AGILE EXECUTION

'In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable' Dwight Eisenhower

This is the third in a series of short outcome-focused articles on 'High Performance Under High Uncertainty', outlining some tools and approaches for dealing with the challenges of uncertainty, complexity and risk in a world still grappling with Covid-19 and its social, political and economic fallout. Previous articles can be viewed here (scene setter) and here (agile thinking). The glue joining the articles together is agility; the background context was described in the scene setter which highlighted 3 main challenges:

In each article, I describe the context, the current problem, tools and approaches and relevant cultural / leadership implications. This post deals with agile execution.

CONTEXT

At 0745 on 5 Jun 1967, Israel landed the first blow of the Six-Day War virtually destroying the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. Why 0745? A number of factors informed the Israeli timing, not least that 0745 was 15 minutes before the start of the normal working day and many officers would be incommunicado (no mobile comms in 1967!) en route to work. The significance of that was that, at that time, Egyptian military doctrine was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union favouring highly centralised decision-making. No junior soldier would take action without orders from above.

Response to a dramatic and unexpected situation (the attack) required fast decision-making but no such capability existed. I pass no comment on the history or politics of the region but merely point out that this conflict was, as much as anything, a conflict between competing organisational philosophies, one decentralised and agile, the other centralised and inflexible. In an environment characterised by uncertainty, complexity and risk, the former proved to be far more effective.

THE CURRENT PROBLEM

In the UK, government support of furlough will cease soon. The impact of that is unknown. In December, the Brexit transition period will end. The impact of that is unknown. Covid-19 potentially poses an increased threat during the winter months. The impact of that is unknown. There will be an election in the US. The impact of that is unknown. All of the above are interconnected through national and global webs of complex systems. The impact of that is unknown.

Even if you applied the principles of agile thinking and used all the tools and approaches in the previous article, you would still only be operating within your 90% confidence interval (which might well be quite large). Any precision in your plans and numbers would largely be an illusion. But we still need to decide on likely market demand, allocate resources and deliver value. We will need to be flexible to how things actually play out, and quick to react to signals that we are getting it wrong or to exploit newly emerged opportunities.

This is the essence of agility. The concept is simple and the need obvious. However, as always, the implementation is more tricky than it looks, in particular in large organisations. If every decision requires 15 approvals in order to ensure alignment with higher-level strategic direction and cross-functional activities, agility will be difficult. But without that alignment check, chaos ensues. How to square that circle?

TOOLS AND APPROACHES

It should be self-evident that the key to agility is empowerment - decentralising decision-making authority to the lowest practical level in order to eliminate management bottlenecks. This is often perceived as a direct trade-off between alignment and autonomy - a zero sum game. However, I prefer Stephen Bungay's representation below (light blue arrows and associated text added by me):

Bungay challenges the trade-off logic and claims that it is high alignment that enables high autonomy. The two are not mutually exclusive but in fact, co-dependent. I agree and identify 3 critical factors in building an agile organisation:

Clarity (in common purpose)

What is our intent? What specifically are we trying to achieve and why? How does that align with my boss' intentions and my boss' boss intentions? What is the main effort? In order for decentralised decisions to align with higher organisational goals, people need to know all of the above. If you don't know them, work them out and backbrief them to your boss for confirmation. Intent should be cascaded through an organisation. NB cascading intent is not the same as cascading targets, which are often numbers plucked out of thin air (see #3 under Alignment).

General Stanley McChrystal makes the point that if you don't agree with my order, execute the order I should have given you to deliver my intent (some significant cultural and leadership implications here - see below). Of course, that is highly predicated on knowing what McChrystal's intent is and alignment with others in the organisation...

Alignment

1. Use Standard Operating Procedures. Coming from a military background, this seems obvious to me. If it's something that happens a lot or is safety critical, simply script the actions. Don't waste brainpower on reinventing the wheel every time. SOPs are not what make you inflexible, they are what make you flexible. They free up the brainpower for the clever stuff. They are implied by Bungay's model - alignment before autonomy, and they build flexibility - at touch points, teams are using the same language and processes for similar or interdependent tasks.
2. Communicate, communicate, communicate. It is essential at all levels that people understand how 'the big picture' is evolving and the relevant aspects of what other teams and individuals are up to. In aviation, it's what is called 'Situational Awareness' or 'SA' - a mental model of what is going on around you and where you fit in. In world becoming ever more sensitive to communication behaviours, don't ignore communication as a process - how to get the right information to the right people at the right time.
3. Think carefully about what you reward. The contributions of individual functions towards a higher collective goal are 'means'. However, if people are primarily measured and rewarded on their silo'ed contributions, they will actively pursue those targets even if those activities are not aligned with the common purpose (e.g. Sales chasing orders irrespective of profitability or Operations' capacity) or everything around them has changed. The means will have become the ends. You will get what you reward.

Empowerment

If you have clarity in common purpose and alignment across individuals and teams then, and only then, can you start to leverage the power of empowerment and agility. Empowerment is not simply delegation, or abrogation of responsibility. It is agreeing what is to be achieved, why, by when, and with what resources, but delegating authority to decide on how. It is critical that the freedoms and constraints (or limits to decision-making authority) are clearly established. It's as simple as that. But it does come with some significant leadership and cultural baggage...

CULTURAL / LEADERSHIP IMPLICATIONS

The leadership issue is best illustrated with a true example. Steve is an experienced, very senior banker. Early in his career, he made a deal that was a bad call and lost ￡10m. He expected to be sacked. However, his Boss said: 'why would I sack when I just sent you on a ￡10m training course? I wish you hadn't done that, but I now realise you weren't ready for this responsibility and I should have put more checks and balances in place.'

This is leadership. Empowerment, and by extension agility, require:

1. Trust. Tell people what you want to achieve and let them get on with it until they deliver, need more help or run into the boundaries of your freedoms and constraints.
2. Support. Empowerment is a 2-way process. In conditions of uncertainty, complexity and risk, things will not always go to plan. You can't remove your support just because things didn't work out.
3. Objectivity. The same as for agile thinking, we need to deal in reality.

So that's agile execution: clarity-alignment-empowerment underpinned by a culture of trust, support and objectivity. Next Sunday, I will close out this series with agile learning. As always, feedback very welcome.