«Shared consciousness» as decisive factor for «forecasting and adaptation»

Article first published as Q204 on L'atelier des futurs on April 6, 2024.

Capitalizing on learnings from past projects: The aim of this article is to describe a real-life example in order to stimulate the reader’s thoughts.

It’s a showcase about a way of working to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change with high speed.

Readers are invited to learn more about what has worked well and they can transfer learnings into their own organization where they see fit.

”The intelligence & understanding created by a collective view…” (Team of Teams®)

Like a swarm of birds, adapting “in synch” as a team is essential in a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). A “shared consciousness” within the team and beyond improves adaptability and accelerates the speed of the execution.

The following article is a real-life example of how a “crisis proven” way of working could look like. The collaboration processes were implemented for the Covid-19 vaccination campaign in the canton of Aargau, the 4th largest canton in Switzerland with 700‘000 inhabitants.

According to feedback from team members and based on my own perception, the team that worked as a hybrid organization did particularly well in the field of „forecasting and adapting“ and it is in this aspect that I‘m happy to share our organizational learnings.

The solutions implemented by the hybrid organization are laid out below.

Starting point – problem detection – consequences

The organizational example started on January 12, 2021. On that day, the vaccine Moderna was approved, and I joined the vaccination campaign, as someone bringing additional organizational expertise to the table.

Although plans for coping with a flu epidemic had historically already been developed, these plans were not fit for Covid purpose for various reasons. It was therefore decided to redesign it from scratch.

• Decisions had already been taken to work with four value streams (mobile teams, vaccination centers, physicians and pharmacists). The availability of two vaccines had been confirmed and mobile teams for nursing homes had already been operational. The core team consisted at the beginning of approximately 12 people and grew over time to 20-30 people, almost all having expertise in project- or crisis management. Overall involvement at the peak was approximately 600 people across all workstreams.
• Within the first week, we realized, that we had to design an organization with rapidly evolving services and therefore increasing complexity. However, there was no agreement about the end-status/ goal or the way to achieve it (globally, nationally, locally), making it a complex problem type. As a consequence, the organization we built incrementally, was a hybrid design. It consisted of elements of project management, crisis management and business agility.
• Within the first 2-3 weeks, the striking observation was „there are a lot of ideas flying around“. As a consequence, we prioritized channelling the teams’ “monkey mind – thoughts that are jumping around like a monkey in the trees – into a sequence of focused actions and activities.

The implemented solutions focusing on forecasting

The implemented solutions aimed to improve the focus on problem solving. The way to achieve it concentrated on three factors:

1. Transparency
2. Cadence
3. Interconnectedness

It became clear, that the use of the comprehensive knowledge of the core team and our stakeholders would be an invaluable asset for forecasting. Firstly, because the team members had a lot of specialised knowledge and secondly, many problems seemed to follow a logic known to these specialists – but unknown to the rest of us. E.g. development of vaccines or logistical dependencies.

The centrepiece of the implemented processes was a two-weekly meeting to discuss (all) possible developments, which unveiled risks and opportunities. In the begin of February 2021, the list counted 15 entries after the first meeting and 15 months later >130. In this two-weekly meeting, all sub-projects were represented by 1-2 people.

Timeboxing to 30 minutes combined with a standard agenda strengthened “focus”. The meetings/discussions were facilitated (moderated) by the deputy project lead.

In case of ambiguity in decisions, the organizational design allowed final decisions to be taken by the project leader.

The cyclical approach started with collecting new ideas about potential developments, discussing and rating those with the help of an uncertainty yardstick. If necessary, over the next two weeks, the developments were further elaborated and ratings were adjusted. The team then decided which developments would be worked out in a standardized 5-steps-process (see-assess-decide-act-monitor).

Of great help to develop a “shared consciousness“, was the use of the uncertainty yardstick in two ways:

1. Over a 16-week period in increments of 2 weeks. Those moved over time from right to left as probability increased over time.
2. Independent of time, indicating how “the end” could look like.

This rating gave us a first indication of:

1. urgency
2. volatility
3. determining factors

Examples for a better understanding: 1) Transfer to standardized health processes was for very long time not urgent. 2) The end of a surplus demand for the vaccine usually kicked in very fast 3) herd immunity as a determining factor would be given at a certain point in time, even though depending on the infection rate.

