Encapsulation and Orchestration

I spend a lot of time thinking about these two words.

When LeadingAgile talks about forming teams and building organizational structures, we rely on the notion of encapsulation to increase local autonomy and, therefore, empower the people doing the work to make local decisions.

When we talk about orchestration, we understand that anything that cannot be encapsulated requires coordination and, therefore, must be coordinated. Orchestration is the means of coordinating work between dependent agents.

Scrum assumes encapsulation and, therefore, has minimal orchestration.

SAFe assumes little encapsulation and, therefore, has more orchestration.

The only way to reduce orchestration is to increase encapsulation.

You increase encapsulation and reduce orchestration by breaking dependencies.

The whole story we are trying to tell at LeadingAgile goes something like this.

1. Organize for encapsulation
2. Respect dependencies and orchestrate as necessary while you break them
3. Reduce orchestration as dependencies are broken.