So is there is a simple explanation of organizational agility then?
Most people reach for pithy one-liners to answer this question such as:
"Organizational agility is an organization's ability to harness change for competitive advantage." - Ken Schwaber
Organizational agility is about using the reality that change is constant for competitive
advantage -- we can't "manage" change; we must adapt to it.
The problem with pithy one-liners is they are a little too open for interpretation and frankly abuse.
]]>
I learn all the time, and 2021 taught me a lot. Based on those lessons, I’d like to share an update on what organizational agility means to me in 2022. I hope you find it useful for what it does and does not mean for you.
Sometimes it’s easier to figure out something by starting with what it is not.
Agility is not about:
The agile industrial complex
Getting a single vendor to transform the organization
Starting work without lining up with the priorities of those we depend on
Not wanting to promote cross-functional collaboration
Imposing a particular approach on people
Re-labeling what we already do to dress it up as something new
Choosing predictability over uncertainty
Old fashioned micro-management
Competition (internally)
Fear
A contest between “experts.”
And agility is not about teams in isolation. Lean and Kanban expert Klaus Leopold says, “Agility is not a team sport; it is a company sport.” The founder of the global movement Agile People, Pia-Maria Thorén, says, “Telling a flower to grow is not useful; one must create the environment in which it can grow.”
Agility is also not about enabling executives to focus on the success in their silo alone, which doesn’t benefit the organization’s success as a whole”.
Sometimes a “bad cop” is needed, and it’s usually safer to have an independent coach who doesn’t rely on your business to fill that role. Still, that bad cop needs to understand the business domain to be credible.
It’s tricky to foster collaboration with executives, who often prefer to be competitive. If collaboration is to develop, executives need to be prepared to change the organization’s structure and what gets measured.
Most people reach for pithy one-liners to answer this question, such as:
“Organizational agility is an organization’s ability to harness change for competitive advantage.” - Ken Schwaber.
Organizational agility is about using the reality that change is constant for competitive advantage -- we can’t “manage” change; we must adapt to it.
The problem with pithy one-liners is they are a little too open for interpretation and frankly abuse.
It’s critical to recognize that organizational agility is not an all-or-nothing endeavor. It’s not a light switch you can quickly turn on and off. It’s ok to aim for more tangible desired outcomes and key experiments on the way to organizational agility, as long as we’re authentic.
Indeed, Rome wasn’t built in a day, but we need to lay bricks daily to improve organizational agility. If executive leadership moves too slowly or thwarts advancements, supporters of agility on the ground begin to lose hope and give up.
Lip service and complacency are a death knell for real change. If you’re reading this and saying, “our organization is already agile,” I have bad news for you. We are never done with continuous improvement—that’s one of the hallmarks of agility.
Let’s give it a try:
↑ Means more (of). ↓ Means less (of).
Organizational agility is about creating an adaptable organization with a higher possibility to drive disruption in society, the industry, and the marketplace.
Organizational agility has ↑effectiveness in optimizing current or un-realized value with ↑frequency-of-impact, ↑quality, ↑learning, ↓drag, ↑flow, ↑efficiency, and ↑work-sustainability.
Organizational agility looks like a pattern of constructive collaboration between people with diverse perspectives. Those people might be applying agile, lean, product management, the Three Ways of DevOps, the Agile Manifesto’s values and principles, Modern Agile, or other frameworks.
It feels like ↑humanity, ↑authenticity, ↑leadership, ↑engagement, and caring more about current and future revenues.
↑Humanity: we mean ↑compassion, ↑invitation, ↓imposition-in-terms-of-ways-of-working, ↑psychological-safety, ↑trust, ↑respect, ↑team-based-commitment, ↑openness, ↑inclusion, ↑passion, ↑focus, ↑energy, and ↑fun.
↑Authenticity: we mean ↑self-managing teams, ↑value, ↑outcomes, ↑impact, ↑sincerity, ↑empiricism, ↑excellence.
↑Leadership: we mean ↑self-awareness, ↑courage, ↑go-see, ↑speaking-truth-to-power, ↑alignment of what is said privately and publicly, ↓backlogs, ↑prioritization, ↑bottleneck-awareness, ↑focus, ↑flow, ↑embracing uncertainty, ↑serving teams, ↑coaching at all levels, ↑fixing-problems-beyond-influence-of-teams, ↑enabling organization design towards the direction of travel.