Further processing of collected “potential future developments”

Continuing the cyclical process, the collected ideas about potential developments were further processed in various ways:

1. Cross-Team-Planning, cp image #1 – Alternating, every other week, the team conducted a planning session “high touch low tech” with the help of sticky notes posted to large swim lanes on the wall. Insights about potential developments as well as actions for planning were communicated by the sub-projects and thereby became visible and synchronized to all team members.
2. 5-step planning process (including templates), cp image #2 – Based on the team’s decision, this standardized process from civil protection was used with a tweak. In order to stay lean and limit waste (as little as possible, as much as necessary), the process continued step by step after a decision to move forward was taken. Examples: for «meineimpfung.ch» we remained in the initialisation phase, while for the vaccination of kids, we worked through all 5 steps to the implementation.
3. Understanding of interrelationships – In order to synchronize the team’s understanding, four different methods were applied. Those instruments were produced by the team members, the process was enabled by the role of the deputy project lead of the vaccination campaign.logicalon a timelinestorytellinga systemic model.
4. Dissemination of insights and raising awareness about our efforts, cp image #3 – To harness the outcome, dissemination was key. Within the structures of the canton, we shared our findings as appendix of the weekly roundtable with over 50 stakeholders. On a national level it was a remark in our weekly contribution as part of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) vaccination call (the developed documents were made available for download to the other cantons on the FOPH-Sharepoint)

Measurable effects on our foresight mindset

So as not to give the wrong impression: As a result, the team didn’t “perform better” than other cantons (competition not possible by default as we all worked on solving a shared challenge).

• However, several developments created my perception, that the team generally anticipated better. As a result, the team members were less stressed about changes and could even release some of the solutions “on demand”.
• As a result of the regular efforts to anticipate, only two events really came by surprise over a period of 1.5 years. Simplifying reality, one could claim the team managed to put more than 98.5% of potential events on the radar. More important was the fact that change – developments that materialized – was mentally perceived positively by the team, as „winners“ and not as a „burden“ (this human process was describe by John P. Kotter in Accelerate). A real proof for a growth mindset.
• The fact that everybody contributed, led to a shared perception of “joint development” within the group. This in turn led to mutual trust into one’s abilities and the abilities of the others. Ideas were additionally rewarded by the group (and not just the boss) and the team developed a “we can do it” attitude.
• The foundation for decentralised decision making was improved through the enlarged contextual understanding, resulting in higher speed of adaptation, better quality, and higher motivation of team members to manage stakeholders and take the necessary decision.
• At one point in time, our process connected also upstream. After communicating our way of working and our pull demand for information about their assumptions over a certain period of time, the BAG increased collaboration (perception: became more agile) and started to share their “working hypotheses” i.e. scénarios. On our side, this change decreased efforts for contingency planning significantly.
• Overall, the team managed to increase the cadence of running the cyclical process of Foresight-Insight-Oversight-Hindsight (or plan-do-check-adjust) over the course of the project in line with the demand of the enormously fast paced environment.

10 lessons learned for “share consciousness” 

1. Open system Scale organizational readiness through a network of external resources  
2. Frameworks Harness diversity of expertise by determining « how » not « what » 
3. Lean principles Things will turn out differently anyway, develop incrementally to avoid waste
4. A daring culture Team members deliver ideas independent of hierarchy
5. Enable additional contribution with own thoughts Our stakeholders are aware of our work
6. Time efficiency Asynchronous & synchronous working styles should be applied mixed
7. Focus on focus Timeboxing of regular, synchronous, face-to-face collaboration meetings
8. Harnessing digital capabilities Collaboration tools have to be available and used by the team
9. Efficiency through shared structures The team members should work with shared templates
10. Agile development IT determines the maximum speed of organizational adaptation

Final Remarks

Due to a lack of an adversary side (the enemy was the virus), the described process was significantly easier to implement.

Moreover, a vision didn’t have to be developed. All involved players worked towards the common goal of “getting our previous life back”.

A characteristic of complexity is, that it can always be explained retrospectively.

The process of implementation probably wasn’t as linear as it might seems in this article. Nevertheless, I hope the layout supports the reader’s understanding and offers take-aways for their own endeavours.

Further readings

In order to value the learnings of the team, I documented our way of working in several articles published on LinkedIn.

1. It's complex (not complicated) – 12 learnings for business agility from crisis management
2. Hybrid agile WoW – organizational agility of a Covid-19 vaccination campaign (1/2)
3. Hybrid agile WoW – organizational agility of a Covid-19 vaccination campaign (2/2)
4. Wieso ist Komplexität so komplex?

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Here are a few additional and available references on which this post and the work carried out are based:

• Cynefin Framework – Les différentes inconnues
• Deming Cycle
• Stacey Matrix
• Scaled Agile Framework, SAFe®
• Swiss Civil Protection staff work & procedures (Handbuch Führung)
• Disciplined Agile®
• University of Cranfield (Beyond ‘Plan-do-check-act’: 4Sight))
• MOD UK 
• A Team of Teams