relatively novel.
Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and accessories business, is well known for its commitment to environmental and social responsibility, but it’s also famously a TEAL organisation. The John Lewis Partnership, although not strictly speaking an organisation that would call itself TEAL, is proudly owned by its employees with a formal constitution and is an excellent example of an industrial democracy which has certain similarities. There are others, of course, but rather than look outwardly, let’s explain more about how Mindera operates, practically what being a TEAL organisation means to us, and in doing so, draw parallels with agile ways of working.
Self-management
This is one of three core tenets of TEAL, and Mindera wholly embraces it. We have no ‘managers’ in our organisation. Being well over 1,000 people, this is quite a statement, and it’s often met with puzzlement and questions like: “How do you know things are getting done?”, “What about performance management?” or “How do you deal with pay reviews?”.
Self-management is about encouraging people to take responsibility for themselves, to actively contribute and have a voice. It promotes creativity and personal growth, often in ways that someone might not have anticipated, or certainly might not have been possible in a more traditional organisation built around clear functional boundaries and a hierarchical structure.
Employees at Mindera have more flexibility in their work and the opportunity to get involved in things that interest them. There’s really no limit to this, provided people act responsibly, which, of course, means always thinking first about commitments to our clients.
Salary cycles and assessing performance
Employee pay is reviewed multiple times a year by region, and most adopt a process of self-nomination and calibrated peer reviews. These are coordinated through our home-grown Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which provides a democratic process for fair remuneration based on an individual’s skills and experience in comparison with colleagues. You could call it ‘relative benchmarking’ – and it’s fully anonymised.
Performance is handled through feedback rather than formal objective setting and annual review meetings. High levels of communication and collaboration are extremely important at Mindera, and it’s something we emphasise during our cultural interview stage and onboarding of new joiners. Giving and receiving feedback is a critical muscle that develops quickly.
Extreme collaboration
As a concept, self-management could be viewed as leaving people feeling unsupported, lonely even, but that’s where collaboration and connectedness come into play. Google messaging system Slack is the lifeblood of our business, with channels for everything and very few restrictions, so people can reach out to anyone at any time or create new channels to rapidly bring attention to new topics.
Other tools like Google Drive and Miro (to name just a few) help our teams across the globe connect and collaborate on things quickly. We have various ‘communities’ – Quality Assurance, Agile, Mobile, etc. – and a knowledge management platform to promote discussion and information sharing, while Udemy makes learning accessible to everyone.
There are weekly company-wide Q&A calls to share the latest news, detailed ‘business updates’ are distributed every few months, and we’ll soon be launching Mindera summits to bring everyone together to share and learn in a more structured fashion.
Fundamentally, the principle of self-management promotes autonomy, which is a crucial quality of successful agile software development teams. As Dan Pink reminds us in his bestseller ‘Drive’, autonomy appeals to intrinsic motivation in us all, strengthening employee engagement and giving way to the servant leadership style of management, which practically we see embodied in the role of scrum master, for example.
Managing without managers
A question we’re frequently asked is: How do you manage at Mindera with no managers? As a TEAL organisation, we reject the conventional view of an organisation with power concentrated at the top and control that trickles down through a hierarchical line management structure. This stifles creativity and, in the worst cases, instils a climate of fear and distrust. To truly empower employees, one must think very differently, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.
You won’t find a traditional organisation chart at Mindera. No one has a line manager. Job titles are not set or determined to encourage a self-organised way of working that helps people to grow and develop around new challenges. If opportunities arise in other projects or departments, people can volunteer their time and expertise to fit the needs.
This absence of structure makes Mindera incredibly dynamic and adaptable, enabling us to pivot quickly. In the last 12 months, we’ve established operational hubs in four new locations from Morocco to Australia, and we assemble new software engineering teams for clients in weeks, not months. This ability to quickly adapt is central to Agile.
A networked organisation
As Margaret Heffernan highlights in her brilliant TED talk about human skills in an unpredictable world, loosely structured organisations that emphasise human relationships can very quickly adapt, which is crucial for survival. Yet, so often, this is an anathema to corporates that seek to optimise people-processes in the quest for efficiency. Repeatability and efficiency of process have a place, but only in a very stable and predictable environment.
