XSCALE Alliance

There's nothing wrong with
the Agile Manifesto.

We extend its values and principles to stop bureaucracy. Not altering them, but adding on:

Descaling Values

Mutual benefit
over command and control
Throughput accounting
over cost accounting.
Pull-based delivery and change
over push-based
Learning ecosystems
over training hierarchies.

That's to say, while there is value in the items on the bottom, we value the items on the top more.

Descaling Principles

Directly responsible individuals: business, design and tech stakeholders make decisions together as peers to build solutions that meet each others' constraints.
Capture and store learning in small, self-organizing teams: as these work with current constraints they become capable of opening future bottlenecks.
Work on outcomes: teams continuously prioritize the current bottleneck, quantify their contributions to top line business throughput, and minimize work in progress.
Align small groups of teams into self-managing business streams that continuously adapt their work priorities to changing market feedback.
Reward mutual benefit across business streams to reduce silos, wastes and missed opportunities, and share resources, services and learning.
Mercilessly refactor business streams: reuse, recycle or reduce all the resources a stream produces so all contribute to top line throughput and none go to waste.

Sign The Descaling Manifesto

Design breadth-first. Step back to see patterns in and between markets and value streams. These inform designs we can only detail as we learn more.
Collaborate rather than delegate: people and teams are in the right relationships when conversations evolve to support each-others' work and learning.
Take time to simplify and automate solutions: simple, automated systems cost less than big manual ones, taking less work to maintain business outcomes.
Use and value experimentation: experiment to reduce risk and adapt each product to the changing constraints of your business streams and markets.
Enrich interfaces to serve under-served markets: spaces between market segments are where most opportunities for innovation and productivity occur.
Transform to embrace change: continuously adapt your organization's patterns to changing market conditions and opportunities to open new markets.

Like the agile and permaculture manifestoes it is based upon, we regard the above as closed to modification but open to extension. Not the last word in agility but the next.

XSCALE Alliance is ...

A learning ecosystem of independent coaches and partners working to descale organizations using patterns based on

Hiawatha's Great Law of Peace
Sen No Rikyu's Mu Hin Shu
Goldratt's Throughput Accounting
Holmgren's Permaculture
Stack's Open Book Management
Beck's Extreme Programming

Like Linux ..

We use Creative Commons to collaborate on collateral for coaching and training – toolkits, not frameworks – for Descaling Business Agility, 3D Product Management and XDevOps.

The opposite of the Agile Industrial Complex, we're coaches, not trainers, using XSCALE internally to collaborate on client engagements, presentation collateral, patterns and tools.

Join the XSCALE Alliance

For Descaling Organizations.

We don't prescribe XSCALE as a framework nor make clients dependent on XSCALE coaches or partners. We build slender but uncompromising new capabilities that self-propagate - that grow exponentially while proving outcomes, lowering resistance, and reducing risk as they grow.

Self-directing portfolios of self-managing streams of self-organizing teams of the client's own staff through self-propagating transformation. It's quicker, better, cheaper and, yes, safer too.

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Descaling vs. Scaling

Scaling makes agile teams leaves on a tree.
Descaling empowers self-governance to
Bring agility to leaves, branches & trunk.

Leadership as a Service
Empowers teams to make consensus decisions
3D Product Management
Aligns business, design and tech breadth-first
The Camelot Model
Rapid response to changing market conditions
Descaling Metrics
Dunbar size limits for teams, streams & portfolios

Learn More

Pull Transformation

A team can't change faster than its most resistant member. Nor a stream than its most resistant team. Pushing change on existing groups builds resistance and compromise, making things harder & risker over time.

Instead we pull individual change champions into a slender new capability that grows by splitting and doubling. We measure outcomes to reduce risk and resistance as it grows. Using agile to make agile.

This keeps new and pre-existing capabilities uncompromised, leveraging the benefits of both. It converts change recipients into change leaders by immersion, not instruction. Which is quicker, cheaper, better, and safer than pushing change.