Good afternoon, morning, or evening, depending on where you're signing in from. This is Kumar Dattatreyan with Agile Meridian for another episode of our Meridian Point podcast. And today, we have a special guest with us. Colin O'Neill is an entrepreneur, thought leader, business executive, international trainer, organizational change agent, conference speaker, author, and executive coach. Boy, that's a lot of hats that Colin wears. He graduated from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis and served as a Marine Corps officer for 11 years. Over the past 40 years, he's been a trusted advisor to government and industry, bringing clients the most promising business and technology practices for the benefit of their employees, their organization, and society. In 2011, Colin co-founded Scaled Agile, serving as its CEO and president of the Asia Pacific operations. There, Colin collaborated with Dean Leffingwell and others to create the Scaled Agile Framework, the world's leading approach to scaling agility across organizations. And since leaving Scaled Agile, Colin has helped clients connect their organization's strategy to execution through value streams, portfolios, and the use of derivative goals at all levels. He's the creator of the Entity Value Realization model, otherwise known as EVER, and author of the book "Take Control by Giving Up Control: The Value-Centered Fast Track to Organizational Growth". So, let me welcome Colin to the stage, and we're going to get started with probing his 40 years in business and 11 years in the Marine Corps and so on. So without further ado, Colin, welcome. Thank you so much for being here today.
Colin: Thank you, Kumar. It's great to be here.
Kumar: Alright. So, I'm going to just fire off with the first question. Your book, it's called "Take Control by Giving Up Control". The title seems a bit like an oxymoron. Can you explain the key premise of the book and what led you to write it?
Colin: Sure. Let me tell you what led me to write it first. Basically, I was about to retire, and I actually kind of semi-retired and I said, "Yeah, I'm going to, you know, just move on with my life." But then I realized I have something to say, and I have something to share with folks who are struggling in any type of organization. I mean, I run into organizations every day through personal life, through professional life, etcetera. And they all seem to have similar problems. So I decided to put pen to paper and share my 40 years of experience and the model that I came up with. It just started to come together in the last 3 or 4 years, and I thought it was too important not to share. So that's why I wrote the book.
The premise of the book, and regarding its title "Take Control by Giving Up Control", yes, it is an oxymoron, and that's why I titled it that way, because basically, organizations that try to hold on to control are the ones that are suffering the most. And the ones that essentially give up control under certain circumstances, give their employees and their associates opportunities to develop solutions that ultimately profit the company and make the organization grow. So yes, it's sort of a hook, you know, everybody's got to have a hook and something, but this theme runs throughout the book. You cannot implement the EVER model and deliver high-value products and services and grow the company without giving up some control. It's just the nature of things. I'll explain more about that later, but that's why I came up with the title.
Kumar: Yeah, it's a really catchy title. And I guess it's true for so many different walks of life, right? "Take Control by Giving Up Control". We hear about this in leadership models, right, servant leadership models where as a leader, you need to serve the people that you're leading in a way. You're giving up control, but it's going to help you and the organization and the people that you're leading in the long run. So even though it may be an oxymoron, I really like the title of the book. And it's something that I often am reminded of, and I try to remind others around me as well that, in order to advance your goals, whatever they may be, it's important to understand the boundaries in which you're operating and give up some control in the process.
Alright, in the book, you talk about the EVER framework. What are the key components of the model and how does it help organizations rethink the way they realize value?
Colin: The idea of the model is that there are two aspects to it. The first is internal value and external value. Most companies don't differentiate the two, but this model says no, external value is all about the customer, the distributor, all of those folks that consume the products and services of a particular entity. Their experience is absolutely critical to generating internal value. Without connecting internal and external value, there's a major gap in what the company perceives as value versus what the customer or consumer perceives as value. So what we want to do is get those in sync. And to do that requires not just your basic market research or knowing who your customers are. It's actually learning more about your customers, digging deep into what really motivates them. Sometimes it's a sense of security. Sometimes it's the journey that you take them on. Sometimes it's the experience that they have. And sometimes it's more subtle things like their personal beliefs. These are typical factors that are not normally considered, and we want to consider them as part of this external value to make sure that what we're developing and delivering is exactly what our consumers want. And that builds the internal value, which ultimately results in impacting growth.
