Business Agility is more than just a mix of frameworks

This article is primarily addressed to C-Suite and head of departments whose business is aggressively challenged and want to undertake a Business Agility Journey.

The world we live in since the last 10 to 20 years holds amazing and scary characteristics at the same time. In the Agile world, we have specific terminology for it. Sometimes we call it VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous), other times Exponential and the list goes on.

I personally see it as if we’re all playing a game that constantly changes. Whether it’s the rules of the game, the ball you’re playing with, the ground, the open-air stands, the spectators, players, teams, etc. Sometimes the changes come one at a time, sometimes a bunch of them fall onto you like a disaster and you have to deal with them.

So how does this relate to our topic?

Imagine a team that’s playing this kind of game. An infinite game where the goal is to continue being part of it as long as possible. Dropping out of the game means their death.

The best thing the team players can do to ensure their ability to continue playing is to develop their ability to first detect when the rules have changed before a referee (wait, when did the referee come in?) signals a foul or even expels them. Second, adapt quicker than the other teams on the field to the new environment and transform it into an opportunity. All this needs to be done while still pleasing the spectators since they’re the ones funding this endeavor. Not pleasing them means not enough money to continue financing the game. This is exactly what we mean by business agility.

Now is a mix of frameworks enough to address this?

Most of the transformations I see are about implementing an in-house framework built from parts of SAFe, Spotify, LESS, and DAD mainly.

If we go back to our game analogy, it’s like replacing your game tactic from a 4-4-2 (known in Football or Soccer as to be a little rigid) to a 4-3-3 (more flexible and creates more opportunities). But is it enough? Is this still going to be adapted when the game rules change? Or the whole game at once? When you move from playing football to tennis along with a ground structure change from grass to clay or synthetic?

If you’ve invested all your and your team members’ (employees) energy in the change of tactics, how can you expect to be able to shift when the kind of changes mentioned above happen?

What should you focus on then?

Well, there are several streams that you need to start working on. It’s a non-exhaustive list but from my perspective, it’s enough to give you a good head start.

One thing I should make clear is that these streams should be managed in parallel and not sequentially. Why you may ask? Simply because if you work on them sequentially, 

1. How will you know that it’s enough and that you can move to the second stream?
2. By the time you’ll say I did enough on this, the game might change and your effort was all for naught. That’s the beauty of uncertainty.

Now let's take a look at the list of streams that need to be addressed:

• A reason to stay in the game

Imagine a game that’s asking an enormous amount of effort and focus from you and whose complexity is increasing. A game that’s so tiring that you end up forgetting why you’re even playing You’ll start thinking about it and if you can’t find a good enough reason, you’ll just quit or change your jersey for another because either the other team is more attractive to you or simply because you want to try something else out.

For this reason, you need to have a cause, a cause so great that it’ll outlast anyone in the field, and so inspiring that no one will forget it. Even those who might forget it, they can see it anywhere on the field, locker rooms, stadium, bleachers, etc.). It needs to be visible for anybody to see.

As an exercise, ask your team members or employees what the goal of our company is. If their answer is “...ummm...I don’t know, make even more money, I guess!” Then you have a lot of work to do.

• Adaptive strategy

The traditional way to work on this stream in our game analogy is like giving a game strategy 4 or 5 rounds beforehand, hear the match on the radio and expect them to win. How can that be possible? If you stay out of the game for too long, then how do you expect to be able to understand it, the new rules, and the hardship that come with it?

A good coach is the one present on the field, supporting the players, giving real-time instructions, calling the players, asking for their feedback, and updating instructions on the spot. That becomes even more important and essential if the game rules along with the game players are unknown.

An adaptive strategy is a strategy developed by taking into account three capital sources of information:

1. One’s own intuition, ambition and knowledge, and one’s own reading of the game
2. Teams feedback and critical opinion
3. Outside parameters (ex: Has this situation happened before, how did others deal with it?)