I get energized when executives fix problems beyond the control/influence of teams or teams-of-teams.
↑Engagement: we mean ↑engagement with society, shareholders, employees, customers, consumers, end-users, markets, partners, and other stakeholders through ↓big bang, ↑transparency, ↑inspection, and ↑adaptation.
↑Current and future revenues: we mean ↑meaningful-shared-purpose, ↑value, ↑understanding needs and wants, ↑outside-in thinking, ↑getting out of the building, ↑constraint management, ↑optimized as a whole.
I witness an excessive focus on efficiency 90 percent of the time. As organizational theorist and consultant Russell Ackoff said, “The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become.”
Consider this definition of organizational agility as a template to modify for your context. Delete words, resequence, add your ingredients. The goal is to clarify what organizational agility is and what it is not for your organization.
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]]>
This part I of a three-part series will focus on goals. We’ll examine how the goals set out in the EBM guide correspond to the Scrum Guide and some tools and formats for setting workable goals. Part II will focus on experimentation, and Part III will focus on measurement.
]]>
Scrum.org developed its Evidence-Based Management (EBM) practices placing a strong emphasis on goals and experimentation. EBM's key value areas are also important, but the critical focus is on goals and how to use them to achieve further organizational gain.
This part I of a three-part series will focus on goals. We’ll examine how the goals set out in the EBM guide correspond to the Scrum Guide and some tools and formats for setting workable goals. Part II will focus on experimentation, and Part III will focus on measurement.
Scrum.org's Evidence-Based Management Guide begins by including the following elements:
So how, if at all, do goals in EBM tie in with goals in Scrum?
First, some context might help as we explore this question:
The 2020 Scrum Guide added a Product Goal commitment to the Product Backlog. See the addition of commitments to each artifact athttps://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/addition-commitments-each-artifact and what's different in the 2020 Scrum Guide athttps://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/whats-different-2020-scrum-guide.
Here are some key extracts from the 2020 Scrum Guide:
Practitioners will be eager to understand how the Product Goal maps to EBM's goals. The mapping is not exact, and it depends on the context.
Let’s look at Scrum and EBM goals through the lens of the SMART criteria. SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and anchored within a timeframe.
The Scrum Guide’s Product Goal might be sooner, more realistic, more tactical, and SMART. Or, it can be later, more idealistic, and a long way from SMART. EBM’s Strategic Goal is doable but might not embody all the SMART components. A Product Goal is more likely to align with an EBM Strategic or Intermediate Goal. However, it could be Tactical or border Intermediate and Tactical.
Using the fictional municipality of Townville, here are examples to illustrate the above:
For further context, we can look at the Scrum vs. EBM goals through the FAST criteria. The FAST goals acronym outlines goals that are the focus of frequent discussions, set ambitiously, measured by specific metrics and transparent.
An almost impossible perfection vision is not FAST. A Tactical goal is usually not as focused on organization/customer/end-user outcomes/effects as a Product Goal. Therefore, only the following would be Product Goal candidates for the above context:
A Product Goal could be Tactical, but it's unlikely because there is only one Product Goal.
Given that EBM has more than one goal type, from a Scrum perspective, one might have:
or
or
In relation to the Product Goal:
Scrum does not dictate that you set a specific goal time horizon; the objective is the priority. However, some people find time horizons to be a helpful benchmark, which is fine as long as we don’t fix the scope.
The following table provides examples of reasonable time horizons for each type of goal.
But there is only one Product Goal so choose one.
There are several ways to tackle the task of creating goals as illustrated below.
The key is to use empiricism to discover if the Product Goal or product vision is wrong or if the Strategic Goal or Intermediate Goal is wrong.
Here are some tips for creating goals:
Goals affect how we behave. In Scrum, they enhance focus and support the Scrum values and empiricism.
Goals:
To get started, ask what small steps you can take to improve goal orientation? What's your first possible step?