Kumar: Yeah, I really like the model. Just a quick comment, this is similar—I mean, it's much better laid out and thought out—to one of the models that we created, kind of an expansion on the OKR framework. You know what those are, Objectives and Key Results. And one of the things that we try to differentiate, as you have, is that there's an external component to it, the consumer, the customer, the person that's taking advantage of whatever product or service that you're offering, as you've pictured here. And then there's the internal value. The internal value could be monetary, it could be goodwill, it could be whatever it might be. And I don't know if you agree with this, you know, like the Costco chicken, right? It doesn't make Costco any money by itself. In fact, it's a loss leader for the company because they still sell it for 5 bucks. But from a consumer standpoint, it's a delighter. You know, they know they can go to Costco, get all their shopping done, and come home with dinner that only costs $5 and feed the whole family. Is that sort of encapsulated here in this picture, in this model?
Colin: It is. That's a very interesting perspective, bringing the Costco chicken into it. But yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, companies that understand what their consumers really, really desire deep down inside, that they can't often communicate but are there nonetheless, we have to form what we call a "fusion team" of business, technical people, customer, and some sort of human design psychology kind of person who can then help tease out those interesting tidbits, like you said, that actually one little thing can make a huge difference for an organization.
Kumar: Yeah, I love the idea of a fusion team. And if you can elaborate on that, to me, when I hear the term "fusion team", it's evocative of a cross-functional team across different business entities, you know, both on the leadership side and the product side and maybe the delivery side. Is that what you're talking about here?
Colin: Yes, it's a self-organizing, self-managing, cross-functional team. That is correct.
Kumar: Awesome. Anything else you'd like to talk about the picture as it's been displayed here?
Colin: So while the picture's up, let's just cover the main point. Internal value deals with essentially communicating strategy down to the people that are actually building and delivering the products and services. Many, many companies struggle with expressing the strategy in ways that can be understood and implemented at the lower levels. It's a classic syndrome that I've seen probably a hundred times in the last 40 years. So what we try to do is connect the strategy to the execution. And to do that, we need a language that the people at the lower level can understand, and we have to make sure that whatever strategy is communicated is clear and unambiguous. That's another key component of this model. We communicate our strategy from the top down, and we use these things called "central cycles". They're think, plan, deliver, and measure, and they're stacked vertically. The think area is where the strategy emerges, and it doesn't actually come first. We start with goals first, then strategy. So goals, strategy, and outcomes, the GSO model, is the common language that is essentially propagated from the top to the bottom. And at each layer, the GSOs above that layer are interpreted by the people that have the special skills, whether it's at the business unit level, the value stream level, or the team of teams level. They interpret the GSOs from the layer above and they write their own GSOs that they believe will help support the accomplishment of the higher-level GSO. So it's not forced or mandated down, but these GSOs, let's say at the executive level, they become the beacon, the guiding light for those in the business units that are tasked with helping achieve those corporate goals. It just cascades down from there.
Kumar: Yeah, it makes sense. The mechanism by which that happens is what we call the "GSO steel thread". It is basically that you can trace GSOs up and down the stack because they're linked to one another. So let's say that a business unit looks at the executive goal, strategy, and outcome in a specific area that they're related to, and they say, "Okay, what can we do? What can our business unit do to promote or help fulfill this particular goal at the executive level, at the corporate level?" And then they essentially build their own GSOs. This is how it happens. Now the key to GSO is, and it's different from an OKR, even though it looks similar to an OKR. GSO first of all starts with a goal, and it tries to create the goal with enough clarity that the people that are actually going to implement the goal now have some understanding of what that is. The goal has certain outcomes. There are things that we identify to know that we've actually achieved the goal. And those are the KRs in OKRs.
