In the 2010s, a new Swedish way of organising product development work took the
tech industry by storm. Henrik
Kniberg’s whitepaper about scaling agile –
full of hip new words like “squads” – was the defining management fad of the
decade. If you’re in tech, you probably have fond memories of a day some five or
six years ago when you found out you and your colleagues were soon to be
re-organised according to this model.
Some of us were so impressed that we were inspired to emigrate - leaving behind
our families, friends, and favourite burrito places - and go to work for the
company where the model originated. Many of us were astonished by the contrast
between Sweden and the countries we’d left behind. World-leading union
membership levels had won a level of dignity for workers here that was
unimaginable back home. Six months of parental leave on full pay is commonplace
here thanks to unions.
We didn’t have a collective agreement of our own back then. We didn’t much care
either. We were more excited about that world famous agile methodology. And
besides, we still benefited from the herd immunity of all the other Swedish
companies’ collective agreements, since matching those collectively bargained
compensation packages was a prerequisite of competing for talent in Sweden.
The 2010s are behind us now, and the 2020s are shaping up to be quite a
different kind of decade. One thing I want to carry forward, though, is Sweden
being an exporter of cool, progressive ways to improve organisations. For the
2020s, Sweden’s 70% nationwide union membership is what the world should be
copying.
To explain why, I want to share this modern reimagining of that infamous 2012
scaling agile whitepaper, and try to bridge the union knowledge gap using ideas
we’re already familiar with in tech. Just like the whitepaper was back then,
this is somewhat aspirational. My colleagues and I haven’t achieved our
collective agreement yet. This is the way for us to help keep Sweden at the
vanguard of the tech industry, and give our employer a chance to enjoy another
ten years as the most exciting, relevant and influential employer brand.
Command and control
We need to lay down some foundations first to create some perspective for the
model itself, so let’s begin with a completely blank slate. Here’s a
hypothetical company with 24 employees.
The individual worker is the basic indivisible unit of this org chart. Each one
sells their labour power to the employer in exchange for a salary.
The most simplistic organisational model is direct command and control, where
the employer assigns tasks to each individual worker one by one. Here’s an
illustration that visualises the employer’s line of communication with the
workers under the command and control model.
Looks like absolute chaos, right? Siloing each worker like this would
disincentivise collaboration and inhibit the formation of communities. People
facing similar challenges wouldn’t build relationships with each other, so
opportunities to share experiences and uncover economies of scale would be
missed. Nonexistent collaboration would lead to significant duplication of
effort. The lack of transparency would breed suspicion and resentment about
fairness. And if a worker became ill, for example, whatever tasks they were
responsible for would simply stop happening. Bottom line: you’d make less money
this way.
This approach to management is not trendy at all. Capital recognises that
workers achieve better outcomes through organisation. Workers agree.
Squad
Let’s assume the different arrow colours in the diagram above represent
different business goals that the tasks contribute to. Under Henrik Kniberg’s
model we should get the people with the same mission together in squads and give
those squads ownership of that mission instead of assigning each individual task
from the top down. So let’s get our re-org started and set up some squads.
Company owners who are accustomed to the command-and-control model can find this
quite a scary transition. And it’s understandable. Superficially, it’s a lot of
power to relinquish. And all those new squads have leaders insisting on new
things like autonomy and ownership, which initially feels more like a challenge
to their central authority than a new kind of collaboration.
The results are impossible to argue with though. The increased engagement alone
is worth equivalent to a doubling of the headcount. Workers pool their knowledge
and discover that each individual had their own unique workflows and
workarounds. The best workflows spread now, and everything speeds up.
The company owners discover that they have a lot more free time. Under
command-and-control, workers required their constant attention. Each time a task
was completed, a new one had to be assigned immediately. This reactive work ate
up most of their time, reducing their availability for initiatives to explore
potential new sources of value.
In exchange for a bit of trust and autonomy, the workers are able to deliver a
significant increase in surplus value to the employer. Everyone’s happy. The
employer can grow the business, and the workers are that little bit less
alienated from their product.
We’re not finished yet, though. The dependencies and relationships between the
squads are important, but this org design doesn’t address them yet. If one squad
needs something from another, but they’re busy on another project, what takes
priority? How do we ensure that the squad missions are working towards a
coherent overall goal? Is that the company owner’s job?
Tribe
Continuing our re-org, let’s identify our squads with related areas and put them
in tribes accordingly. Our imaginary company has two. They’re quite small for
tribes really, but this model is all about scaling anyway so let’s assume there
are big expansion plans for both tribes.
