Brightline Transformation Compass

I just finished the draft version for the second print of my book Scaling agile in organizaties (in Dutch) and I counted 65 frameworks and approaches (25 more than the first print). I thought I covered all, but I found a few new ones.

One of them is the Brightline Transformation Compass, a comprehensive system for transformation developed by Behnam Tabrizi, PMI.

This approach helps to create the right mindset within your organization needed for a successful agile transformation. It gives you a compass that is built around 5 critical, mutually reinforcing building blocks for effective transformation and a three-step approach for transformation.

The five compass building blocks:

1. North Star: A crisp, inspiring articulation of the vision and strategic objectives for the transformation to give your employees a clear direction.
2. Customer Insights & Megatrends: Embedding a deep understanding of the customer in every change you make, and in every employee – the customer you may have today, and the customer you want tomorrow, as well as the “megatrends” affecting them. Core principles are involving the real customer, find leading customers and conduct the research yourself.
3. The Transformation Operating System: A flat, adaptable and cross-functional organizational structure that enables sustainable change. It consists of five components: Flat, cross-functional Rapid Response Teams, a lightweight governance & strong program management, a collaborative and appropriate risk appetite, well-defined KPIs and venture-style investment rounds.
4. Your Volunteer Champions: A mechanism to harness many thought leaders from across your organization to drive transformation (identify, recruit, motivate and empower).
5. Inside-Out Employee Transformation: A set of tools to make the transformation personal for your employees – to connect their aspiration to the North Star and to your customers based on the SEE-model. The aim of the SEE-model is to find the intersection between your strengths, the elements of the transformation that evoke personal meaning and actions that make you feel elated.

The three-stage methodology for transformation (inspire, mobilize and shift):

• Inspiring your organization for change: build your transformation organization with Rapid Response Teams initiated and ready to start.
• In mobilizing key elements to drive the change: define the blueprint for your transformed organization and build a plan to get there.
• In shifting the organization to effect transformation: execute on the transformation to meaningfully alter performance and instill the mindset and culture within the organization to continue transforming on an ongoing basis.

This approach is independent of the framework or methodology you are using. It can be used on top of SAFe, LeSS, Disciplined Agile, Nexus and many more to create the right mindset and will improve the chance of a successful agile transformation (more than 70% fail).

For more information on the Brightline Transformation Compass: www.brightline.org

This is definitely an approach that fits in the culture-targeted box in my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest.

For the complete Bird’s eye view on the agile forest article see: Portman, H. (2019). A bird’s eye view on the agile forest; PM World Journal, Vol. VIII, Issue X, November.