• Little’s law, a beautifully simple formula with a nice visual interpretation (and an excuse to revisit cumulative flow diagrams)
• The Satir change model, the late Virginia Satir’s powerful description of the change process
• Two coaching models, the very useful thinking tool GROW, and Toyota’s A3 (first mentioned in Chapter 14)
• Jeff Anderson’s Lean Change Canvas via a digression into the Pyramid Principle
• Various models of facilitation, including games
• Two models of leadership and collaboration, T-shaped leadership and triads

This week’s excerpt introduces the last of those.

Models of Collaborative Leadership: Triads and T-Shapes

The Triad is a very simple model of collaboration and collaborative leadership that has been practiced deliberately in a surprising variety of places. Thanks to Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, the book by Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright, we understand its applicability to corporate and community life. Triads appear in some churches in the form of prayer triplets (my wife, Sharon, has been a member of several of these); the model was even practiced by the KGB!

A triad connects three people, united by some common purpose. Sometimes it is the result of one person introducing two previously unconnected people; sometimes they are formed to perform some specific task. Effective triads obey two rules:

1. Each member takes some responsibility for the relationship between the other two members, providing strength.
2. Growth comes not by turning triads into quads, but by forming additional triads involving one or two members of existing triads, thereby creating networks.

I’m the kind of person who approaches a “networking event” with dread, and the triad model is just about the only form of networking that works for me. I have learned to make a point of introducing people whom I know to share some common interest. That’s rewarding in itself, but often I reap double or triple the benefit in the form of fruitful collaboration and new introductions.

Triads express collaborative leadership when they are used deliberately to share knowledge, to create opportunities, and to form bridges between different parts of the organization. I have encouraged graduate recruits to form long-lasting triads and to help one another to grow their networks from them, and I have used them short-term to solve specific problems.

Morten Hansen describes T-shaped management, which is somewhat analogous to the T-shaped people I alluded to in this book’s preface. His T-shaped managers encourage collaboration in two quite distinct ways:

1. Much in the manner described in Chapter 3, close collaboration inside their part of the organization
2. Addressing the downsides of collaboration described at the close of Chapter 3, “disciplined” collaboration across the wider organization

The key to Hansen’s model is that this second kind of collaboration is required to be purposeful and effective; it is not about networking for its own sake, and it is expected to deliver results in healthy proportion to the effort expended. Ill-disciplined collaboration may be worse than no collaboration at all.

Both models are entirely compatible with Kanban’s at every level kind of leadership. Triads don’t need to respect organizational boundaries at all, and those T shapes can emanate from anywhere. We can all do it.

Next up: 18 Understand sources of dissatisfaction. Previously: 16. The Kanban method. Start from the beginning: 1. Transparency.

My book Kanban from the Inside was published in September 2014 by Blue Hole Press, publishers of David Anderson’s Kanban book, aka the “blue book”. Complete with an awesome foreword by Luke Hohmann, it is available in paperback and now on Kindle onamazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de and amazon.fr and (no doubt) other amazons also. A PDF e-book is also available via the djaa.com store.