Colin: What's different is there's a hypothesis statement that fits between the goal and the outcomes, and that's called the strategy. And the strategy is how we're going to accomplish that goal to achieve those outcomes. Or I should say how we think we're going to accomplish that goal, because let's face it, there are so many assumptions when we plan, let's say annually or quarterly, that there's really no way we can choose the exact right strategy to implement a specific goal to achieve certain outcomes. We need to experiment. We need to form it as a hypothesis and say, "We believe that if we do these things, we will achieve our results." Well, in the time frame that's specifically allotted. This is, let's say, annual. Within that time frame, we look at leading indicators to see if our strategy is actually moving the needle forward. And if it's not, then we go back and we revisit the strategy. So that's what's really different. It's this hypothesis, experiment, outcome kind of feedback loop that then informs the layers above to continually review the strategy at whatever level you're at and make sure that it is actually doing what it's supposed to do.
Kumar: It makes total and perfect sense. You know, with OKRs, if they're done well, I think it follows a similar pattern where the objectives, if you will, are loosely coupled with the objectives at a different level in the organization, a lower level in the organization. And these cascading levels provide a structure and a mechanism where I see it go off the rails is often, there isn't enough collaboration between the levels, if you will, in an organization that makes the OKRs less useful than they could be. And OKRs aren't the only framework that does this type of thing. The 4DX method, the 4 Dimensions of Execution, is similar. OKRs do something like this. Our model, our COBI method, is similar in scope. It's all down to execution, right? It's all down to the people that are in the system and how they collaborate their goals and how they come up with their strategies or experiments and how they measure their leading indicators and lagging indicators, and how that information then is rolled up to the layer above them. What is different about this system that makes it more effective?
Colin: Well, in addition to having a hypothesis statement, there are two other key differences between GSOs and OKRs. Number one is that they are linked and traceable. We have a tool behind this where these things are persistent in a data store. And the linkage shows that we can roll up the lower-level GSOs and see if, in fact, they are collaboratively helping implement the higher-level GSOs. That's number one. Number two is the feedback mechanism. The GSOs offer CFOs and other financial people an opportunity to look at and measure the value delivered in every quarter at the execution layer. It's because we are capturing the metrics that are based on the outcome. That allows us to create everything into a common denominator. In some organizations, that's money. In other organizations, it's goodwill, whatever the case may be. But it's the common denominator that we can actually go look at every quarter and say, "Have we gotten the results, the value that we expected when we funded this particular initiative?"
Kumar: It makes a lot of sense. And I think these types of safeguards are important. You mentioned the tool, just real quick, because I do want to get to the next question. What is the tool? Is it the metric? Is that the tool, or do you have something already built that's more software-driven?
Colin: Well, we are partnered with a tool vendor that has an awesome implementation or execution tool that allows us to tie all of this stuff together. And this is basically a front end that sits on top of the tooling itself, but everything is persisted and it's just, you know, really well-architected.
Kumar: That makes a lot of sense. I love the picture. It's very simple, easy to understand. And I love the fact that you have these value amplifiers. And for those of you who are listening and not viewing, the amplifiers are things like market intelligence, strategy expression (and that would be the strategy expressed in the form of a hypothesis, if I'm not mistaken), obviously the value proposition (why are you doing what you're doing?), the capabilities that are going to be impacted (the business capabilities and the value stream), the impact metrics that you already mentioned, Colin, and leadership and talent. Now this is, I think, to me, one of the most critical aspects of any model is leadership and talent. Can you speak a little bit about that and how this model helps leaders lead by getting out of the way, by giving up control?
