The FACTUAL Framework helps organizations plan for, establish and maintain a work ecosystem conducive to successful Lean-Agile transformation and execution at scale. The FACTUAL Framework aids in focusing and aligning employees on the mission, its operational goals, and the constraints. It promotes establishing high levels of transparency and collaboration as well as enabling autonomy and learning. A work system with these qualities enables high employee engagement by elevating the level of trust, providing clear purpose and allowing them to have true ownership and accountability for their work.
FACTUAL stands for
These represent the key characteristics of the ‘human ecosystem’ of a Lean – Agile Enterprise. This ‘human ecosystem’ is the environment in which knowledge workers inter-operate while fulfilling the value stream(s) of the Lean-Agile Enterprise. Like a biological ecosystem, a knowledge worker ecosystem is a complex adaptive system that can’t be predictably controlled like a complicated system, but it can be influenced. For example in a biological ecosystems, biologists postulate hypothesis and conduct experiments to influence change in the ecosystem, but it takes time to see the outcomes and if the hypothesis was correct.
“Feng Shui is a Chinese philosophical system of harmonizing everyone with the surrounding environment”. – Wikipedia
You can think of FACTUAL as the Feng Shui of the human behavioral side of scaling lean and agile, taking a complex systems approach to the enterprise human ecosystem, recognizing the interconnection of its component parts.
Without a fertile ecosystem for lean-agile knowledge-workers, attempts to scale execution following lean-agile process frameworks are at high risk of failure.
How FACTUAL Helps Leaders Navigate Digital Business Transformation
“Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next (this) century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.” – John Kotter
FACTUAL is a framework and tool set for leaders to pragmatically assess their current team’s / organization’s competency at each of the seven characteristics. Starting with this baseline and an understanding of the interconnected nature of these characteristics, leaders can create a hypothesis for improving their work ecosystem or specific area of execution. Once an improvement experiment has been executed to test their hypothesis, leadership can reassess the FACTUAL characteristics of their ‘human ecosystem’ to determine if the experiment had the planned outcomes.
Over time, an enterprise can understand its FACTUAL profile and gain insight into which behaviors at what levels in the organization need change to maintain and improve the knowledge-worker ecosystem. It is well understood that the last thing to change in an organization during a digital business transformation, is culture. To change a culture, we must first change behaviors.