I had the pleasure of speaking again at the Kandddinsky conference— one of my favorite conferences. This year, I gave a new talk exploring a topic I have been working on for years, and in time, seeing that it seems to be a recurrent, yet often ignored, pattern: how can we effectively improve our organization and team skills by leveraging Enabling Activities and Platforms (as in @TeamTopologies)?

deck:

(Speakerdeck: https://speakerdeck.com/emgsilva/enabling-plus-platforms-equals-sustainable-continuous-improvement-kddd2025)

Here are the main highlights of the talk:

💡Organizations need to learn faster - and they “urgently” need to do that more sustainably (we are doing these in rather expensive and non-human-friendly ways)

💡I introduced a simple new model called “Needs → Skills / Capabilities → Response”, as a means to ground “improvement work” to specific needs arising in the environment. This helps us adopt a purpose-driven, outside-in thinking model for improvement, avoiding the “I think we need this huge new platform” inside-out thinking mode.

💡I then argue that when we listen to the environment needs in complete isolation (each team trying to learn alone and address a missing capability), we tend to take longer to respond to that need, and we tend to build up less capability and less quality of response, thish at the end leads to a low “Return & Quality of Investment” (R&QoI).

💡Then I explore how we can improve this by leveraging “Enabling Activities” (which I define as the fundamental behaviors from Team Topologies Enabling Teams, but without the necessity of having “official teams”). Here, an expert (yes, a single person on a team who already knows a specific topic) or a team can help accelerate up-skilling and address missing capabilities, as all teams face challenges in addressing a particular need. (Sometimes these experts don’t exist in the org, and we may need to bring in an external expert to help on this.)

💡By leveraging Enabling Activities, we tend to increase the “R&QoI”, because teams get faster to better solutions and also improve their own capability to address that need moving forward (so become self-sufficient faster).

💡 I then explore the idea that as time goes by. These Enabling Activities involve multiple teams, and we begin to see the formation of “candidate capabilities” that are useful for addressing the needs of most teams. These tend to be shaped and “owned” by the people driving the Enabling Activities.

💡This emergence of capabilities is a very interesting pattern, which may become an anti-pattern if we don’t listen to it and, when it makes sense, consolidate into a proper platform (team). The almost anti-pattern arises because such capabilities may lack the necessary support for quality and evolution, as they are often treated as a “side project” by some individuals.

💡When organizations manage to recognize those signals, they are basically shaping platforms based on the specific needs of their product teams, who are their final users.

💡I share several examples of this evolution—and I have seen it happen across all sorts of things: software tools, languages, methods, and even how we approach architecture (check https://esilva.net/architecture-topologies for my work on that particular topic).

💡Bottom line: Enabling + Platforms Pattern is a strategic pattern to help organizations address their path of learning new skills, shaping, and scaling the capabilities that they require to respond to the needs arising in their environment. As such, I believe this is a strategic pattern for achieving sustainable continuous improvement.

Stay tuned for a more comprehensive write-up on this topic - I will publish it here: https://esilva.net/enabling-and-platforms-for-sustainable-improvement