Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Gene Kim introduces Sam Yeats, founder and CEO of TeamForm. Gene says he finally met Sam the previous year in Amsterdam after following his work for several years, and that Sam will present work benchmarking hundreds of organizations. The work uncovers how organizations create strategies, fund programs, set goals, organize, manage silos, and execute on goals, along with the problems that can result. Gene frames the talk around common patterns and configurations, and says nearly all organizations appear to be missing some critical wiring. He notes that this community understands the importance of being wired well so lots of people can work together toward common objectives.

Sam Yeats

Sam thanks Gene and the conference team, then introduces himself as Sam Yeats, founder of TeamForm. He says he has been drawn to wiring things and working on complex systems for most of his life: soldering circuits with his dad as a five-year-old, running coax and Ethernet through his primary school and high school, dropping out of high school to start an e-commerce hosting business, networking a thousand servers, and supporting global retailers and fast-moving retail scaleups.

That experience exposed him to the challenges and opportunities large, complex organizations have to perform and outperform by thinking about the way they work. He later orchestrated the transformation program of Australia's largest telco, which was facing an unprecedented level of change. The learnings from the DevOps Enterprise community were invaluable as they introduced modern software delivery practices, cloud, and new ways of working. For the last five years, Sam says he has put all his energy into solving underlying root wiring challenges facing organizations, and now works with some of the largest organizations in the world on this wiring problem.

Sam opens with a scenario: imagine an organization where the light switches are wired to the fire alarm, but the fact is clearly documented in the employee handbook on page 125, section C. Existing team members know the deal because they learned the hard way. New team members reveal very quickly who skipped the onboarding course. In that example, the feedback loop is immediate: you hit the switch and the bell goes off. But many organizational miswirings have feedback loops of months. You do not know something is miswired until something has gone badly wrong, or, more commonly, you choose to live with the miswiring. Sam calls that learned helplessness.

He says he wants to share an experience that made him passionate about fixing these problems. It starts with the unit of a team in a context. While mobilizing hundreds of teams, there was always a shortfall of people with security backgrounds. He found that this unique role type was funded entirely with project money, and he found one person booking time to more than a hundred projects just to stay in the job. There was also a full-time person, Mary, doing all the coordination for those funding codes.

Coming from startup land, where people work end to end and do not worry about bureaucracy and silos, Sam started building a map. He wanted to know why it took so long and so much process to capitalize one hour of time through the system. No map seemed to exist, so he had to talk to dozens of people to understand how money flowed from A to B. The simplified map showed people creating things on the left and many other roles involved in their part of the puzzle, but none incentivized to fix the end-to-end problem.

Sam says the gravity behind all these systems is very heavy. Most finance systems were implemented decades ago, and modern ways of working have not landed back in those systems.

He then moves to the unit of the team. Modern ways of working, including Accelerate, Team Topologies, and similar bodies of work, treat the cross-functional team as one of the most fundamental components. Yet when Sam asks hundreds of companies whether they have cross-functional teams, 80% say yes and that it is their primary unit for organizing people. However, in the majority of companies, with only very rare exceptions, this organizational data about teams is stuck in a spreadsheet. It is also in PowerPoint slides and sometimes Confluence pages, but those are static and not connected to the data.

He shows an example of one team spreadsheet: three columns manually refreshed from the HR platform, two columns manually loaded and mapped from the portfolio management platform, and the rest of the columns maintained by a well-meaning Excel craftsperson trying to look after and protect these teams. Sam says this is an underlying core wiring problem everyone should be working on.

Audience Pulse Check

Because it is a live conference, Sam asks the audience to engage with a quick poll by scanning a QR code. Gene asks him to read the questions aloud. The first question is: in your current role or organization, how long did it take for you to feel really effective, not just effective but knowing how to get things done in the organization? The second asks how clear the language is that the organization uses to describe its strategy, work, and structure, from confusing to clear. The last asks what people call the unit of a cross-functional team. Sam sees answers including squad and team, and says team appears to be the winner.