In summary, Evidence-Based Management has goal types that assist with providing a direction of travel. EBM directs us to use (evidence-based) empiricism to prove if the goals we’ve set are wrong. Scrum also uses goals and they somewhat align with EBM’s. Context matters,– the Product Goal in Scrum might align with a Strategic, Intermediate, or Intermediate to Tactical Goal from an EBM perspective.
In part II, we’ll discuss experimentation orientation and evidence-based empiricism to discover if the goal is wrong. In part III, we’ll look at EBM's key value areas.
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Tobias Mayer, author of The People's Scrum, and the upcoming audiobook, The State of Work joins this Xagility™ episode. Using funny anecdotes as well as real-life experiences, John and Tobias bring you a raw yet inspiring account of agile in motion, a consolidation of a decade of experience right to your ears.
Put your headphones on, this episode Mayer change your life ;)
Punny right?
Listen here: https://linktr.ee/johncolemanagile
Lean, Agile, and Kanban pioneer Mike Burrows joins John in this episode to chat about his book AgendaShift, which explores ways to engage every employee, at every level, in the process of change.
John frames the discussion by revealing that upon reading Mike’s book, his immediate reaction was, “This is brilliant; I have to know more!” What inspired the birth of such a spectacular book? How do we fit these concepts into the larger agile framework and what does it look like in practice?
Get your snacks ready and turn off your screens as we get answers to the above questions in this captivating exchange.
Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2P8vGa9
Spotify - https://spoti.fi/3sLbb1P
Amazon Music / Audible USA - http://bit.ly/JohnOnAudible
Anchor.fm - https://anchor.fm/xagility
YouTube - http://bit.ly/JohnonYouTube
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David Nixon uses narrative processes rooted in classical knowledge and learning. His skills are creative writing, performance, information management and rehabilitation studies.
Kyle Richardson is a pragmatic problem solver, interested in understanding team psychology; investing in and improving people; bringing software solutions to market that deliver added value.
Carolyn Mumby, David Nixon, and Kyle Richardson join John Coleman to discuss the importance of agility within organizations and the need for widening its scope..
The pandemic has presented us with previously unimaginable challenges, but the velocity of change inherent amid of all the adversity is fertile ground fordiscussion. The pandemic has revealed the importance of embracing change and the role of keeping an open mind plays in gaining competitive advantage. Strong opinions, weakly held have surfaced to be the mantra of change.
Join us for an insightful, knowledgeable, and humorous adventure as this group discusses the reasons for and benefits of organizations widening the scope of agile.
Get ready to fold your laundry or grab a cup of tea and listen here.
Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2P8vGa9
Spotify - https://spoti.fi/3sLbb1P
Amazon Music / Audible USA - http://bit.ly/JohnOnAudible
Anchor.fm - https://anchor.fm/xagility
YouTube - http://bit.ly/JohnonYouTube
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The term organizational agility is everywhere these days, but what does it really mean? Can we even define it at all? Deepen your understanding of the manifesto and why it is essential to implementing healthy agile that delivers meaningful value.
Since its genesis, the agile manifesto has been subject to heavy analysis and subsequent criticism. Robert Annis and host John Coleman begin the episode by discussing the lack of diversity and inclusion within the group that created the Agile Manifesto.
Whilst acknowledging the limitations of the Agile Manifesto, Robert and John praise its strengths, embarking on a balanced discussion of the manifesto’s twelve principles including 21st-century nuances and examples. Using simple anecdotes, psychological theory, and of course, humor, this discussion guaranteed to give you a new perspective of the Agile Manifesto.
Put your walking shoes on or find a comfortable sofa and tune in here to this inspiring episode!
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Spotify - https://spoti.fi/3sLbb1P
Amazon Music / Audible USA - http://bit.ly/JohnOnAudible
Anchor.fm - https://anchor.fm/xagility
YouTube - http://bit.ly/JohnonYouTube
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Pia Maria Thoren joins John Coleman as his guest in the first episode of the Xagility™ podcast.
Pia starts the episode by recalling her journey in agile and explains what fuelled the drive to write her first book: Agile People. John and Pia then embark on a deep, multifaceted, and simultaneously humorous discussion about agility.
Pia and John opine on what they think enables the optimum functioning of agility and what motivates employees. They discuss the importance of the 'garden' metaphor in agility and talk about fostering the right environment to allow employees to achieve their full potential.
