Introduction
For the past year, I have been working as an Agile consultant at an IT company that manages business-critical IT infrastructures for their customers. This company is a classic project organization that bases most of its organizational structure on ITIL 4 and Team Topologies. The organization has 8 customer-specific application teams and 7 generic application teams. Their main product is 24/7 managed services.
The generic and customer teams are overseen by a substantial layer of middle management (amount unclear), comprising various groups that coordinate and manage their operations. This middle management layer, in turn, reports to and is directed by the C-suite leadership to align the work with the organization’s overarching strategy and goals.
This experience report analyzes their past years Obeya transformation journey in retrospect using Org Topologies™.
The management group
Working with the middle-level management group revealed that they operated as a pool of separated individuals (at the B0 and A0 levels) rather than a cohesive team or a functional group. The image on the right is a mapping of the individuals working in this management team. Their environment was characterized by an excess of meetings, frequent hand-offs, and poor collaboration, which raised critical questions: How do they ensure they are doing the right things? How do they know if they are on track? How do they measure whether they are delivering real value to the customer? Addressing these issues became a priority. The initial goal became to help the businesspeople elevate to B1, forming a unified and functional management group with a business area focus. However, simply bringing these individuals together in a room wasn’t enough.
The relationship between the A0 managers and other teams (not mapped here as this document only focuses on the management group) is critical but strained, as their ability to create value heavily depends on the execution and collaboration of the operational teams. The managers, operating in isolation before intervention, relied on fragmented communication with Y1 teams to push tasks related to technological components, often through top-down directives. However, their limited scope and lack of alignment with both the customer-specific teams (CTs) and generic teams (GTs) created inefficiencies and gaps in understanding how value flows through the organization. This disconnect hindered their ability to provide meaningful strategic direction or ensure that work being executed by other teams aligned with customer and organizational goals. Elevating the A0 businesspeople to the B level, with a broader perspective, was essential to bridge these gaps and foster a more collaborative relationship across teams. To address this gap, the Elevating Kata[1] of Obeya was introduced, enabling a broader scope of work, improving alignment, and enhancing collaboration across the group. Elevating Kata is a collection of guidelines from the Org Topologies approach. Applying Elevating Kata helps improve a chosen organizational ecosystem with its org design (departmental, group of teams) to create new desired organizational capabilities.
[1] https://www.orgtopologies.com/post/elevating-katas-structured-repeatable-routines-for-improvement
Implementing Obeya: A Journey of Transformation
Obeya, derived from the Japanese term for "large room," is a method that serves as a workspace and a system for strategic alignment and collaboration. It is rooted in principles that foster inclusive and sustainable decision-making, enabling organizations to navigate complexity while pursuing long-term value creation. As an elevating kata, Obeya is a disciplined practice that integrates visual management, structured problem-solving, and systemic thinking to connect strategy with execution. It emphasizes transparency, ownership, and collaboration, creating a shared space—physical or digital—where diverse perspectives converge to solve problems, align on goals, and drive continuous improvement. By integrating principles from Lean and Agile methodologies, Obeya helps organizations adapt flexibly to change, focus on customer value, and develop resilient, high-performing teams.
In this organization, the Leading with Obeya method was adopted as a structured framework to bridge strategy and execution while fostering collaboration and effective leadership. Leading with Obeya focuses on creating a shared visual workspace where all critical elements of organizational governance to strategy, performance, problem-solving, and execution are interconnected and continuously monitored. This approach ensures transparency, alignment, and timely decision-making. The methodology revolves around five key areas displayed on the Obeya walls:
Strategic Direction – A clear articulation of where the organization is headed and the necessary capabilities to achieve its goals.
Performance – Key indicators that track progress towards these goals, highlighting successes and challenges to prioritize focus areas.
Tough Problems – A designated space to identify and resolve critical issues using structured problem-solving methods, such as root cause analysis.
Plan to Value – A roadmap outlining the steps needed to create value for customers and the organization, ensuring to connect the initiatives worked on and the strategic initiatives. i.e. making sure we do the right things..
Act and Respond – An adaptive space to address emerging issues, requests, or changes, enabling swift action and policy adjustments when necessary.