Colin: Yeah, this goes back to the notion that you've got to give up control to really thrive in this world. There are, I believe, four reasons why most organizations struggle today. And this is in the book, right in the introduction. Basically, people today have so much information. We have smartphones, we can tap into anything that we want to and determine which is going to give us more value or not. We go to Yelp, we look at reviews, all this stuff. So with that information, consumers are smarter than they've ever been. And so if consumers can use all of that technology for their benefit, why can't organizations use the same technology for their benefit? Because people have so much information at hand, even employees and associates, they don't like to be controlled because they oftentimes know more than the people that are leading them. So that's number one, control doesn't work anymore in the modern economy.
Number two, strategy and execution are disconnected. We just talked about that.
Number three, and this is really important, because technology continues to advance at a rapid pace daily, there are so many mechanisms for using intelligent data to make decisions in an organization. And when companies realize that they need to tap into this, and that in order to do that, they need to empower their employees, they need to empower the people who are actually executing to tap into all of this technology. Now we have AI, we have all kinds of stuff available that can help deliver more valuable products and services. And so when we get out of the way of the people that are actually doing the work and we allow them to create a collective consciousness within our organization, let them connect like a network, then there's a lot of power.
The fourth thing, and we've discussed this already, is knowing your customer intimately, even more than you think you do today. There's a lot more there.
So those are the four reasons I believe most organizations are struggling today. This framework addresses all four of those.
Kumar: I love it. It's very similar, Colin, to our Disruptor method. I mean, not the whole model, but things that we teach our clients as part of our Disruptor method, especially what we call "catalyst teams", what you call "fusion teams", we call "catalyst teams". So terminology may be different, but great minds think alike, I guess, if I can be so bold as to compare what we've come up with with this beautiful model that you've come up with.
I want to move to the next question. The book intentionally avoids using the term "agile", and you instead frame things in business language. Why did you make that choice, and who is the primary audience of this book and the framework in it?
Colin: Yes, we intentionally avoid using the term "agile" because I've been in the agile space for over 20 years, and it has become overused, oversaturated, and widely misused in organizations. Business people, I have found, recoil atthe word "agile" and they—I've heard companies say, "Don't ever say that word. That's not us. That's IT. We don't want anything to do with agile. We've tried this agile stuff and it hasn't worked." And they just have a mental image of something that they created in their mind based on experience. So, I avoid using that term at all. There are so many rich business terms that can communicate the same concepts. And so I stuck to those, and I wanted this to be specifically geared toward business executives and managers who are trying to solve these problems on a daily basis.
Kumar: So, Colin, what do you say to business executives that have sort of been down the agile road and have been burned by it, and you come with this model, and they recognize elements of it from maybe some of the agile frameworks out there, and they're like, "This is just agile, Colin." How is this any different?
Colin: Well, first of all, there are a couple of terms that have been associated with agile, like value streams, but those terms actually originated in lean manufacturing. So it came out of the business world and was co-opted by agile folks for good reason. Value streams make a lot of sense. In fact, that's a central theme to this whole book and this model—creating value. And to do that, value streams are the easiest and simplest ways to do that. So we still use that term. But nothing else really speaks of agile except the term "value stream".
Let me see, what was I going to say? When business people ask me, "How is this different from agile?" First thing is, it's not a transformation. We have couched agile as transformations. We're somehow transforming an organization. This is not something that we come in and lay on a company. It's basically something that they can do themselves when they look at specific aspects of their organization. What are their main problem areas? If the problem areas are in business capabilities, then we focus on that. If the problems are in expressing their strategy, we focus on that. If the problems are in impact metrics, we focus on that. So it's not something that we say you have to adopt this whole thing, and there are no new roles involved. There are no special roles. It's just using what you have and adopting some of these value amplifiers as levers to pull in order to gain more traction in creating more value.
Kumar: I love that. And it resonates a lot with me and the things that we are doing as well, not that we are ditching agile. I think to your point, agile has co-opted some of the things that existed much before agile became what it is, right? Like value streams and the whole lean from manufacturing and things like that. And keeping the things that make sense, you know, like with our Disruptor method, we don't speak agile at all when we talk to leaders of companies, but we do use a lot of the techniques and practices and patterns that are useful in agile contexts. So we haven't ditched anything. We're just sort of reusing it where it makes sense.