Grab some snacks or your running shoes, and tune in here!
Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2P8vGa9
Spotify - https://spoti.fi/3sLbb1P
Amazon Music / Audible USA - http://bit.ly/JohnOnAudible
Anchor.fm - https://anchor.fm/xagility
YouTube - http://bit.ly/JohnonYouTube
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When forecasting potential value, value is not crystal clear; it’s about the relative value of one item over another.
]]>The dictionary definition is open to interpretation. I'd like us to be a little clearer for agility.
Let’s talk about what value is not:
Value is context sensitive. Almost universally, value is difficult to measure. Value can be a mixture from one/some/all of the following perspectives:
When forecasting potential value, value is not crystal clear; it’s about the relative value of one item over another.
Use of formulae for potential value is only useful to initially sort a list so we can then put items in “the right value sequence”, usually a value sequence “that feels right”. Sorting a backlog alphabetically can be useful to trigger thinking about what the wrong value sequence is; it’s a start.
Once we’re happy the items are in the right potential value sequence, other factors then interfere with that sequence, that is, reality; for example, dependencies and so on and so forth.
In Scrum, the Product Backlog is ordered. In Kanban Guide, a backlog is optional, and even if you have one, it is not necessarily ordered; my personal preference is to order as long as we don’t make a “cottage industry” out of it.
Value for an item is not realized until the item is used. Customer outcomes usually result in a change in human behavior. Either way, people understand a little more what they want when they see what they don’t want. It’s worse than that; Clayton Christensen’s “milk shake video” illustrates that point very well.
Check out, the optional addendum to Kanban Guide page 16 for an example of value.
In your context, what is value? Please tell your context as part of your answer, thank you.
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See my change story for agility at https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/what-organizational-agility-3rd-edition.
The people we need in new teams/teams-of-teams need to support a fresh mindset.
]]>Check out https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/whyg... - you decide which reasons are better for your context, some reasons are better than others.
See my change story for agility at https://orderlydisruption.com/blogs/executive-agility/what-is-organizational-agility-3rd-edition
The people we need in new teams/teams-of-teams need to support a fresh mindset.
The chase for clarity doesn't lead to good outcomes.
Check out https://bit.ly/HBRCynefin.
But, be careful. Arranging agility within each function might not lead to good outcomes either. If you started there, have a look at how to progress out of there to a better place.
Why not inspire your people to move with you? #agility #cynefin #scrum #kanban #complexity #agile #agileleadership
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It looks like small cognitively-diverse (Syed, 2019) cross-skilled cross-functional teams or teams-of-teams using Agile, Lean, Lean/Agile methods, or the Agile Manifesto principles.
]]>Many thanks to attendees at my PAL-E workshop in London on 26-27 October who reviewed & debugged my change story for "what is organizational agility?"
Please continue to help debug this. Thank you.
The ability to drive disruption in the industry & the marketplace, an adaptive way of being/learning/sensemaking, through ↑effectiveness, ↑frequency-of-impact, ↑quality, ↑learning, ↓impediments, ↑flow, ↑efficiency, and ↑sustainability.
It looks like small cognitively-diverse (Syed, 2019) cross-skilled cross-functional teams or teams-of-teams using Agile, Lean, Lean/Agile methods, or the Agile Manifesto principles.
It feels like ↑invitation, ↓imposition, ↑value, ↑impact, ↑trust, ↑optimized-as-a-whole, ↑sincerity, ↑empiricism, ↑psychological-safety, ↑engagement ( shareholders, employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders), ↑respect, ↑leaders-embracing-uncertainty, ↑leaders-serving-teams, ↑leaders-as-coaches, ↑excellence, ↑transparency, ↑inspection, ↑adaptation, ↑team-based-commitment, ↑openness, ↑inclusion, ↑courage, ↑passion, ↑focus, ↑energy, and ↑fun.
It is underpinned by the Agile Manifesto at www.agilemanifesto.org.
It’s a helpful way of being in this Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world. It is a required skill set for the 21st century, regardless of specialty or function.
The ability to drive disruption in society, the industry & the marketplace, an adaptive way of being/learning/sensemaking, through ↑effectiveness, ↑frequency-of-impact, ↑quality, ↑learning, ↓impediments, ↑flow, ↑efficiency, and ↑sustainability.