Sam Yeats

Sam says these are questions he has asked hundreds of times in organizations, and every organization is different. He asks the audience to imagine being asked to draw the company's strategy, work, and structure, and how it all hangs together on one page. Could they draw it top to bottom across the whole business? Would others draw the same thing? Who would they ask to help fill in the gaps?

He recently ran that exercise with 40 enterprise technology leaders in a room, using the context of onboarding a new starter. Within 20 minutes, everyone could draw a picture. Some companies spend millions of dollars on consultants to draw similar maps, work breakdown structures, and golden threads, but the leaders could draw their organizations quickly. Some maps had gaps or question marks. Some were more top-down, with more clarity at the top; others were team-up focused.

In one example map, the left side showed organizing structure from ELT down to squads, the middle showed strategy from business goals down to quarterly roadmaps, and the right side showed the work breakdown structure from solutions down to epics and stories. When companies shared their maps, Sam asked what they could improve or steal from another company. In that example, the work breakdown structure was the improvement area.

Looking across companies with more than 5,000 staff, Sam says every company uses different terminology. Some areas, such as work breakdown structures of epics and stories, show a lot of commonality. Other areas, such as company strategy and how it breaks down to the next level, have a wide variety of terms. Small teams at the center of organizations can spend months trying to define what a KPI is versus an OKR. The opportunity is to build shared understanding across the whole organization of what these things mean.

Sam says this variety is totally fine: one size does not fit all, quoting John Smart, and nor should it. Every organization is a complex adaptive system that needs to find its own terminology and way of working. But this does create challenges when communicating between teams.

He shares three learnings.

The first is lack of shared understanding: what is said does not always mean what is understood and received by the other party. In the exercise, even two teammates from the same company built entirely different maps of their organization and the terminology used. Sam asks how, when people do not share an understanding of how work gets done, they can be confident they will deliver value and provide a positive work environment.

He shares statistics: 90% of leadership do not feel they can drill down from strategy to the work being done by teams, so their ability to check what is happening is limited. Forty percent of teams are unclear on how their work aligns to company strategy. Companies with staff who have a clear connection to strategy feel they are two times better able to meet customer needs. Sam says it is important to work through these things.

The second learning is that the messy middle is not transparent. Performance data is siloed, not transparent, and shared in the middle layer on a need-to-know basis. Middle management is often so busy managing up and across that they forget to tell teams what the strategy, goals, and commitments are, especially in larger organizations. In a study, middle management believed their plans were 90% aligned to company strategy; when those plans were inspected, only 30% were actually aligned.

The third learning is that processes and systems have not been rewired to support how organizations are now working. Many organizational transformation challenges can be traced to these underlying wiring challenges. Sam says it is incredibly important for transformation leads to make sure change sticks. They need the company to embed and incorporate these changes and reduce the risk that, if transformation leaders leave for days or months, things regress to how they were. Just as IT and technology systems are built for resilience, new ways of operating need to stick and embed. That requires working on the hard foundations of how companies are set up.

Sam says new principles are needed across these underlying systems. HR is very good at paying people, but HR systems do not recognize new units and constructs such as cross-functional teams, chapters, and capabilities. Organizations should make underlying systems more user-centric, foster transparency by default where goals are shared and not hidden, and make the underlying data measurable and observable so they can improve and demonstrate the value of the changes they are driving.

Sam closes with two calls to action. The first is to extend the ambition beyond modern practices and fix the underlying wiring challenges. Change is hard, but it is worth sticking your neck out and building a coalition of the willing to address underlying impediments affecting all teams.

The second call to action is clarity. Sam says clarity is a core responsibility as leaders and a basic right for teams. With considerable people movement happening, people leaving and joining organizations, teams need to readjust and reteam. Leaders have a responsibility to onboard team members and give them the clarity they need to be effective, help them understand their connection to organizational purpose, and help them be part of the team.

Sam leaves the audience with two resources. TeamForm is documenting how companies work at HowWeTeam.fyi, and he has a Strategy to Execution Map template that will be posted in the Slack channel. He will also be in Gather if anyone wants to map their organization together. He thanks Gene and the audience. Gene thanks Sam.