Organisation Refactoring and Culture Hacking : Lessons from Software
summary
Argues that small, continuous org refactors beat top‑down rewrites and shows concrete experiments: build a visible “roles and circles” map to expose who holds power, automate approvals with an Outlook rule to prove flow (works briefly, then splits into two streams when finance overloads), adopt the advice process plus written ADRs to kill meeting‑driven consensus and speed decisions, and devolve authority instead of delegating. Reports running teams up to 98 people and shows these changes increase ownership and delivery velocity when tuned.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Org Refactoring & Culture Hacking Andrew Harmel-Law
- 1:09Hacking teams is almost as much fun as hacking code
- 2:15Features have no value until they are in the hands of a user and being used for a productive effort. So any activity not spent getting the next most valuable feature into the hands of a user quickly is just waste.
- 9:00[P]laced in the same system, people [...] tend to produce similar results
- 11:28How do
- 11:39We can do a better job
- 12:18Three Statements
- 12:57The best people to drive these changes are those closest to the action - us, the makers.
- 13:14Our existing maker skills are ideally suited for this work.
- 13:34Refactoring and Hacking
- 15:41I. Map the Human
- 16:49Once upon a time...
- 21:33Uncover the Circles & Roles
- 33:12The Advice
- 38:20It's about POWER
- 39:35Devolution Beats Delegation
- 42:26Right changes in end-to-end dynamic systems++
- 43:55Circles and Roles++
- 45:28Refactoring or Hack?
- 49:18What questions do you have? (or tweet me @al94781)
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