Scale is depth, depth is scale
The word "Scale" has been used so bandied about in the world of business. One hear terms that they are able to Scale "Lean" or Scale "Agile" or Scale "Teams" or Scale "Products" and a variety of other things and the word "Scale" is tagged before all sort of things to possibly to convey a magnitude to the work that being done.
Unfortunately, one cant "Scale" much of the things that are being talked about. If you really look at the word "Scale" what it really signifies is one's ability to do something deeply. It is about the depth of the work. Let us look at some examples in a values context...
- From: We value being customer centric to: we value the depth of our customer centricity
- From: We value the performance of our teams to: we value the depth of performance of our teams
- From: We value the quality of our product to: we value our ability to deepen the quality of our products
- From: We value early market delivery and revenue creation to: we value early market delivery to deepen revenue realization
- ... we want to deepen our learning in our teams, so they have the ability to create more options
- ... we want to deepen the interaction between the teams to have more integrated releases
- ... we want to deepen the architecture to be more accommodative of various design choices
- ... we want to deepen the ability to conduce more experiments so that we can find things of higher potential value
- ... we want to be deeply innovative in our application of technology, improvement of our processes and the simplicity of our product...
Forget scale. How deep can you go?