This extra organisational layer maximises the strategic impact of the work of
the squads. Tribe leads have a very broad perspective of the tribe’s business
context, enabling them to identify opportunities that may not be apparent at the
lower level to product managers in squads.
It also further streamlines the communication between the employer and the
workers.
The broader missions of tribes means they operate on longer timelines than
squads. This enables employers to set a long-term goal and make the tribe leads
accountable for delivering it. It deepens the strategic maturity of the
company’s operations, which are now unrecognisable compared to the
command-and-control model from the beginning.
The incredible popularity of this model throughout the 2010s demonstrates that
employers and workers understand that organised, autonomous groups of workers
can deliver superior outcomes as compared to siloed individuals. Some of us felt
strongly enough about the importance of this that it played a role in convincing
us to move to Sweden to be a part of it.
But this old model only covers the employer’s side of the business relationship.
And employers are right to focus on their side: running a successful product
development company is very difficult. Applying the lessons of this model to the
workers’ side of the relationship to meet the challenges of the new decade is
our responsibility as workers. Only we can do it.
Union
In much of the world, it’s still considered normal to manage the worker’s side
of the business relationship with the command-and-control model. Each worker
negotiates the terms of their employment individually with the employer, with
very little transparency. Cooperation between employees is discouraged in favour
of maximising the employer’s influence.
This has the same inferior outcomes in this context as it does for product
development.
The absence of a clear organisational channel to communicate about shared
challenges leads to significant duplication of effort. Without a structured way
to negotiate, workers resort to a system of ad-hoc petitions and word-of-mouth
pressure campaigns. Each time workers undertake one of these campaigns they have
to repeat time-consuming networking and promotional work.
For the employers, responding to these petitions is reactive work that’s
impossible to manage satisfactorily. Without a defined negotiation period,
there’s no way to get a holistic look at the workers’ full set of demands. Last
month they wanted reforms to the stock option program. This month they want to
change how the fitness stipend works.
Put yourself in the employer’s shoes and imagine trying to decide if this
current request is the right one to fund. You can’t fund them all. How do you
know there isn’t a more impactful and cheaper request coming next month that
you’ll regret not waiting for? The workers don’t even know that themselves yet,
because they’re completely disorganised.
This is a solved problem, and the solution is the Swedish collective agreement
system. Let’s re-org our workers one more time. This time, they’re joining a
union.
This is an easy re-org compared to the squads and tribes. For one, it creates an
order of magnitude fewer new leadership roles. Also, because the workers are
very happy with their current terms, the initial collective agreement is easy to
achieve.
Just like the transition from the command-and-control approach to product
development, this moment is understandably a little scary on the employer’s
side. And the results are just as impossible to argue with: unions are how
Sweden so successfully balances the needs of its workers and its employers,
leading the world in quality of life and innovation simultaneously.
In our imaginary company, the chaos of the command-and-control model is gone,
and the lines of communication between the employer and the workers are
significantly streamlined.
The union’s ownership of its mission empowers it to develop a deep understanding
of the workers’ current likes and dislikes about their working conditions. These
can then be collected together, prioritised, and negotiated over in a structured
way each time the previous collective agreement expires.
The holistic perspective of the workers’ requests means the employer is more
readily able to respond to them. The commitment to peace once the agreement is
signed gives them a guarantee that there really isn’t another set of requests
just around the corner. That certainty empowers them to give workers more in
return for their labour.
The time is now
My colleagues have inspired the world before. For years after I moved to Sweden,
I would periodically hear from yet another friend back home in the UK whose
employer was adopting Henrik Kniberg’s agile model. It felt like the whole UK
was doing squads and tribes at one point.
Thatcherism mortally wounded the union movement in the UK, kicking off a
political crisis that’s still smouldering today. Union membership levels back
home seem to have finally hit rock bottom after decades of decline. What I
really want right now is for my colleagues in Sweden to inspire all my friends
back home one more time and kickstart their recovery.
If they see us do it, they might do it too. We hold tremendous power in our
hands right now. We can be part of a hugely consequential international tipping
point if we can find the will to use that power. Many of us packed up our entire
lives and moved countries to be a part of the old model. So we already know
we’re brave enough to do a
quick Bank ID signup for this new
one.
]]>
![Version control diff showing the addition of a line that reads “day.searches.destroy_all if options[:purge]” in a file called “app/jobs/work_environment/day_job.rb”](/2024/03/09/fix@1220x600.webp)
![[▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮] 1626 git s [▮▮▮ ] 616 git b [▮▮▮ ] 604 yarn test Total commands: 10268 Unique commands: 2091](/2024/02/25/atuin-stats@672x256.webp)
]]>
