Capabilities

It seems that everyone talks these days about “agile,” even in the original manifesto, there were multiple dimensions (values and principles) of agile discussed.?

Fundamentally, being agile is about how quickly you can respond to something in the right way, and depending on what you do, that will mean different things. So there’s no single universally accepted definition of “agile.”?

As a leader, trying to make your organization agile can be very confusing to even know where to start.

This article is not an attempt to interpret the Agile Manifesto or comment on processes like Scrum or Kanban, but it's to clarify agile and better understand how you can identify areas of opportunity in the organization, consider this frame:

Each of these areas has a role in agility and more importantly, they don’t exist on separate islands. And getting these components to work together in the right way is really the key.

For the remainder of this article, let's take a look at one of the above dimensions of agility, - I already talked about Leadership in my last post, and now let's discover?the capabilities:

The capability is the ability to do something. And it can be thought of at the organizational level (e.g. manufacturing capability), at the team level (e.g. a project team), or at the individual level. In any case, the capability is about having the skills, training, experience, coaching, education, etc. to effectively do the work being asked of you.

Note that capability is different from capacity. The former is about your ability to do something, whereas the latter is about whether or not you have the time available to do it. So to do a good job you need both capability and capacity. However, we often merge the two together when trying to get something accomplished, i.e. we first look for who’s available (has capacity) rather than who’s capable.?

In the context of agile, not only do you need the capability to do your current work, you need the capability to do the work you may be asked to pivot to.

Developing the individual and team capabilities needed to make organizations more agile is becoming a lost art. As organizations and teams are asked to pivot to a new direction (and be agile), the managers typically jump into the fray to make things happen rather than the individuals. This approach may or may not be successful, but it’s certainly not sustainable. It also has the unintended consequence of subverting the overall capability development needed to support long-term agility, since managers spend their time solving tactical problems instead of developing strategic capabilities in their teams.

Developing new individual or team capabilities is somewhat of a multi-step process:

1. Identify the capability gaps: To do this, think about what your teams are being asked to do now and what they may be asked to pivot to in the future.

2. Provide training: This could be reading, an online course, a workshop, or with a coach. Having a coach can help people to change their methods of employing capabilities. These are different types of people in employing capabilities:

Abition: He used it to build himself.

Hateful: He used it to destroy others.

Miserable: He used it in self-destruction.

Desperate: He used it to destroy himself and others.

Loving: He used it to build himself and others.

Altruism: He used it to build others.

Ignorant: never used it.

3. Provide support. Often times training topics will sound perfectly logical while in the workshop with an expert instructor, but then get murky when the individual tries to apply the topic in a real-world situation.?

4. Have the individual/team apply the new capability knowledge as soon as possible. It’s well known that people forget what they don’t apply, so find real-world avenues for application and insist that they use the newly acquired capabilities.

5. Review, measure and provide feedback on their outputs. Remember that people pay attention to what is measured, so if you want them to really use what they’ve been trained on then you need to measure them on it and hold them accountable for results.

When senior-management models capability development and makes it an expectation with their direct reports, it cascades down to that level and next until it’s part of the organization’s culture. More specifically, organizations that are great at developing employee capabilities put mechanisms in place to motivate (functional) managers to make capability development a top priority.

Creating an agile organization is no simple task that can be checked off in the next few months. It’s not about new technology, writing new procedures, a 3-day workshop, new roles & responsibilities, or a new org chart – although they are all part of it. Furthermore, achieving agility is very specific to the organization at hand, so while we can think of the six overall “levers of agility” :

Leadership .

Capabilities .

Decision-making .

Organizational Structure .

Processes, systems, tools .

Teams.

I will add articles about the other dimensions of agility.

By Ouhaga Charifa