Playing in Position
There's a reason you don't see good football teams all running after the ball. Young kids do it because the instinct is to help, to be where the action is. But it doesn't work. Everyone converges, nobody's in position, and the game becomes a scramble.
This week I spent a day in London with the cluster leads, working through Q2 planning and the delivery operating model we're trying to build for a nine-team programme. Q1 has been harder than I'd like to admit — scaling from three teams to nine with the onboarding and supplier complexity that brings has outpaced the operating model we had. We're not where we should be. Q2 is about improving the conditions.
Thursday was about trying to fix that — not by telling people how it works, but by designing it with them. Some of it landed. Some of it showed exactly where the work still needs to go: the end-to-end picture, from software through transformation and onboarding to actual adoption, isn't yet in people's instincts. It's still too easy to treat "go live" as the finish line.
What I keep coming back to is Marquet's point in Turn the Ship Around!: the goal isn't empowered clusters. The goal is empowered teams. Clusters are only useful if they give authority away as fast as they receive it. You can't run a leader-leader model halfway.
More sessions next week. SLT playback on the 29th. The direction is right. The work isn't done.
Linked notes
Lesson learned
Empowerment isn't something you hand down. It's something you create the conditions for — and then actually get out of the way.