It looks like small cognitively-diverse (Syed, 2019) cross-skilled cross-functional teams or teams-of-teams using Agile, Lean, Lean/Agile methods, or the Agile Manifesto principles.
It feels like ↑invitation, ↓imposition, ↑value, ↑impact, ↑trust, ↑optimized-as-a-whole, ↑sincerity, ↑empiricism, ↑caring-about-planet-earth, ↑shared-purpose-that-is-not-all-about-customers-and-money, ↑psychological-safety, ↑engagement (society, shareholders, employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders), ↑respect, ↑leaders-embracing-uncertainty, ↑leaders-serving-teams, ↑leaders-as-coaches, ↑excellence, ↑transparency, ↑inspection, ↑adaptation, ↑team-based-commitment, ↑openness, ↑inclusion, ↑courage, ↑passion, ↑focus, ↑energy, and ↑fun.
It is underpinned by the Agile Manifesto at www.agilemanifesto.org.
It’s a helpful way of being in this Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous and threatened world. It is a required skill set for the 21st century, regardless of specialty or function.
Your comments are very welcome, thank you!
For "what is value", see definitions at the back of Guide for Kanban - the Flow Strategy™ at https://kanbanguides.org
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For executives and for change agents who deal with executives in large contexts ...
A number of people inside and outside Scrum.org collaborated with me in 2018 and early 2019, to talk about 21st-century executive leadership. Some people contributed independently, some built on work I had been doing since 2015, some of us leveraged the work of Ron Eringa and Ryan Ripley with their Professional Agile Leadership - Essentials class. Discussions were mostly bilateral, most were online, some were face to face. Sometimes, it felt like we were going backward. We went back to the drawing board at least once.
Some of the people involved from inside & outside the Scrum.org community have communities in their own right, communities that are strong and growing.
To personalize things a little, previously strongly held positions by me are not so strongly held now. Most of the movement in my thinking was prompted by conversations with Angie Main, Andrzej Zińczuk, Andy Carmichael, Ben Maynard, Bjarte Bognes, Brendan Wovchko, Charles Bradley, Daniel Doiron, Daniel Vacanti, Dave Snowden, Dave West, David Dame, Don McGreal, Erich R. Bühler, Erik Weber, Fin Goulding, Haydn Shaughnessy, Jackie Thoms, Jill Graves, John Seddon, Kurt Bittner, Laurens Bonnema, Liz Keogh, Mark Noneman, Marshall Goldsmith, Mike Burrows, Nader Talai, Ron Eringa, Steve Porter, and Thomas Power. Some had time to see the full picture, others inspired me & some of my peers with their experience so I could update the full picture later. The conversations strongly influenced what the reader will see in the coming posts in this blog series.
I now understand more deeply why there is so much sub-optimal Scrum/Kanban out there, and why there is scope for all sorts of agility from crap to phenomenal, and why it is not always helpful to diss "inferior" approaches. As a passionate optimist, I want to help organizations towards their direction of travel using agility as a strategy.
I watched an interview recently. I loved the webcast by Dr. Lance Secretan and Rhett Power. People need to be inspired ("lighting a fire within someone"), more than motivated ("lighting a fire under someone"). And we have so many models, so what should we stop doing?
Before we start, I have a confession to make. As recently as 2017, I had a strongly held belief that if I had 30 minutes captive audience with an executive in my contexts with access to a whiteboard, I would (visually) talk about a selection of the following:
There were other topics also. Wow, was I wrong! Even if we agreed on a better list, there is a little problem. More often than not, the executive is not ready to listen to:
Long-lived teams, product over project mindset, customer jobs to be done, or consciousness are usually off my shortlist for the first 30 minutes also.
Executives are smarter than most, so there are no issues with getting the theory as long as the executives are ready to listen. The biggest challenge is the disparity between actions and words, not because of a lack of candor. It's because it's hard to change.
I and my peers discovered 5 steps on a journey for a 21st-century executive leader. Each step has a set of exit criteria that are effectively about stopping to do some things. The blog post series will do those Steps more justice.
