Understanding Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile

Chapter 4. Leading Teams to Win

In this chapter, we look at ways to communicate vision and purpose, and how to align teams achieve success. We explore the mechanics of autonomy with the protocol of coherent action, and introduce some methods that help teams to make decisions and prioritize along the way.

Let’s be honest: a lot of the work that goes on in modern businesses can seem void of meaning. Most of us aren’t providing critical services, saving lives, or curing diseases. Mostly, we’re building software products and services. And mostly, we’re doing it for commercial gain. Maybe not our own individual gain, but at least the gain of our employers, or their shareholders, or capitalism at large. That’s not very motivating. For those with a strong work ethic, hard work is a virtue, but the work in itself isn’t always virtuous. The next generation of talent are set to challenge the status quo of hard work for fair pay further yet, and they’re estimated to comprise 75 percent of the workforce by 2025. Organizations are desperate to find ways to make work more meaningful, purposeful, and engaging for people.

People want to be self-directed, trusted, and empowered to do the right thing. Even in seemingly mundane workplaces like the Faber-Castell pencil factory in Nuremburg,¹ people are happier, more engaged, and do right for the company when they’re included and valued as people, not just resources or units of effort. A senior manager at Faber-Castell chalks this up in part to the ...