If you have ever questioned your current organizational structure, its roles, links, dedication or ways of relating, then, with the practical “Meddlers Game” of Management 3.0, you will find a way to solve it.
It gives you a great overview, and information to discuss with your colleagues the current structure. It even allows you to propose new organizational structures. You can create new roles, new teams and reorganize the structure as many times as you want to meet your needs.
Structures influence the way we create products and services, we have to be flexible to adapt and respond quickly to the changing market. It is important to design structures that encourage and enable communication, avoiding the inability to work efficiently and rigid structures.
I work in a program that has 4 teams. On many occasions, people in the teams have asked me if the current structure is the best way to organize ourselves. That is why I considered applying this practice and now I share with you one of the ways to do it:
- Gather all the people from your teams, managers and all the people related to the product that is being built. Those people who can make the change possible should also be present.
- Identify the weaknesses of the current organizational structure.
- Form several working groups, and give each group a set of Meddlers.
- Explain the rules of the dynamic:
- Each hexagonal figure represents a functional team that only has people with the same role or a multifunctional team that has people with different roles.
- Connecting the sides of the teams would represent that they are collaborating and providing value to one another.
- Faces represent individuals and hats represent roles.
- New roles can be created.
- Each team must have a maximum of 9 members.
- When all the groups have completed their proposal, each organizational model is discussed. The best way to organize each group is open to a debate.
- Finally, it is necessary to agree on the new organizational structure, taking the strengths from each model, establishing steps to follow and working agreements for collaboration among teams.
Meddlers is a very useful practice, the teams participate, propose their ideas, self-organize, become part of the decision-making in the organization and agree on the best solution.
After several execution sprints and the implementation of changes in the organizational structure we obtained the following benefits:
- Facilitates the teams to self-organize.
- Reduces internal dependencies between teams
- Helps to adopt agile practices in a geographically distributed team.
- Offers a good balance between functional teams and multifunctional teams
- Improves communication
- Works efficiently
- Empowers people to define their roles according to the team’s or company’s aims.
With this practice I have had good results, it is an experiment where people participate with enthusiasm to find the best way to organize themselves.
However, I learned that depending on the organization we will have more or less freedom to make changes in the teams.
I have worked in structurally complex organizations, where resistance to change is very common, in these cases, as far as possible, I have proposed to start with a new structure to respond to a specific product or service.
In large organizations, I encourage these bottom-up experiments. I believe that one way to adopt new ways of working is by demonstrating the results.
I invite you to rethink your current organizational structure. Look for spaces to analyze new forms, reinvent, allow innovation to emerge and experiment. The results are amazing.
Rosana De Faria 