What a great post! I wasn’t familiar yet with this little framework. Very useful. Will be definitely trying it out. And agree with you: it should be extra useful at an organizational level, as way to try to figure out bigger levers to pull...
I'd question the conclusion that a missing Sprint Goal is the dysfunction in your example. Actually that's premature settlement on a solution. And that's the problem with that method: It drives people to see exactly those (assumed) dysfunctions that they already have a (assumed) solution for in their toolbox - which in turn becomes the constraint.
Yes, you are right and wrong. It is one of the dysfunctions. You are right this is not all of the dysfunctions, but since I only showed one this may be misinterpreted. I'll update the article to make this more clear.
I intentionally showed one slice. If you do a good job you see many related dysfunctions, and a missing Sprint Goal isn't what you should be solving.
The key thing to keep in mind is that the Dysfunction isn't what you are solving you map the different dysfunctions to a Purpose and then a Solution. This means that there is more room to prevent those kind of wrong assumptions.
You can also do Agnostic Dysfunction Mapping, which is not through the Agile or Scrum lens.
Yet you didn't pick-up one argument: deriving one or multiple things called a 'dysfunction' from one or multiple observations is a very error-prone, perhaps even dysfunctional, step in itself. Actually you a trying to map a complex, intertweened bunch of cause-effect relationships into a linear, deductive process. Hence I'd prefer a Causal-Loop-Diagram or something along these lines to map such rarely linear topics. Additionally, those don't force you into a good/bad dichotomy during the mapping phase. Like this: https://flowt.substack.com/p/the-longer-it-takes
What a great post! I wasn’t familiar yet with this little framework. Very useful. Will be definitely trying it out. And agree with you: it should be extra useful at an organizational level, as way to try to figure out bigger levers to pull...
Interesting thoughts! Is that example from your upcoming book? 😉
No it is not! I did not include Dysfunction Mapping. Maybe in the second edition.
I'd question the conclusion that a missing Sprint Goal is the dysfunction in your example. Actually that's premature settlement on a solution. And that's the problem with that method: It drives people to see exactly those (assumed) dysfunctions that they already have a (assumed) solution for in their toolbox - which in turn becomes the constraint.
Yes, you are right and wrong. It is one of the dysfunctions. You are right this is not all of the dysfunctions, but since I only showed one this may be misinterpreted. I'll update the article to make this more clear.
I intentionally showed one slice. If you do a good job you see many related dysfunctions, and a missing Sprint Goal isn't what you should be solving.
The key thing to keep in mind is that the Dysfunction isn't what you are solving you map the different dysfunctions to a Purpose and then a Solution. This means that there is more room to prevent those kind of wrong assumptions.
You can also do Agnostic Dysfunction Mapping, which is not through the Agile or Scrum lens.
Yet you didn't pick-up one argument: deriving one or multiple things called a 'dysfunction' from one or multiple observations is a very error-prone, perhaps even dysfunctional, step in itself. Actually you a trying to map a complex, intertweened bunch of cause-effect relationships into a linear, deductive process. Hence I'd prefer a Causal-Loop-Diagram or something along these lines to map such rarely linear topics. Additionally, those don't force you into a good/bad dichotomy during the mapping phase. Like this: https://flowt.substack.com/p/the-longer-it-takes
Do you measure the solution?
Great article, Martijn - Love the systematic approach as well as the shift from lagging to leading.
And it comes with a bit of humor too, when you read this sentence:
"Every company I ever worked for as an employee had problems" - You need to stop working men ;)