Think. Build. Ship. Tweak.

Forget the days of heading to the CD shop to buy a CD – just stream what you want to listen to via an online service like Spotify.

So how does a business like Spotify get their sh*t together and take on a market, and an industry and revel in the opportunity to disrupt?
 
Henrik Kniberg shined a light on some of the leadership and management insights of Spotify at a conference recently - he's been working as a lean and agile coach.  

Go anti-silo and have squads and tribes
Henrik reckons a minimum viable bureaurcracy is the way to go…to group people into tribes; to have squads of people who collaborate with each other to find the best solution. These groups cut across the organisation. It’s somewhat of an anti silo strategy.

Healthy culture heals broken processes
Don’t try and scale your product or service – rather, descale the organisation. A healthy culture is what will heal broken processes. We’ve all felt the pain of a broken process when we’ve interacted with a business or organisation and things just didn't go well :-(
 
It seems that control is dying but not yet buried. In fact it’s trust that flourishes; it’s more powerful than control. Having autonomy across the organisation means you can move fast. Be agile.

What agility looks like
In Henrik's words, agility looks like this:

• Think it
• Build it
• Ship it
• Tweak it

Don’t you love it?
 
And it's alignment that enables the autonomy. Without people being aligned to the vision, plan and purpose, you’ll create fear, silos, yawn culture, and a host of flow on problems.

Fail fast ... and recover from it
You’ve got to let people make mistakes. To fail fast. But then recover from the failure.

I think too many leaders think they're encouraging failure yet secretly fear failure because it takes so damn long to recover from it – “hmmm, best to not go there at all,” they think.
 
Rather, go there. Fail it fast. But Henrik says limit your ‘blast radiance’ – limit the effect of the fail and how far it impacts around the organisation.

Are we learning anything people?

Leverage the learning from the fail. And further, you’ve got to then share the learning from the fail. Trust and support people.

Contemporary leaders of today have to let go and let their teams make sense of what needs to be done and how to do it. Community is what matters.
 
Move fast, fail fast, limit the blast.
Think. Build. Ship. Tweak.