PROGRAM 'PARTY' WAVE //: embracing chaos with orchestration of assumptions

Spring 2021: Mapping the "Party Wave" program - where systematic planning meets the reality of coordinating complex teams. Left side shows the strategy, right side shows what it actually feels like to execute when everyone's riding the same wave together.

Found this buried in old project notes. The messier the thinking process, the cleaner the eventual solution.

'Programs' fascinate me. As my career has matured inside enterprise organizations, you eventually evolve to a highly complex 'team of teams' with dependencies and shared purposes that create a wild style of orchestration - like what you find on a big sunset day when everyone decides to ride down the face of a 15ft wave together.

The assumptions and measurement mapping here is a direct reference to reality Jeff Patton brought to our attention in a workshop over a decade ago: we'd like to think most experiments/product launches pass or fail - where in reality 80% land in a "thud" zone where we don't know the harm we're creating, so we just run it for another quarter to get out of the noise.

When you're in a program, the thud zone and unknowns create a high risk of impact zone damage that can cascade to multiple upstream and downstream teams if we don't push ourselves to ask hard questions and leverage service design to bring visibility to invisible systems.

Sometimes the best program design is knowing when to stop designing and start surfing—but only after you've mapped the rocks below.

#ProgramManagement #ServiceDesign #EnterpriseStrategy #Thudzone