What do these things have in common? A lot more than you might think!

During our SPC(T) class last week, SAFe Fellow and continuous-learning, deep-OCM-thinker Joe Vallone pointed our class to John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber’s latest fable, That’s Not How We Do It Here! The title alone piqued my interest and as a fan of their prior fable Our Iceberg is Melting  (I will always remember Penguin ‘NoNo’ in that book; and BTW if you really want to learn more about the NoNos of change management, check out ‘Zed’  in Play Bigger).  I ordered my copy right away.

As I’m still a fan of holding an actual book in my hands, the hardcopy arrived one day later (how does Amazon do that?). I read it immediately. Through the story of protagonists Matt, Nadia, Ayo, and a host of threatened Kalahari Meerkat colonies, the authors explore the ‘dual operating system’ in metaphor form in a fun and easy to read fable. And they somehow manage to advance our understanding of Leadership and Management at the same time.

In my last post, I described the more explicit inclusion of Operational Value Streams in the latest SAFe 5 update, and I promised another on the other half of the dual operating system, the half that contains Development Value Streams.

Perhaps a quick read of this little book will help you bridge the gap and maybe better avoid the dreaded ‘vulture creature’ aiming to eat your company. Besides, I haven’t gotten around to writing that next post yet anyway.

Stay tuned and stay SAFe!

—Dean