Factors Influencing Organizational Success

Intro

Most of us work together with other people trying to achieve success but what are factors that influence us on that path, that help us or hinder us? What can we measure our organization against to help us know if we are on the right track?

Communication, Structure

Conway's Law

This theory/law says that systems reflect the communication structure. This means that if we want to improve the systems output we need improve the communication structure and flow in our organization.

Conway's Law

Dunbar's Number

This number is the approx. limit to the amount of people we can have a connection with. It's about 150. That doesn't mean we can have meaningful relationships with all of the 150 but we can with an inner circle of about five people.

Dunbar's Number

Dealing With Change

Agile Manifesto

The agile manifesto is a set of principles/recommendations that help us produce value for the customer and better software faster by improving our ability to respond to change. It is based on decades of experience of well-known software engineers and scientists.

Agile Manifesto

Innovator’s Dilemma

This is a book by Clayton Christensen. This dilemma is about inflection points on a companies journey where the company, if it wants to keep and grow their market share and does not want to fail, has to reinvent itself at certain points.

Innovator’s Dilemma

Gall's Law

This law, by John Gall, tells us that we cannot build complex systems from scratch. Rather, complex systems always start simple and move towards bigger and more complex systems incrementally.

Gall's Law

Dealing With Complexity

Coupling

Coupling is a measure of how tightly coupled different parts of the system are. Coupling makes sense for some parts but can be dangerous and hinder productivity significantly if the wrong parts are coupled.

Coupling

Cohesion

Cohesion is a measure of how broad or narrow an individual part of the system is from the perspective of its behavior i.e. is it focused around one task (high cohesion) or is it "all over the place" (low cohesion). Low cohesion eventually leads chaos and hinders productivity significantly.

Cohesion

Miller's Magic Number

One of the most cited psychology papers by George Miller seems to suggest that on average, we are able to hold, more or less, 7 objects in working memory or in other words, there is a limit to our cognitive capacity.

Miller's Magic Number

Cognitive Load

We spend far more time reading and understanding a system than performing work on it. Therefore, the amount of cognitive load required to understand a system is a crucial metric.

Cognitive Load

Cynefin Framework

A vast amount of factors in our environment influence us in ways that are exceedingly difficult to grasp. The Cynefin framework helps us make sense of our environment and thereby allow us to make better decisions.

Cynefin Framework

Making Decisions

Theory of Constraints

A chain can never be stronger than its weakest link. This theory helps us find and deal with the weakest links i.e. bottlenecks in our process.

Theory of Constraints

Lean Thinking

This is a way of thinking focused on the customer. What will increase the value for the customer and how to achieve it with the least amount of waste?

Lean Thinking

Contingency Theory

We all wish there was one sure recipe for success but from experience we know that this is not the case. Contingency theory tells us that there is no "best way" of organization, decision making etc. instead it depends on our current context.

Contingency Theory

Power Law

One simple example of this is the 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle). This principle says that approx. 20% of effort can result in 80% of output i.e. by prioritizing what really matters you will get a much higher output compared to working on tasks that matter less. But the power law is a very general phenomena that occurs seemingly everywhere.

Power Law

Heilmeier Catechism

Actions and projects might deliver high rewards but also carry risk. "Heilmeier Catechism" is a set of questions that might help us understand the risk better and if it's worth taking.

Heilmeier Catechism

Goodhart's Law

"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.". This tells us that we cannot simply observe a metric, apply pressure on it and expect for things to get better. Instead we should probably gather a wider perspective.

Goodhart's Law