Agility isn’t anarchy - its orderly

It seems like everyone in agency land now wants to be more agile. Spurred on by a goal of ‘acting like a start-up’, teams are looking for new ways of working to keep pace with more nimble competitors, or go to market with new ideas for their clients faster than previously possible.

Often when I speak to my peers in the industry about agility, they talk about the importance of ‘speed’, or giving an increasing degree of autonomy to one or more individuals over the wider team. I feel both are very much incorrect.

Shortening deadlines (without a fundamental change in team work flow) leads to cut corners, producing sloppy work and a burnt-out team. And a good ‘agile’ team (i.e. a structured squad designed to deliver innovative work) should be given the semi-autonomy from the wider business, but no one individual should not be given significantly higher decision making power than the wider team. The best ideas tend to result from a collective with clear roles and responsibilities (see. Walter Isaacson’s excellent The Innovators for a multitude of examples).

However, the most dangerous belief is that being ‘agile’ is linked with a lack of structure, hybrid roles, and unclear end goal. This anarchic view of agility, which typically stems from a lack of preparation and process, may give the impression that a team is ‘agile’, both within the team and outside, but it produces nothing more than poor work done completed in stressful circumstances.

Planning, process, and procedure may sound like they run counter to ‘agile’ ways of working, but from my experience running ‘agile’ projects over the past two years, placing some order in the chaos helps projects run faster, maximises the skillset of your team and produces strong, differentiated work.

There are many ways in which agile ways work working can be applied in the workplace (I would recommend Harvard Business Review’s Agile at Scale which adapts some core concepts for larger organisations).

But I have found three ‘agility focus areas’ that have made the largest positive impact to day to day work and team output

• Team design – A team must be designed to a lean size (note: not a small size) to minimise communication lines and reduce consensus congestion, and know when to pull in skillsets as required. Team behaviours and ways of working, such as the Scrum processes, which emphasizes creative and adaptive teamwork in solving complex problems, are one way of maximising team skillets, whilst increasing efficiencies
• Compression – A great deal of time is spent in teams waiting for the next deliverable. Waiting around for the work to drop can lead to overload when it drops (and a knock-on to other areas/projects). Work flow processes made famous by the Japanese firms (such as Kanban used in the Toyota Production System) are useful for understanding and reducing lead times to maximise work flow
• Streamlining – Retrospectively, a large portion of time spent working on projects isn’t all that useful. That’s not to say it’s poor work, just that upon revision, there are certain elements in the processes that weren’t required. Reflective, internal feedback loops that focus on the on the continual elimination of waste (lean development) help bring project timelines down, increase throughput as well as decrease the volume of work that is superfluous

The high calibre of work that has been delivered from the MediaCom Blink teams results from these principles – lean ‘squad’ teams built with structured processes and limited hierarchy can produce work at higher volume and speed without sacrificing quality.

This is not an outcome of doing work on the fly. It requires preparation in terms of team makeup, roles and structure, custom workflow processes, a continuous focus on KPIs and knowing when to deliver/close.

Above: Jeff Bezos's "Two Pizza" Principle for ideal team sizes

To act like a start-up can often extend to the disorganisation that exists in many start-ups. Successful companies with a history of agile working processes – Google, Amazon, Facebook – are no longer start-ups. They are large corporations with orderly processes and procedures, and clearly defined roles that allow for radically different (and effective) work flow processes to be implemented.

We should all be looking to Silicon Valley for inspiration. But when it comes to operation, ways of working should be learned not from anarchic early stage start-ups, but rather scaled startups using their orderly agility for competitive advantage.

Liam Brennan

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