ELEVATING KATAS™

Elevating Organizations for High Adaptiveness

The Elevating Katas are a set of practices and principles that can be applied as thoughtful experiments to change the organizational structure, processes, policies, and so forth. We are working toward a collection of Elevating Katas that can be applied to get change going, helping to improve any organization in the thoughtful direction of any topology.

Elevating an organization means moving its org design closer to the upper right on the Org Topologies map. Such moves increase the scope of skills and the scope of work mandate of organizational elements. Note that AI now makes elevation much easier, inviting change as never before.

More on Elevation can be learned from the MADE method and articles below.

GET THE PRIMER

Org Topologies™ Primer is a free, comprehensive summary of the Org Topologies™ method to help you map, assess, design, and elevate your organizational ecosystem with a strategic org design approach:

Two dimensions of org design
Four organizational characteristics
Sixteen archetypes within four groups
Three distinctive organizational topologies
Change MADE Real method
Strategic AI adoption
Blank maps

Towards a Collection of Elevating Katas

Each Kata focuses on a particular area (such as governance, practices, roles, events, or artifacts) and is designed to shift mindsets, structures, or processes in a way that provides incremental, scalable benefits over time. By repeatedly practicing an Elevating Kata, organizations internalize more adaptive behaviors, enhance their management capabilities, and ultimately create a more responsive and learning-oriented culture.

Elevating Katas:

Expand the “Product” Definition
Elevate Product Ownership
Hold Multi-Team Product Backlog Refinement (PBR)
Slice Work Vertically
Merge Product Backlogs
Define Shared "Done"
Self-Select with Open Space and FAST
Implement Beyond Budgeting
Lead with OBEYA Strategically
Design Tailwind Career Paths
Apply AI Strategically
Learn more

Elevate Your Organization with Strategic AI Adoption

Craig Larman

5 days ago2 min read

Elevate Your Organization with Strategic AI Adoption

Any management approach that doesn’t include AI as a central part of the future workforce is of the past. We are rapidly entering a world...

Case Study: Implementing Obeya at Organization X. A retrospective-experience report with Org Topologies.

Aimé Flemm

Feb 19 min read

Case Study: Implementing Obeya at Organization X. A retrospective-experience report with Org Topologies.

Introduction For the past year, I have been working as an Agile consultant at an IT company that manages business-critical IT...

Elevating Katas™ as Systemic Levers for Organizational Agility

Alexey Krivitsky

Dec 17, 20247 min read

Elevating Katas™ as Systemic Levers for Organizational Agility

The Org Topologies MADE method introduces Elevating Katas to get change going. “Kata” was popularized in management via Toyota,...

Tailwind Career Paths: Encouraging Growth in Multi-Skilled Organizations

Alexey Krivitsky

Dec 17, 20244 min read

Tailwind Career Paths: Encouraging Growth in Multi-Skilled Organizations

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, organizations face increasing pressure to build adaptive, multi-skilled teams....

Elevate Product Management to Drive Business Agility

Roland Flemm

Jul 19, 202411 min read

Elevate Product Management to Drive Business Agility

This blog describes how moving up on the Org Topologies™ map shapes Product Management to achieve business agility.

Alexey Krivitsky

Jul 16, 20244 min read

Avoid Premature Platformization

Mind the gap! In the rush to platformization, organizations often create a chasm between the platform and their core operations.

More Elevating Katas

Stories from Trenches

Michael Voorhaen

Product Owner

"We did this as a team exercise last week, gauging where on the map the teams thought they were. And then we were able to share our vision on where we want to go next. The great thing is that this helped us stay away from good/bad discussions and focus on something as simple as ‘we are here’ and ‘this is where we want to go next’. Which then opens up the floor to everyone to discuss how we want to get there."

Read the story on LinkedIn

Pavel Gerasimov

Senior Engineering Manager

"We had three engineering teams who had their disconnected scopes, who owned "features", being at A level - and we had product team, who structured the goals in the way if we were (almost) at B level. The Org Topologies™ Map was the key to explaining this gap to both sides."

Read the story on LinkedIn