How do people learn how to ski? You wear boots and skis. Somehow, you get hauled up the mountain. There's snow or a snow-like surface. Other skiers and snowboarders surround you. You end up skiing—albeit slowly at first. You fall and learn how to fall safely. If you choose to take a group lesson, you join a community of similarly skilled skiers and experienced teachers. And when the class ends, invariably, you join your friends (with more diverse levels of experience) in a less formal learning environment.
What you are describing looks like the work an inexperienced consultant, or a "wholesale" one. A more experienced (and/or independent) consultant would know that rolling out a framework before having re-framed the problem together with the client is a risk.
And since companies have the tendency to buy frameworks, the "framework delivery" consultants come with it. There are also consultants like myself who come after many waves of other consultants and frameworks: you find what you find, and never have the luxury of starting from scratch.
Sometime you really have to go through the "crawl, walk, run" metaphor because someone tried to make the company run on a framework that was unfit for the context: so you have to "un-framework" the situation and go along a reverse, "run, walk, crawl" path.
That's not infantilizing: it's called assessing the situation (something that somebody conveniently forgot to do earlier...) and choosing the correct course of action for the situation — and that sometimes means stopping all the nonsensical framework-y stuff and doing something more practical like, for example, an extensive dependency mapping activity amongst the teams.
Shu-ha-ri. Shu can just be following a framework for a bit until you gain confidence to Ha it. As long as that is clear amongst all parties, nothing wrong with frameworks. If you follow them mechanically and treat them as an end-state, bad things will happen.
TBM 39B/52: Crawl, Walk, Run, and the Fragility of Frameworks
What you are describing looks like the work an inexperienced consultant, or a "wholesale" one. A more experienced (and/or independent) consultant would know that rolling out a framework before having re-framed the problem together with the client is a risk.
And since companies have the tendency to buy frameworks, the "framework delivery" consultants come with it. There are also consultants like myself who come after many waves of other consultants and frameworks: you find what you find, and never have the luxury of starting from scratch.
Sometime you really have to go through the "crawl, walk, run" metaphor because someone tried to make the company run on a framework that was unfit for the context: so you have to "un-framework" the situation and go along a reverse, "run, walk, crawl" path.
That's not infantilizing: it's called assessing the situation (something that somebody conveniently forgot to do earlier...) and choosing the correct course of action for the situation — and that sometimes means stopping all the nonsensical framework-y stuff and doing something more practical like, for example, an extensive dependency mapping activity amongst the teams.
Shu-ha-ri. Shu can just be following a framework for a bit until you gain confidence to Ha it. As long as that is clear amongst all parties, nothing wrong with frameworks. If you follow them mechanically and treat them as an end-state, bad things will happen.
I wonder how you would build and scale an environment for agile given your observations here?
Frameworks should connect and contextualise but often they do not.
Love it!
You’ll also enjoy this piece about how ski school teaches you to “crawl” and there are better ways to learn to ski: https://pullnews.medium.com/ski-better-faster-b871acdc5b13