Dhaval: There’s no industry today that is safe. In other words, the taxi industry you got taken over by Uber and left. The media industry has been taken over by napster and then later by all the streaming devices. So there is no company on the planet that can not be taken over by a small group of seven, eight people who are working in a startup trying to basically take your bread and butter. The way organizations have historically solved this problem is by hiring more people, having more talent, and then compartmentalizing it so when they look at how am I now going to cope with all of the threats that are coming at me, which is probably 100 start ups. You can’t tell which startup will take you over, but you know one of them will. So how do you compete with that? And the way people are choosing to do that is by trying to do whatever they’ve already been doing, but only faster. So if you look at the problem that the organizations have, they’ve tried to solve a typical competitive problem by trying to more put more people at the problem. In other words, we keep doing the stuff that you’ve already been doing only now do it faster, right? They don’t change the underlying system and that underlying system is a very tayloristic mindset of compartmentalizing people, compartmentalizing their function, and trying to compartmentalize even more whenever they want to try to increase throughput.

When we talk about scaling, LeSS especially, it talks about descaling because it’s about going back to the basics of why you have this system that you have and that there must be a better way of doing what you’ve been doing without taking on the overhead.

Bas: A lot of those startups that are disrupting the industry, they grow and they become the same big inefficient company. So why does that happen?

It happened because they didn’t get out of that mindset. Even when they were a small group, somewhere in the back of their head is still a large scale development shoot [like a plant] to work that way. Luckily we’re not that way yet, but when they grow, they make the same mistakes. If you wait, they follow the same assumption, the effect of ending up with the same kind of organizations has more to do with the assumptions that they have about how work should be done. And if lots of people have the same assumptions, then even if they think it’s a bad idea, they automatically fall into the same traps over and over again.

Dhaval: So think about a smaller company that gets bigger and it got to where they are doing work a certain particular way. Now when I face a threat, I have the natural inclination to say I need to try harder of what I’ve always been doing, or get better at whatever I’ve been doing, instead of wondering why can’t whatever got me here, why can’t it get me from here to somewhere else?

Right. And that fundamental question should challenge a lot of mindsets around what would you do if you started up again, as opposed to saying, now I have 500,000 or 500 people and now have to figure it out how to best utilize 500 people.

Lance: So one of the things I learned in in Bas’s class is about trying to solve a problem with just one team first and then using that as a model, and then figure out how to scale that across multiple teams. You’re sort of saying the same thing. If we go back to our startup mentality, what is it that we did well and then let’s try to figure out how to scale that.

Bas: In one of the LeSS adoptions I was involved in with electric telecom system. At some point we had a on a workshop with some of the management to talk about less and and what they were, what they were going to do. And one of the most funniest moments was when, when there’s this guy and he had been working for the company for 35 years and I was telling him how less worked and especially like how teams saw to work directly with users and customers. And at some point in time I saw him gradually smiling more and more during the course. At some point he came to me and he says, you know what, this course is a lot of fun because what you’re explaining is exactly the way we used to work.

Dhaval: I’ve had similar experiences because something happened in, I don’t know somewhere in the middle because I talked people who’ve been in industry for a very long time and they describe a constant interaction with the customer directly delivering software, doing their own testing and having their own scripts and you see the same kind of dynamic in smaller startup teams, so very young people, industry veterans, but in the middle there or something.

Bas: So I asked him, I said, well, why did you stop doing that? And he said, well, we grew larger and we assumed we couldn’t work in that way anymore. So we started working in a different way. And then I asked did that work better? He says, no, it’s good that we’re finally going back to the original way of which the company was successful. The original way of working, because I find that fascinating that they. They ended up throwing away the things that actually made it successful because they grew larger. There’s all these assumptions about what can and cannot work with a large company. And so instead saying, when we grow larger can we keep the way of working that made us sucessful, they often throw that away and go back to how they think larger organizations need to work.

Next episode Bas, Dhaval, and I talk about Ownership by the team and the Product