Initially, the introduction of the Obeya method played a pivotal role in elevating the businesspeople from A0 to B1, transforming them from isolated individuals into a cohesive and strategically aligned management group. Before the Obeya, the businesspeople functioned without a unified perspective, leading to fragmented communication, scattered priorities, and a lack of clarity about whether their actions aligned with organizational goals. By implementing the Obeya framework, these individuals were brought into a shared, visual space where strategic objectives, performance metrics, and key challenges were displayed transparently. This enabled them to develop a broader understanding of the organization’s priorities and their role in achieving them. Through structured discussions, performance dialogues, and problem-solving routines, the group began to work on collective goals and align their efforts with the organizational strategy. The Obeya also promoted collaboration and mutual accountability, helping the businesspeople transition from reactive, task-oriented behavior (A0) to a more proactive, strategic mindset (B1), where they contributed as a unified management team. However, cracks started to show after the first half year of the Obeya implementation, preventing the Obeya from realizing its promised benefits.
Pitfalls and Problems
The main pitfall encountered during the Obeya implementation was the tendency to layer the Obeya method on top of existing routines rather than using it to replace and streamline outdated processes. This approach led to overlapping efforts, where teams continued to rely on legacy systems, meetings, and reporting structures alongside the new Obeya framework. Instead of simplifying workflows and fostering alignment, this created additional complexity, increasing the burden on team members and diluting the impact of the Obeya. It became clear that without retiring redundant routines and fully integrating Obeya into the organization's way of working, the method's potential to enhance decision-making and collaboration would remain underutilized.
Another critical problem was failing to establish a clear "Why" for the Obeya implementation, which resulted in a lack of ownership and engagement among participants. Without a compelling purpose that linked the Obeya method to the organization’s strategic goals and the team’s daily work, many individuals viewed it as just another tool or process rather than a transformative approach. This ambiguity undermined commitment, as participants struggled to see how their contributions within the Obeya aligned with broader objectives or created tangible value. As a result, the absence of a shared purpose led to inconsistent participation and limited the method’s ability to foster collaboration and drive meaningful outcomes.
A third challenge that amplified the lack of ownership was that the team didn’t create their own Obeya process, further distancing them from the method. By not involving the team in designing the workflows, visuals, and routines of the Obeya, the process felt imposed rather than organically developed. This missed opportunity to leverage their input and adapt the Obeya to their specific context not only reduced engagement but also reinforced the perception that it was just another external tool. As a result, the team struggled to take full ownership of the process, exacerbating the lack of alignment and accountability that stemmed from an unclear "Why".
The last significant difficulty was the team’s heavy reliance on senior leadership figures within the Obeya, which had far-reaching consequences when those leaders left the company. Without these key figures to anchor the process, the team experienced a drop from B1 to A1, as the absence of strong leadership caused a decline in strategic focus and ownership. Over time, this situation worsened, with the process becoming increasingly diluted and disconnected from its original purpose, ultimately regressing further to an A0 level. This shift reflected a complete erosion of the collaborative culture and shared accountability that the Obeya was intended to foster. The over-dependence on senior leaders not only highlighted vulnerabilities in the team's dynamics but also underscored the critical importance of distributing responsibility and embedding the process deeply within the team’s way of working to ensure its sustainability.
Lessons Learned, Opportunities for Growth
One of the key observations is that Obeya does not inherently reduce systemic organizational complexity but rather exposes it, creating a clear and visible starting point for meaningful organizational change. By exposing workflows, dependencies, challenges, and outcomes in a transparent and structured way, Obeya brings previously hidden complexities to the surface. This exposure does not simplify the organization but instead makes its intricacies more understandable and actionable. Seeing these complexities clearly enables teams and leaders to identify bottlenecks, misalignments, and inefficiencies that may have been obscured within siloed operations or legacy processes. While this can initially feel overwhelming, it also provides a powerful opportunity to address systemic issues and lay the foundation for broader organizational transformation.