Long story short for now:
Step 1- apprentice, values efficiency, commitments are not made by teams, scale as much as possible, outsource as much as possible because speed is of the essence. See this survey for exit criteria from step 1.
Step 2- tiger, values "star performers" over teams, values big bets, measures cycle time, improves the ideas of others, still values efficiency over effectiveness, uses the equivalent of tiger-teams to solve problems that the normal organization struggles with. See this survey for exit criteria from step 2.
Step 3- impediment blaster, more customer centric, actively removes bottlenecks, values smaller bets and still expects bets to win, ventures into the land of long-term-stable-product-teams. See this survey for exit criteria from step 3.
Step 4- system-inverter, in tune with the customer, understands that the customer often doesn't really know what she wants, values effectiveness, values small bets while expecting most bets to lose, insources or builds long term partnerships, changes the organization design, changes the ways we finance work, changes the way we reward/promote people, thinking in direction of being guardian of the culture, applies coaching skills, de-scales the organization. See this survey for exit criteria from step 4.
Step 5 - custodian-of-the-culture, in tune with staff and customer Jobs To Be Done, values sustainability, embodies consciousness, sees backlogs as wasteful queues, can operate based on principles such as the Agile Principles ("back to the future") and without frameworks. Somewhat akin to an executive leader of a "Teal organization" but not necessarily. See this survey for exit criteria from step 5, as there is always room for improvement.
To exit a step, one has usually passed the exit criteria for all previous steps.
The step for an executive could be dictated by the culture and the industry. It helps to have "the right people on the bus" and "in the rights seats on the bus" with the "right person driving the bus" (Collins, 2011), at the right time.
"You don't see what you don't see". So, in an industry where safety risk is high, having a technical understanding to not only see the technical risks but to help fix problems is crucial. At Step 1, a leader might be "back to back" in meetings, and be tempted to see people as "resources". At Step 4, a leader helps to fix problems 80% of the time and engages proactively with people who have unique qualities & skills.
When executive leaders within the sphere of influence are in Step 1, it is almost impossible to have Professional Scrum, LeSS-Friendly Scrum, or Kanban with limited WIP in the long run. Step 1 is where we see creative "best practice" of mixing Waterfall and agility. In the curriculum for Step 1, executives come to understand this phenomenon & some unintended consequences a little more.
Some change agents have the talent and skills to bring up topics (see my chapter in Stalham, Bradley and Priestley, 2018) from day one; I'm not one of those. Instead, I need to help the executive from where she is right now, even if it means not talking about topics I would have been bursting to talk about as recently as 2017, at least not until she is ready, not until I or my colleagues have helped to nudge things forward. We don't wait forever, we need to see evidence of progress. That's where Evidence Based Management kicks in, although, at Step 1, it's a challenge to get executives to stop measuring the wrong things. Therein lies the paradox.
Equally, one might find a pocket in the organization with Step 3 executives where one can be more optimistic about teams using Professional Scrum and Kanban (or whatever is appropriate) as they were intended. That is my plan, my hope.
I discovered I need to speak about content for the step the executive leader is at. I am (usually) wasting my energy and the exec's time talking about anything more.
My job and the job of my peers and partners is to nudge the executive leader to the next step through workshops. After building the curriculum for the 21st century-leadership, I finally reviewed this work against Spiral Dynamics Integral, and the Adizes Corporate Lifecycle.
This hypothesis is part of why I now understand more deeply why a Step 2 (at a point in time) executive would like something like "the Spotify approach" (ok, Spotify has moved on by now). I should perhaps support that with caveats. See Misconceptions of a Product Owner by Michael James.
The exec content will evolve. Unless you're one of a few having real success with serious topics, regardless of Step, from day one, I say:
Stop talking about stuff your executive is not ready for, start meeting your executive where she is!
Stop preaching, start teaching!
Stop "drudging", start nudging!
Iteratively ask "what's the smallest thing we can do to change?"
Help executives, their reports and teams to see the problems for themselves, to see beyond the pretty dashboards.
On the last point, the Vanguard Method seems to be particularly effective in the service sector.
In the next post, let's have a deeper look at Step 1. You will see some recommendations. In Step 1, some complexity theory helps to explain why a strategy such as agility is needed. Cynefin Sense Making (Cognitive Edge, 2019) is 101 for 21st-century executive leadership.
