Agility – The Answer to Complex World

We’d just about got used to being in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous). A global pandemic, new ways of working, war, and recessionary pressures have combined to challenge how businesses not just survive, but thrive. The world is increasingly characterized by complexity.

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What is agility??

Agility, or?being?agile, is often misunderstood. It is not about speed. Operating faster can simply be a recipe for doing the wrong activities quicker. Agility is about being able to adapt, pivot, and respond to your customers and market trends, both at an organizational and individual level. This means you’re focusing your time, money, and energy on the core problem areas that will add the most value to your customers and make the biggest difference to your company’s success. When you do that, the pace picks up on the right activities.

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Mindset vs. meetings

Agile is commonly associated with practices such as scrum meetings, Kanban’s etc. However, true agility is a mindset – or a set of four critical ones:

1. Customer centricity This is about being driven by customer needs, not your own corporate agenda. By doing so, you open yourself up to co-creating solutions with your customers, which can lead more rapid innovation, faster product and solution launches, and increased market relevance.
2. Empowerment At its heart, this is about people at all levels being enabled to make decisions and be proactive. This means customers get a quicker, more personal and effective service, and employees can take more accountability.
3. Collaboration If you’re going to be truly agile you need to have all the various parts of your business communicating and collaborating together as one. Customer problems are too big to be solved by a single team or department, which is why silo's thinking and working is hampering many organizations’ ability to be agile.
4. Experimentation Business cycles are shortening, and companies no longer have time to perfect their products and solutions. They need to test, learn, and iterate. This is about being able to let activities and projects go if they’re no longer helping the company to serve customers. By doing this, you are able to generate more and better ideas, test, learn and iterate.?

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Why is agility so important?? Despite our human craving for stability, the world is only becoming more uncertain (52% of companies on the Fortune 500 since 2000 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired, or ceased to exist – Infosight). In this environment, companies who are truly agile and put the customer at the canter of their strategy and operations will maintain and take market share, reduce costs, attract and retain the best talent, and futureproof themselves to continue competing in an increasingly challenging world. ?

Agile manifesto formed the basis for the mindset and procedures of a large number of approaches, frameworks and methods. Agile manifesto has long been applied in wide variety of contents.

The Agile Manifesto is called exactly, comprises four core sentences:

Individuals and interactions more than process and tools. In completed world, process and tools are crucial. If we use the right tool for each activity and design the process in such a way that are easy to follow, achievable success becomes virtually comprehensible and implementable for everyone. This does not work in a complicated world. Here, the best salutations can only be achieved through the synergy of people with different areas of expertise and experience. What we need is creativity and the ability and the ability to react quickly and purposefully to unpredictable external influences.

Functioning software more than comprehensive documentation. To take the agile manifesto somewhat out of the software corner, it is more than legitimate here to replace the world software with products or services. In a complicated world, comprehensive documentation is of absolutely central importance. We depend on documenting processes and application down to the smallest detail in order to ensure the reproducibility and traceability of processes. It is much more important to focus on the emerging product or service and to permanently optimize and realize it.

Cooperation with the customer more than contact negation. We put a lot of effort into creating security by anticipating all possible eventualities in the form of contacts and agreements and jointly coordinating consequences and measures. In a world characterized by complexity, this will no longer be possible, as there is an unplannable number of influencing factors and developments, not all of which can be planned or foreseen. Accordingly, no measures or safeguards can be planned in advance. Rather, it is important that we establish a cooperation with our stakeholders to achieve goals or all parts of matters.

Responding to change more than following a plan. We are confronted with significantly more challenges than in a complicated world. We can not plan as aspect. It is more profitable and acceptable to make short-term planning and it is adaptable to change.

When we think about implementing agility, it is crucial that this is not about using any agile techniques or methods, but about a shift in the mindset of the people and organization. Agile understanding of leadership.

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