What Are Elevating Katas?
Elevating Katas are iterative practices designed to help organizations enhance their structures, collaboration, and delivery models. Inspired by lean and agile methodologies, these katas support teams in gradually improving their processes while adapting to complex business challenges.
In the evolving landscape of software development and organizational design, Elevating Katas play a crucial role in fostering continuous improvement. These structured, repeatable exercises help teams refine their workflows, challenge inefficiencies, and push for higher performance.
Elevating Katas and the MADE Method
The MADE Method (Map, Assess, Design, and Elevate) is a structured approach to organizational transformation. While the first three components focus on diagnosing and structuring improvements, the Elevate phase relies heavily on katas to experiment with the practices used in highly adaptive organization.
Some Elevating Katas
Case Study: Implementing Obeya at Organization X. A retrospective-experience report with Org Topologies.
An IT company’s middle management struggled with fragmentation, misalignment, and inefficiencies, limiting strategic direction. To address this, they adopted Obeya, a structured framework for collaboration, transparency, and decision-making. Initially, Obeya helped elevate managers from isolated individuals (A0) to a cohesive, strategy-driven team (B1). However, issues arose when Obeya was layered on top of old routines, lacked clear purpose, and was overly dependent on senior leadership. Without systemic integration, its impact diminished. The experience highlighted that sustainable change requires broader organizational redesign beyond Obeya alone, emphasizing the importance of Org Topologies™ for lasting transformation and adaptability.
Read the full case study on the application and pitfalls of using OBEYA
Tailwind Career Paths: Encouraging Growth in Multi-Skilled Organizations
Traditional career paths often limit adaptability by enforcing specialization and hierarchical growth. Tailwind career paths offer a flexible alternative, aligning individual development with organizational needs. These models emphasize multi-skilling, technical excellence, and mentorship without rigid managerial ladders. Companies like Y Soft showcase successful implementations with transparent, peer-driven promotions and simplified roles (e.g., Junior → Senior → Principal). Key principles include clear communication, role simplification, peer-driven promotions, mentorship, and team-based goals. By fostering skill mobility and eliminating rigid hierarchies, organizations create resilient, innovative teams. Success depends on leadership commitment and structured frameworks that empower employees to grow and contribute meaningfully.
Read the full article on Tailwind Careerpaths.
Elevate Product Management to Drive Business Agility
Business Agility enables organizations to quickly adapt to market changes and maximize value delivery. However, many companies struggle due to fragmented product ownership, where Product Owners manage parts rather than the whole Product. This creates inefficiencies, limiting strategic alignment and impact.
To close the Product Gap, organizations should:
- Elevate Product Owners—connect them directly to teams and strategic priorities.
- Form Teams of Teams—aligning work around business problems rather than isolated components.
- Adopt Product Sprints—ensuring cross-team collaboration and shared ownership.
- Strengthen Engineering Practices—promoting multi-team code ownership and flexibility.
Read the full article on Elevating Product Management
Elevate a SAFe Adoption with Team of Teams and eARTS
Elevation by Org Topologies™ enhances organizational agility by restructuring teams for adaptability, innovation, and resilience. Traditional SAFe adoptions often struggle with dependency management, slow feedback loops, and fragmented backlogs, limiting true business agility. Elevating SAFe involves transforming Agile Release Trains (ARTs) into Teams of Teams (eARTs)—cohesive units focused on shared business objectives.
Key steps include:
- Select an ART to transform into a Team of Teams.
- Shift backlog focus from tasks to business objectives.
- Enable synchronous collaboration by reducing dependencies.
- Iterate improvements incrementally for lasting agility.
This approach fosters self-coordination, shared ownership, and continuous learning, strengthening business alignment.
Read the full details of elevating Agile Release Trains.
Systemic Reduction of Cognitive Load
Cognitive load impacts productivity, engagement, and business agility. While reducing ownership scope seems like an easy fix, it often creates bottlenecks, silos, and inefficiencies. Instead of fragmenting teams, organizations should balance cognitive load while maintaining a holistic view of customer value.
Key strategies include simplifying workflows, automating tasks, sharing work, minimizing WIP, embedding business analysis, and integrating discovery with delivery. By designing organizations with systemic thinking, teams can stay productive without sacrificing customer experience. The goal is to optimize cognitive load, not eliminate it, ensuring sustainable, high-performing work environments.
Read the full article on reducing cognitive load.
Conclusion
Elevating Katas embody the principle that lasting organizational change arises from systemic coherence and incremental, behavioral shifts. By focusing on daily routines—how teams refine backlogs, how product definitions are broadened, how budgets are allocated, and how Product Owners engage with strategy—these katas directly influence the elements of Galbraith’s Star Model. The result is a more agile organization, one that continuously aligns its strategy, structure, processes, people, and rewards.
These katas do not offer a magic bullet; they demand patience, consistency, and intentional practice. Yet, this very requirement ensures authenticity. As habits form, culture evolves organically, and the organization’s capacity to learn and adapt deepens. In a world where the only constant is change, Elevating Katas serve as reliable instruments for shaping the future, guiding organizations toward sustained performance, relevance, and growth.
Read more in the Org Topologies Knowledge base.