It also needs to be precise, clear, understood by all, and effortlessly implementable. There’s a reason we call it adaptive. Mainly because it doesn’t take a year to define and 5 years to implement. If you want it to be successful, you need something that’s easily shiftable when the conditions necessitate it. As Jeff Bezos said, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast”.

• Continuous Learning

Imagine you’re leading a team that’s been accustomed to playing with a rugby ball size and shape. And then suddenly, the game changes and the ball becomes a tennis ball and you can only touch it with your feet. How would you react? Would your team still be able to play?

Would you halt the game and wait for your team to get proper training and start getting accustomed to the new form and rules?

In our modern world, this cannot be done. You can’t just ask for the game to be played at your own pace. So what needs to be done then?

One good way to overcome this, is ensuring that your players are constantly, continuously, and prospectively learning new techniques. This means that it becomes part of their daily activities. Be it through an LMS (Learning Management System) that’s constantly updating its catalog or through ad-hoc training, the most important thing is to never stop the learning and growth curve of your players so that they continue to acquire new skills and expertise.

By doing that, not only do you enhance their cognitive abilities, prepare them to accept the change, and embrace it, you also create a culture of excellence.

• A Spectator’s seat at the table?

Have you ever heard of the expression “customer seat at the table”, it’s been around for a while now. But guess what? I just don’t like it. To me, it just sounds like doing whatever the spectator wants and give them the reigns of the play. It sounds as if I should go and ask them (should I wear black or white Jersey? Short or long pants? Joggers? etc?). If it’s the way it should be done, humanity would never have had cars to drive but instead, we would all be riding horses that run faster. We would never have had an iPhone like we do today, but instead, we would still be struggling with Chiclet Keys.

While it’s important to get early feedback and quickly react and adapt, It’s important to keep in mind that you’re the SME (Subject Matter Expert), and your role is to delight your customers with a mind-blowing product that, while solving their problems, is seducing in its simplicity. But in order to do this, you need to really and carefully know your customers and anticipate their problems, frustrations, and needs. That’s the only way to have delighted customers instead of just satisfying them. Because limiting yourself to satisfying them, won’t get you out of the danger zone. Instead, build a relationship with your spectators that’ll allow you to know them perfectly. Even better than they know themselves.

Steve Jobs sums it up wonderfully in his famous quote: “Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

• Execution excellency

Of course, in order to deliver a good game, it needs to be executed perfectly. It needs to be wonderfully played. But how would you rate your execution capacity?

Well, if you have shortcuts running inside your team, then you probably have quite a few problems to solve. What I mean by shortcuts, is when people go around the corner or below the radar, just to avoid a process, or a department because it’ll make the work slower, and they’re in a hurry to deliver some value. That’s when you’ll need to work on your execution excellence.

Execution excellence is a commitment to raise the level of productivity during the execution so you can deliver the highest value to your spectators in the shortest amount of time without reducing your requirements (e.g. Quality, Consistency, Regulation, etc.). In order to do this, you’ll need to work on the efficiency and the effectiveness of how people collaborate in teams and cross-teams. You’ll need to develop a shared understanding of personal constraints, objectives, and concerns. Your technical excellence needs also to be irreproachable at this point. This is where agile frameworks you worked on fit.

Being about your productivity as a whole, makes it, in some way, the tip of the iceberg that’ll let you perform once going to market. But it’s not the only thing that matters. It’ll only be made self-sustainable if you work on all the other aspects we talked about earlier which are the bottom of the iceberg that will hold the rest.

Conclusion

I’m in the process of adding the concepts of Inside-out sales and Invest-Income Equilibrium. If you’re interested in knowing more about them, send me a DM.

As you might have noticed, it’s all done for the spectators. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or you intend to make, if you play on an empty stadium, then what’s the point of it? All you’re doing is surviving.

So stop surviving, put your spectator at the heart of your planning, embrace Business Agility, and thrive in an accelerated changing world.

But before that, share your list of items that you think will help organisations survive and thrive in today’s world in the comments and tell me what mine is missing?