Another key observation is the inherent fragility of organizational change, which became strikingly apparent when the Obeya process began to fall apart following the departure of key leadership figures. This fragility was a direct consequence of the team’s over-reliance on senior leaders to drive the process, compounded by a lack of ownership among team members. Without these pivotal leaders to sustain direction and accountability, the Obeya quickly lost its strategic focus, coherence, and purpose. The process, which initially held promise as a tool for alignment and empowerment, became fragmented and diluted. This underscores the delicate nature of change initiatives: without a robust foundation of shared ownership and active participation at all levels, even the most thoughtfully implemented practices can collapse under pressure. The experience revealed that organizational change is not only about introducing new methods but also about embedding resilience into those methods to withstand inevitable shifts, such as leadership transitions.
Redesigning for the Future: From Obeya to Systemic Transformation
The organization's future envisions a radical shift in management’s role, transforming it into a high-functioning product team guided by the principles of Obeya. This evolution focuses on three key pillars—productizing the company, fostering an outside-in focus, and emphasizing system optimization over local improvements. These elements, cultivated by the discipline of Obeya as an elevating kata, can potentially move the group to a solidified B1-level team, where strategic alignment, adaptability, and value creation become the norm.
The first step in elevating management is to productize the company, treating the organization’s capabilities and services as integrated products. The management team shifts its focus from reactive task allocation to delivering value as a cohesive product team. The Obeya serves as a central hub, visually connecting strategy, execution, and outcomes, ensuring all efforts are aligned toward shared objectives. As an elevating kata, Obeya instills continuous learning and improvement into this productization, enabling the team to refine their approach iteratively. Over time, this disciplined practice can embed a proactive and value-driven culture, reinforcing the team’s position at a stable B1 level.
In the improved design, decision-making is driven by an outside-in focus, centering on customer and market needs. The Obeya becomes the lens through which external data, customer feedback, and market trends are integrated into strategy and execution. This focus transforms the team’s mindset, encouraging them to evaluate success based on their ability to deliver tangible value to customers. As the team internalizes this practice through regular Obeya cycles, they elevate their strategic awareness and align more effectively with the organization’s overarching goals, further solidifying their B1 maturity.
A key component of the future design is system-wide optimization, prioritizing the health of the entire organization over localized gains. Obeya’s visual tools highlight dependencies, inefficiencies, and opportunities across the organization, enabling teams to collaborate across silos and try to make decisions that maximize current system performance. By embedding this systemic perspective into Obeya routines, the team not only solves immediate issues but also develops the capability to address root causes and long-term challenges. This approach fosters resilience and builds a culture of collective responsibility.
Through the discipline of Obeya as an elevating kata the team is more empowered to continuously refine their practices and strengthen their strategic and operational alignment as a shared responsibility. Over time, this disciplined focus has the potential to transform management into a unified, product-oriented team firmly positioned at the B1 level, driving sustainable growth and value creation.
Conclusion
This vision of elevating management into a product-oriented team through Obeya is just one piece of a much larger puzzle—an ideal stepping stone toward a comprehensive organizational redesign with Org Topologies. While Obeya exposes and provides a framework to address complexity, truly solving systemic issues requires rethinking the organization’s structure, workflows, and cultural dynamics on a broader scale. By integrating this approach with larger transformative initiatives, the organization can move beyond local optimizations to create a cohesive, adaptable system designed to thrive in an ever-changing environment.
In retrospect, while implementing Obeya was a valuable step, it was ultimately only a temporary solution. The reason for this is that, although Obeya serves as a powerful elevating kata, it alone is not enough to drive lasting organizational transformation. Galbraith was right, true change requires more than just a new practice; it demands that all elements of organizational design be aligned and reinforce each other. Without addressing the broader systemic factors such as structure, processes, rewards, people, and strategy, the impact of Obeya remained limited. A more comprehensive approach, combining Obeya with a redesign of these other elements, would have created a truly sustainable, systemic change. This experience showed the value of Org Topologies™ as a tool to deeply understand how an organization functions and why certain changes succeed or fail. By mapping out the interactions between different elements, Org Topologies™ provides the clarity needed to design a more resilient and adaptive organization.
This journey toward systemic redesign is an ongoing effort, and I look forward to sharing more insights and strategies for addressing these larger challenges in an upcoming article. Stay tuned!
