The first chapter of the first book on LeSS (Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking & Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum) is Systems Thinking. It’s the key fifth discipline for a learning organization… and LeSS is about creating learning organizations for product development. And systems thinking is also a key to owning not renting ideas about organizational design, because it has tools to help people talk about, reason about, and visualize organizational systems, and as a consequence arrive at their own insights about a system and its dynamics.
Concretely, doing systems thinking means to sketch, think about, and talk about system dynamics with a causal loop diagram (or system model). System models are used regularly in introductions to LeSS, to help see the dynamics of what’s going on in large-scale development. It is useful to understand them for that reason alone. And more useful to you, we recommend you do these together with colleagues at a whiteboard.
Thus, we have an opportunity to come together and learn to model to have a conversation about a system, so in this meetup we will do a hands-on workshop to think about the system by modelling with causal loop diagrams. Interesting and useful!
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