And for those who do not like frameworks, we also have something for you on this journey.
What looks smart in hindsight isn't a predictor for the future for complex work. Lots of people are trying to bridge the lack of congruence between the executive's questions and organizational agility. Help us with our experiments, give us feedback, tell us about your experiments. Thank you.
Bibliography:
Collins, J. (2011). Good to Great. HarperCollins.
Cognitive Edge. (2019). Cynefin as of St Davids Day 2019 (1 of 5) - Cognitive Edge. [online] Available at: https://cognitive-edge.com/blog/cynefin-as-of-st-davids-day-2019/ [Accessed 23 Mar. 2019].
Stalham, A., Bradley, M. and Priestley, A. (2018). Pivot: Real Cut-Through Stories By Experts At The Frontline Of Agility and Transformation. 1st ed.
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It is understood that the organization has constraints, e.g., not running out of cash, outcomes that need to be true to allow continued spend. If we take a bunch of bets and none of them is working out, there are consequences. The organization has to continue to operate as it changes.
]]>In this Scrum.org context .....
An executive is a person who owns the strategy or sets the direction of travel or sets justifications for spending. This exec could be the Product Owner for a chunk of the organization. Examples include someone at CxO level, someone reporting to a CEO, a chairwoman, or a board member for a large organization (>1000 people). An executive could also be a regional president or one of her reports for an overall 100,000 person + organization. It could also be a board member of a Fortune 500 organization, a government minister, or a chairwoman of a global non-profit organization. It could also be a leader within a division of a large firm, or within a small/medium sized firm. The main consideration is that the person has accountability for strategy and tactics.
Agility is just a way to get to where you want to get to, it is not the objective in itself. And, agility is no longer just for IT. One does not become an executive for agility overnight. Growing sustainable agility can take years. Given that agility is only a means to an end, we need 21st-century executive leadership.
In the context of agility, a lot has been written about teams, coaching, training, scaling, and the organization. The executive has been left longing for real context on agility. Scrum.org recognizes this as an important problem.
Context is everything. At the same time, a “starter for ten” is useful. To support a journey to agility for executives, Scrum.org is developing a journey of workshops on the growth of sustainable organizational agility for an executive audience.
Note the emphasis on (organizational) agility and the de-emphasis on Agile; this is because neither Scrum nor Agile is the only answer. Did you hear the mic drop?
With a little help from some colleagues, here is my attempt at defining organizational agility ...
The ability to drive disruption in the industry & the marketplace, an adaptive way of being/learning/sensemaking, through ↑effectiveness, ↑frequency-of-impact, ↑quality, ↑learning, ↓impediments, ↑flow, ↑efficiency, and ↑sustainability.
It looks like small cross-skilled cross-functional teams or teams-of-teams using Agile, Lean, Lean/Agile methods, or the Agile Manifesto principles.
It feels like, ↑psychological-safety, ↑engagement (employees, customers, partners and other stakeholders), ↑respect, ↑leaders-embracing-uncertainty, ↑leaders-serving-teams, ↑leaders-as-coaches, ↑excellence, ↑transparency, ↑inspection, ↑adaptation, ↑team-based-commitment, ↑openness, ↑inclusion, ↑courage, ↑passion, ↑focus, ↑energy, and ↑fun.
It is underpinned by the Agile Manifesto at www.agilemanifesto.org.
It’s a helpful way of being in this Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world. It is a required skill set for the 21st century, regardless of speciality or function.
In this blog post series, I will outline five steps and "aha moments" on a typical executive journey for organizational agility for the organization's direction of travel, understanding at the same time that there isn't any such thing as a typical journey.
It is understood that the organization has constraints, e.g., not running out of cash, outcomes that need to be true to allow continued spend. If we take a bunch of bets and none of them is working out, there are consequences. The organization has to continue to operate as it changes.
We are learning, we haven't got all of the answers, and with your help (input from all communities welcome), we'll get there together. I look forward to introducing the steps, some associated stories, and credits for contributors to the ideas/content.
https://linktr.ee/johncolemanxagility - social and podcast links
https://linkpop.com/orderlydisruption - order training from right here