You position this book as the next scaled agile framework and say that it picks up where SAFe leaves off. Can you elaborate on the limitations you see within SAFe and how your framework, how this book and approach addresses them?
Colin: Sure. Well, I never say in the book, and I never mention SAFe. This is a conversation we had. Yes, it was based on a conversation we had because you and I both know SAFe, Scaled Agile Framework. And the thing is that Scaled Agile Framework was initially developed as an IT framework, an IT framework only. And through the years, it has tried to essentially exert some influence on the business organizations, the higher level than the business managers, the C-suite, etcetera. And it hasn't really done that very well. That's where a lot of the biggest failures, I think, in SAFe are—that they tried to go too far beyond the boundaries of what it was designed to do, because it just doesn't deal with these issues at the highest level.
So Scaled Agile Framework, which I helped develop, is fantastic at the deliver and execution levels. It is second to none in terms of developing products and services that use lean and agile principles, self-managing, self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It's just fantastic. And then when it gets up to the portfolio level, it starts to fall apart. This approach essentially says you don't put anything on your portfolio unless it is needed to accomplish your goals and strategies. So that makes a very clean break between "all ideas are welcome" and "all ideas are welcome within the context of a crisp goal and a tight strategy." Portfolios then don't get overloaded and it's very simple to say, "This is the business capability we're trying to build in order to support the achievement of this goal. Therefore, let's take some of the money that this goal has been given"—we fund goals, not strategies or initiatives—"we take the money that this goal has been allocated, and we say let's build that business capability," whether it's technical or not, it doesn't matter, but that's what goes on the portfolio and that's what we build.
Kumar: That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for that. I'm going to zoom out a little bit for the next question. What do you think is the biggest challenge and opportunity for companies trying to be disruptors in their space, rather than being disrupted? We talked about this in an earlier conversation, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the show.
Colin: Sure. Well, you know, disruptors—in order to be a disruptor, you need to be forward-thinking. You need to think outside the box. And the creativity and the innovation necessary to be a disruptor does not come from management. It does not come from the executives. It does not come from middle management. It comes from the people on the ground. You know, there is empirical evidence that the people that are closest to the customer and the product are the ones that come up with the most brilliant ideas and actually create the disruption. And this has been proven over and over again. With this additional technology, with artificial intelligence and so many other tools that we have available to us, there's no reason why we can't create these small little experimental teams and say, "Go try something." If it fails, then we learn something, and if it works, then that's great. We pursue that. But there are so many opportunities at that lower level to actually create disruptions. That's where the disruptors have to live, is at that lower level, letting those people find their way. And then those ideas, the disruptive ideas, come up to the top, and that's where the organization seizes upon them and becomes the disruptor.
Kumar: Yeah, that takes a real shift, right, in culture to empower people. Again, that's all about the talent, right, to empower the talent to share ideas without fear of reprimand or retribution or whatever it might be, even though those ideas end up being a failure. It's still a success in the sense that you've tried it, you've determined that it didn't work, and you try the next thing.
Last question before I turn it over to you to see if you have any questions. What are your plans moving forward for the EVER model and maybe the book itself?
Colin: Well, the book is basically just a baseline. It's a place to start. It helps readers understand what the model is. And there's a chapter dedicated to each value amplifier and it ties it all together, you know, all the things we just talked about. So the book itself is just a stake in the ground. Where I think this is really going to be powerful for so many organizations is actually operationalizing the model. What I mentioned before was EVER being implemented in a way, I'll call it a tool because that's the word we typically use, is something that's an enterprise-wide tool that's instantiated in an organization where we start at the highest level of annual goals, strategies, and outcomes, and that cascades down into the various layers. Each organized part of the organization has its sandbox within which it creates its own GSOs, and then that work actually goes down to the lower-level teams, the people who are, whether they're in marketing, sales, HR, technology—it doesn't matter, security—it doesn't matter. Every organization is going to have its own GSOs in support of those higher-level ones. And so all of that data is in one place, it's all connected.