Mindera operates much more like a network – a distributed workforce, with authority and leadership tending to come from those with the most experience and who are closest to the problem at hand. Command and control behaviour is replaced with guidance, coaching and mentoring at all levels – a much softer style of ‘management’.
There are parallels with biological neural networks: intelligence forms from strengthening connections between neurons, just as our strength as a technology services organisation stems from the relationships and collaboration we promote between ourselves and our clients.
Evolutionary purpose
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of a TEAL organisation is its evolutionary purpose. In a nutshell, this is about being driven to do work that has meaning and purpose rather than being obsessed with profit, growth and beating the competition, which is typical in an egocentric capitalist frame.
Mindera’s purpose is “to craft technologies and solutions that help organisations and people flourish”, and in this sentence, the word ‘flourish’ is the most dear to us. We form strong partnerships with our clients and care deeply about their success while at the same time caring that our employees, our ‘minders’, are working on products and in teams that help them grow and develop in ways that are fulfilling.
By balancing commercial and client commitments with employee happiness and growth, we respect people’s preferences on what they want to work on, and look to move people around when possible. Maybe they want to work on a new client project in a different sector or try their hand at helping out with operations or marketing. Whatever the reason for a desired change in responsibilities, we look into it and endeavour to make it work for everyone concerned. There is no corporate ladder to climb at Mindera, only a plethora of opportunities and a strong, supportive network.
Just enough planning
We invest ‘just enough’ time in forming strategy, plans and governance of how we run the business. Of course, we have board meetings and formal reporting, and take our responsibilities seriously in how the business operates. Still, we keep our planning light to allow our business to evolve or more radically pivot where we see the need to. For example, in response to emerging market demands or pressures. When there is less commitment on paper, there are fewer egos and less politics associated with loss aversion or confirmation bias.
As the famous physicist Richard Feynman once said: “To progress, we must recognise the ignorance and leave room for doubt”. Which is to say, detailed plans are fraught with inaccuracy. This is analogous to backlogs in Agile and just enough sprint planning that’s needed for teams to start while allowing some room for manoeuvre.
It’s crazy out there
Whether you’re familiar with VUCA or perhaps BANI or even TUNA, the underlying messages are the same. We live in a world faced with growing uncertainty and constant change, that’s increasingly interconnected and digital. Having an evolutionary purpose gives us half a chance to meet these challenges, much like agile aims to de-risk complexity that emerges with software engineering (rather than complexity being predictable) and to design and deliver digital products that are genuinely useful by iterating on customer feedback (rather than believing we know what customers want from the get-go).
The parallels between the evolutionary purpose of TEAL organisations and the iterative and incremental practices of agile are clear to see.
Key takeaways
- Shining a light on how Mindera, a TEAL organisation, operates gets to the heart of several crucial factors behind developing a successful agile organisation.
- The TEAL paradigm sees the organisation as an independent force. Self-organisation and self-management are vital characteristics. Hierarchical control is replaced with small teams, each taking responsibility for their own governance and interaction with the broader organisation.
- Self-management is about encouraging people to take responsibility for themselves, to actively contribute and have a voice. It promotes creativity and personal growth.
- The absence of structure makes Mindera incredibly dynamic and adaptable, enabling us to pivot quickly. We assemble new teams for clients in weeks, not months. This ability to quickly adapt is central to agile.
- Mindera operates much more like a network – a distributed workforce, with authority and leadership tending to come from those with the most experience and who are closest to the problem at hand. There are parallels with biological neural networks: intelligence forms from strengthening connections between neurons.
- TEAL organisations embrace evolutionary purpose, driven to do work that has meaning and purpose rather than being obsessed with profit, growth and beating the competition.
Read our next AgileBeyondTech article on Agile Transformation Journeys…
Find out how we’ve made our clients more agile…
About the author
Mindera’s Technology Leader and Advisor, Richard Hilsley specialises in strategy, business development and transformation.