Focusing on systems thinking and organizational design
In Chapter 4, Systems Thinking, you were introduced to the concepts around systems thinking and how to apply causal modeling and Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs) to visually depict the causal relationships between the elements identified within a system. This is the same approach used by practitioners of LeSS to visually assess system dynamics as a collective effort among affected stakeholders.
Causal modeling is used in LeSS as an approach to generate conversation about the organization's development systems and to reach a collective understanding of the systems as a whole. The purpose of the exercise is to avoid local optimizations that are endemic in traditional organizational design practices. Local optimization is directly tied to wastes as defined in the lean development chapters of this book—Chapter 5, Lean Thinking, and Chapter 6, Lean Practices in Software Development. Examples of Lean waste include the following...