Spontaneous Squads – A Tool for Transformational Change
LinkedIn
March 18, 2025
"Spontaneous Squads" describes a volunteer mobilisation model Jon developed at a client after a 2020 call for transformation volunteers drew 228 responses against an expected 20, which initially overwhelmed the programme's structure. The paper is the retrospective on how they fixed that.
The framework draws on Kotter's fourth step, "Enlist a Volunteer Army," but adapts it into something more concrete: volunteers self-select which theme to join at a "crewing call" during quarterly and monthly planning, then form purpose-built "spontaneous squads" that run lightweight Scrum-adjacent ceremonies (stand-ups two or three times a week, Kanban boards, timeboxes, flow-based pull rather than estimation) until their goal is met, sometimes over six months. Senior leaders and frontline staff volunteer on equal footing, a deliberate flattening that Jon credits with improving both engagement and buy-in. Stand-ups double as a mechanism for surfacing "regression," his term for change reverting once attention moves elsewhere, which he treats as a normal, trackable part of culture change rather than a failure. Quarterly planning uses a World Café format to reprioritise, let volunteers rotate or stand down, and recruit fresh contributors, so the operating model evolves rather than being fixed upfront.
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Tags: Business Strategy, Change Management, Digital Transformation
Operating Models for Enterprise Agility
LinkedIn
March 04, 2025
This paper contrasts traditional, functionally aligned operating models with agile ones, and argues for designing organisations around customer value streams rather than departments.
Traditional models are described as hierarchical, centralised, and optimised for functional efficiency and career paths within silos, at the cost of speed and responsiveness to changing customer or market conditions. Agile operating models, by contrast, are flatter, organised around value streams rather than functions, and built to evolve continuously rather than being fixed once and left alone.
The core design method is customer journey mapping: tracing every touchpoint from initial contact through post-purchase support to find friction and redesign around it (illustrated with a telecoms example where ordering broadband took roughly four times longer than competitors). Customer satisfaction metrics, gathered through surveys, analytics, and AI-assisted monitoring, function as the ongoing design benchmark rather than a one-off measure.
Design itself is treated as iterative, borrowing the analysis-ideation-modelling cycle from agile software practice and applying it to organisational structure rather than code, with value stream maps used to model and refine target operating models over successive rounds. This is explicitly contrasted with Lewin's Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze model, a linear, one-time change approach, positioned as the traditional counterpart to agile's continuous iteration. One caveat raised: frequent structural change can unsettle employees, so iteration needs measured pacing and clearly communicated goals rather than constant, disorienting churn.
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Tags: Agile, Management, Transformation
How HR facilitates Enterprise Agility
LinkedIn
February 25, 2025
This paper outlines that HR functions need a fundamental overhaul to support Enterprise Agility, rather than treating agility as purely an IT or operating-model concern. The central complaint is that most HR goal-setting still runs on century-old scientific management theory, individual OKRs, annual appraisal cycles, departmental targets, and that this actively works against agility by encouraging employees to optimise their own metrics over cross-functional collaboration, and by locking organisations into annual planning cycles when markets move faster than that.
The prescription has three parts. Goal-setting needs to shift from individuals to teams, with more frequent, data-driven feedback (it floats AI systems pulling from sales, ERP, project management, and financial data to monitor progress continuously rather than annually). Talent management needs to move from fixed job roles to fluid ones, with executives shifting from managing-by-reporting to leadership-by-data, giving teams the information to make autonomous decisions rather than waiting to be directed. And new job families and career paths need to emerge to formalise the roles agile ways of working actually require, rather than forcing them into legacy structures.
The cultural-change section leans on Edgar Schein's three-layer model (artefacts, espoused values, underlying assumptions), with the practical angle being that HR can move fastest by changing visible artefacts first, the example given being swapping annual individual appraisals for quarterly team reviews as a deliberate signal that teamwork now outranks individual performance.
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Tags: Behavioral Science, HR, Leadership
Agile Lineout
Amazon
April 18, 2022
Agile Lineout is Jonathan Ward's alternative to Scrum, built to fill the gaps novice teams hit when Scrum's deliberate minimalism leaves them unsupported. It organizes agile delivery around two aligned "lines" — a product line, which ensures the team is building the right outcome, and a delivery line, which ensures the team is building it efficiently — with team behaviour running between them. Each iteration opens with a context assessment across all three, uses a mid-iteration Enhancement Workshop for course correction, and draws on Deming's system of profound knowledge, systems thinking, and team-behaviour research (Hackman, Gersick, Edmondson, Alderfer) rather than prescribing practices by rote. It's designed to scale to big teams and to apply equally to software and non-software change initiatives, and — per the update we just made — it now positions itself as a practical implementation of the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility rather than only a critique of Scrum.
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Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management
Agile Coach's Cookbook
Austin Macauley Publishers
May 28, 2021
With this coachs cookbook, Jon has managed to create a thing of both great simplicity and immense value. A must read for the coaching community, this is an easily referenceable guide to coaching excellence, full of handy hints, tips, tools and techniques. As a coach, no matter your experience, expertise and specialism, this is a resource you will all want in your back pocket. Gustav Bjorkeroth, CEO at Radtac There are so many self\-proclaimed\-and\-promoting agile experts, and best\-selling agile authors. Its challenging to decipher whos right, who to engage with, or who to follow. Then theres Jon Ward of Beneficial Consulting. Jons pragmatic and catalytic approach nullifies these challenges. Within the world of agile transformation, transitioning from waterfall to agile, Jon stands up and out providing practical advice based on successful recent experience. This book provides an essential read for agile coaches who wish to make a difference. Alan Gedye, Head: People Change Management and Enablement, Absa Johannesburg
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Tags: Agile, Behavioral Science, Coaching
