Mapping Organizational Dysfunctions to Foster Outcome-Oriented Results

Here is the hard truth: organizations, regardless of their size or industry, have their shortcomings. Even large enterprises often deal with complex internal politics and resistance to change. As these companies expand, they become less adaptable and more rigid, with a narrative of ongoing success where a drop in performance is either covered up or attributed to a convenient scapegoat.  

To prevent rigidity, we must reconsider organizations from a systems thinking approach, viewing the organization as an ecosystem. Failure to do so can lead to employees becoming misaligned with the company’s vision and mission, resulting in counterproductive behavior and the delivery of unneeded solutions, which unintentionally leads to unhappy customers. 

It is essential to take a step back and recalibrate. This approach enables us to rediscover the organizational drivers that initially took an idea to form the company’s vision and mission. 

The product vision is a company’s declaration of how they intend to make a positive impact on the world with their product. Marty Cagan describes it as follows: 

“The product vision describes the future you are trying to create and, most importantly, how this vision will improve the lives of your customers (…) The product vision is what keeps teams inspired and excited to come to work each day – month after month, year after year.” (Marty Cagan, Transformed, Chapter 13) 

If the teams working on your product are not aware of the company and product vision, nor what the company vision is, then they will be at a loss of how to execute a product strategy to drive meaningful customer outcomes. So, what do we do? We must move. 

From Activities and Outputs to Outcomes and Impacts  

Newly appointed leadership teams often ignore the foundations built up to this point and rush straight ahead into modeling the behavior and system they envision.  

In those cases, it is typical for the leadership team and, by extension, the company to attribute the value they deliver to customers to the work put out during a quarter. That is because measuring activities and outputs is easy. While that may sound like a clever idea, it often leads to negative outcomes. Goodhart’s law states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”   

Customers are indifferent to the number of meetings, lines of code, defect reports, and product releases you have produced. What matters to them is whether your product offers new or improved functionalities to enhance their experiences, such as providing more convenient access to entertainment or enhanced reliability in navigation.  

Switching from measuring the value the company delivers from employee outputs to focusing on customer outcomes and impacts is challenging.  

“Organizations only create value when they improve the outcomes that their customers experience. They cannot create value for customers by reducing costs, becoming more efficient, or even delivering faster, although improving these things may help them deliver value to customers.” (Kong, Miller, Bittner, Ripley, Unlocking Business Agility with Evidence-Based Management, p. 51) 

So, how do we deliver that customer value in practice? By identifying inefficiencies that hinder the company’s ability to provide value to their customers, gaining approval from senior management, and then implementing the solution company-wide.  

This is where Dysfunction Mapping comes into play. Dysfunction Mapping is a tool created by Michael Lloyd that presents Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters with an empirical approach to identifying and addressing dysfunctions related to Agile and Scrum. By using this tool, we can build a compelling case that change is necessary to deliver more valuable customer outcomes. 

Dysfunction Mapping is a five-step process: identifying symptoms, tying those symptoms to dysfunctional behavior, crafting a purpose statement as to why solving those dysfunctions is beneficial, presenting a solution, and finally measuring that our proposed solution is yielding results. 

But before we jump right in, we must ask and observe.  

Ask and Observe  

When you join an organization, the first action is to begin observing and asking questions. Talk to those you work with directly, subordinates and anyone within your reach. Observe the company’s purpose, mission, and culture. The work values and what stands out as being most crucial for the company.  

There is a good chance you will spot things that don’t seem right as soon as you start. Excessive focus on fulfilling projects with rigid deadlines, infrequent releases, high technical debt, lack of continuous product discovery, overemphasis on predictability, and lack of data-driven decision-making.  

Naturally, we will list them out. Spend time writing down everything you see and hear to gather insight. You will soon find that the list of issues to tackle is massive, ranging from “Stakeholders exhibit a lack of trust in teams, leading to micromanagement,” to “There’s little to no direct customer interaction” and “The organization prioritizes predictability over innovation.”  

Identify and Connect  

When you spend time writing down symptoms that cause negative impacts, you can end up with a massive list of potential issues, such as this one:  

The more time you spend observing and asking questions, the more issues you will be able to write down. However, our goal isn’t just to list problems, we are here to propose solutions. To do this, look for themes that pop up repeatedly and connect them to a single item. While doing that, combine any overlapping issues you have seen. This is also the stage where we hypothesize the root cause of those issues. We assume these symptoms lead to a given dysfunction. There are no right or wrong answers. As you start rearranging your board and linking items, your list will start looking like this:  

Once we have outlined our symptoms and dysfunctions, it is time to figure out how fixing these dysfunctions will lead to positive outcomes.  

Outline Beneficial Practices  

Dysfunctions result from missing practices hampering positive business, customer, or organizational outcomes. They are gaps between the current and desired state and are often influenced by variables such as office politics, process inefficiency, demotivated product teams, etc.   

Taking a step back, detaching, and reflecting on how solving these dysfunctions will bring us closer to meeting customer needs can help us weed out impactful decisions from noise. That allows us to create Purpose Statements – What the situation would be like if the Dysfunctions did not exist. 

Let us illustrate this from the information up to this point: 

Dysfunction: Customer feedback is not gathered and analyzed early and often.  

Purpose: Development aligns with user needs and expectations, leading to higher customer satisfaction and reduced churn.  

A single ‘Purpose’ statement can be tied to multiple dysfunctions simultaneously, which allows us to address various concerns.  

Propose and Regularly Evaluate Solutions  

The journey so far looks like this: We entered a new organizational structure, asked around and observed, wrote down customer and employee complaints, tied them to a common theme, and found a reason they are valuable to amend.  

The next step is to tie the Purpose statements we have to Solutions. The solution is a hypothesis that is grounded in empirical and evidence-based principles. The solution must also be tied to an action that will lead to a positive outcome. 

Without adequately understanding the outcomes of our hypothesis, we cannot be sure they effectively solved the earlier dysfunctions. We don’t want to simply assume that our solutions are correct; we need to measure them. To understand what metrics to use for measurement, we need to review the original symptoms we found and base our measures on fixes related to them.  

The Purpose-Solution-Measure workflow will look like this when everything is set and done. 

Next Steps & Wrap-Up 

So which dysfunction should we tackle first? Let us start with the minimum viable dysfunction to prove we are on the right track. Once we have one sheep in the pen, the rest will follow. 

While Dysfunction Mapping is a tool originally intended for exploring and addressing Agile and Scrum-related dysfunctions, it is also a valuable tool for identifying, understanding, and proposing actionable changes, be it on a business, company, or product level. By using it, it will enable your business to move past tracking activities and producing outputs to better align the company with outcomes that will positively impact your customers.