And as people go through these experiments to validate the hypothesis of their strategy, they capture this information in terms of leading and lagging indicators, and that information can be examined and assessed on a quarterly basis when we do our big room planning, typically on a quarterly basis. At the end of that, we look at the results of the big room planning. Did we actually achieve what we wanted to? Now using GSOs, we can actually quantify the impact and get a value measure so that representatives of the financial part of the organization can come and sit in these retrospectives and go, "It looks like you delivered the value that we expected based on our investment, and therefore our return on investment is X." So by doing that on a quarterly basis, that's huge. I mean, those are the gold nuggets that come up.
Kumar: Absolutely. And companies can see where we're wasting money, where we're throwing money away. So let's shut this down or let's change our strategy. You know, sometimes it does take longer than a quarter to build those lagging indicators, if you will, right? Where it actually has an impact on customer behavior—they're buying more of the product, they're referring more of the product, whatever it might be. It takes a little time. How do you, and this is probably a conversation for another time, I want to, if you're willing, have you back on the show and we can pick some of these more specific things. But maybe in a nutshell, how do you guard against measuring too early and then cutting the pipe or cutting the funding, if you will?
Colin: Sure. Well, it has to be reasonable. We can't have everything in black and white or employ this approach in a very strict manner. You've got to have some latitude. So if the financial representative from the CFO's office or whatever understands that the solution we're building or creating is complex and takes extra quarters to manifest its value, well, that has to be taken into consideration. And so they can go back to the CFO and say, "Yeah, you know, we're seeing the value, but it's not going to really peak until we get to the third quarter. And then that'll give us the true indicator of whether or not we're still moving in the right direction."
Kumar: Yeah, these things happen. And I think you said the key term—moving in the right direction. So that's where the leading indicators could become super important, having a measure of where you're going, what direction you're going, and are you making progress towards that destination, if you will, the goal, or in this case, the execution strategy. And if you are, even though you may not have made any money in that quarter, you know, you haven't really gotten an ROI, you're trending in the right direction. Would you say that's correct?
Colin: Yeah. As long as it's moving the needle in the right direction, you know, persist. If it's not, if you see problem signs or red flags, then we look at it closer and we really examine, "Is our strategy the best strategy? Or are the outcomes even the right outcomes?"
Kumar: Alright. So, is there going to be training on the model or classes, certifications?
Colin: Well, we're still thinking about how to do that, but I think operationalizing the model is number one. And then we'll see how the market reacts and what the market needs. The market may need another book, or it may need a lot of online help within the tool, you know, putting the actual instructions of how to go through this process in the tool itself. And it may be consulting, and it may be who knows what, but we'll see where that leads us.
Kumar: Alright. So what have I not asked you, Colin?
Colin: I think you've asked me pretty much everything that's important, at least for the introduction to the book "Take Control by Giving Up Control" and the EVER model. I really want to thank you for having me on the show. And I hope to be invited back.
Kumar: I want to read the book myself. Where is the book available? Is it on the usual places, Amazon, things like that?
Colin: First of all, it's an ebook, and it's on Amazon, and it costs less than $10. So it's easy for anybody to get.
Kumar: Excellent. I'll have the link. If you can share that, I'll have the link in the show notes for this episode. And that way, people that are interested can go get it. And if they want to get ahold of you, just reach out to Colin O'Neill. I'm sure you're on LinkedIn. I found you there. We work together, so I know you. But I'm sure if people want information on the EVER model and the other ideas that are in the book, they can reach you.
Colin: Exactly. Yes.
Kumar: Again, thank you so much for being here. And we'll see you again soon, I hope.
Colin: Yes. Thank you very much.
Kumar: You're welcome. Bye bye.
Colin: Bye.
