In the Autumn of 2024, I wrote a series of articles about the future of agile and the changes we were experiencing in the agile space. One article summarized my advice for how agilists can move forward in their careers given the ongoing downturn in agile, and one of my suggestions was that agile coaches should consider upping their game and become enterprise designers. Great idea, but how do you go about moving into enterprise design?
In this blog I address four questions:
To answer these questions, I’m going to lean heavily on the great work that’s been done by the Intersection Group, a European not-for-profit organization that I am an advisor to.
According to the Intersection Group, enterprise design (ED) is the collaborative practice of designing and creating better enterprises. To do this, they suggest that you identify a purpose worth pursuing (identity), identify how you’ll make a valuable contribution to people’s lives (experience), and identify how you’ll perform and deliver on your promises (architecture).
In many ways this is applying agile thinking at the enterprise level, rather than the team level. Where agile practice focuses (mostly) on building better teams, ED focuses on building better organizations. Enterprise design, at least as Intersection Group promotes it, occurs at the intersection of three enterprise design facets: identity, experience, and architecture. Enterprises must design their organisation, brand, and product.
Every agile coach I’ve ever met wanted to help people, to help them make their work more enjoyable, and often to help them become more effective in that work. Unfortunately, agile coaches often run into problems outside of their scope of influence, challenges that extend beyond the team to the organization itself. Many have come to realize that the gnarly problems, the ones that are both interesting and impactful, tend to be greater in scope than what agile by itself is well suited to deal with.
If you want to coach at the enterprise level, you need to learn about enterprise design. This includes both ways of thinking (WoT) and ways of working (WoW). A critical aspect of the enterprise design WoT is to take a holistic, collaborative approach. Your agile WoT provides a good foundation for that. Regarding WoW, the heart of enterprise design is the activity of mapping (modeling) and describing enterprises and their potential evolution, ideally via a collaborative co-creation approach. Intersection Group has developed a simple language called EDGY to support doing this very thing. The following diagram summarizes the EDGY conceptual model.
The quick answer is Intersection Group. They offer:
An easy start is to read their Enterprise Design Patterns book as it will give you a feel for fundamental enterprise design concepts. Then you should consider getting some training. I’ve taken their 6-week cohort-based remote training in EDGY and learned a lot from it. They also offer a half-day introductory training workshop which I have not attended although have heard good things about. These two things, reading and training, will get you going.
But, as you know, to truly learn something you need to experience it. Ideally you want to find a position where you can work with other enterprise designers so that you can learn from their experience. Failing that, you want to bootstrap your way into enterprise design by applying what you’ve learned on an enterprise-spanning initiative.
Moving into enterprise design is a viable career option for any agile coach who is willing to expand their horizons. Much of your agile WoT and WoW will provide a foundation to do so, although some will need to be discarded and replaced with more holistic strategies.
I also can’t say enough good things about the Intersection conference. I attended in 2023 and had a great learning experience where I met a lot of fantastic, experienced people. I’ll also be attending and speaking at Intersection 25 this year in Brussels, Sept 17-19. The conference has a great line up and I hope you can make it.
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ENTERPRISE DESIGN PATTERNS
Capturing a wealth of experience from many sources, four world-class enterprise designers and architects present a collection of 35 immediately applicable solutions to successful enterprise design.
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