Descaling Your Organization

by | Jan 31, 2019

Track 4: Scaling Agile to Enterprise | Room: 1454 – Auditorium
Kumar Dattatreyan, John Maxwell Certified Coach, Speaker and Trainer, Xscale Steward NA; ICAgile Learning Expert, Treya Consulting

Scaling is an anti-pattern. Big meetings, long loops, slow cadence, tight coupling, and deep hierarchies represent bottlenecks no matter how Agile an individual team may be. De-scaling refactors your organization into self-managing streams of self-organizing teams working together like pods of dolphins.

How can organizations de-scale? How do we balance the autonomy of teams against alignment to business realities?

In this talk, we’ll explore some of the popular scaling frameworks, as well as XScale’s approach to scaling agile to organizations; Descaling. This talk focuses on the metrics and practice patterns for de-scaling based on a uniquely successful historical precedent, the Iroquois Confederacy, which sustained a de-scaled society of hundreds of thousands for over five centuries. We’ll explore some successful implementations of this model, including Spotify, Apple/Steve Jobs DRI’s, as well as Haier, the world’s largest appliance maker.

The biggest gap we face in any transformation is leadership. It’s not that leadership isn’t bought in, or that leadership doesn’t have the intent to change, but too often, leadership doesn’t have the tools or skills to achieve the outcomes they desire.With over 20 years in the software industry in a variety of roles, and a decade running restaurants prior to that, Kumar possesses a unique skill set and approach to transformational coaching that’s evolved and continues to evolve today. He strongly believes that guiding leaders on a path to a coaching mindset is key to unlocking the potential of the individual, the team, and ultimately the organization. Being a former Restaurateur set the stage for a long journey as a leader and a coach. Working in restaurants equipped Kumar with the skills and the pragmatism to adapt quickly to changing environments. Kumar is a recognized agile change agent and leader and his experience in traditional environments and his pragmatic approach to Agile Transformation allows him to help organizations bridge the gap when adopting Agile practices. He utilizes the John Maxwell approach to coaching, teaching and mentoring to help his client gain valuable outcomes. Most recently, Kumar has been working to bring XScale, a collection of practice patterns that emphasize an ecosystem of organizational agility to his clients.