Ever Heard of “VUCA”? Then You Need Business Agility

Over my career I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of working with many great teams. I developed software for startups; worked with Fortune 50 companies; I’ve helped the world’s most innovative companies sharpen their business agility. Yet I was recently reminded just how truly game-changing agile ways of working can be when combined with effective teaming. Here’s the backstory.

Thanks to Covid, supply chains in the semiconductor industry have been sorely tested. To lock in supplies, a major manufacturer needed its forecasting capabilities, which typically peer into the future for two months, to now cover a full year. Being able to secure this supply was critical in keeping the manufacturing lines running, creating high demand product. What’s more, this feat needed to happen not by the next quarter, not in a couple of months, but within 30 days. Here’s how we pulled it off.

VUCA

The challenges facing the team were dauting. Product forecasting in the best of times requires significant effort across multiple business domains (many of which are siloed). Not only do you need wide support; you also need deep expertise.

In our current situation, there were more unknowns than knowns: We didn’t know what the extended forecast would cost, or how risky it would be. We didn’t even have certainty around how to create the forecast itself. Our milieu was what the U.S. Army calls “VUCA” — volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous .

Micro Goals

In a VUCA world, the key to success is to not get bogged down in upfront planning or lengthy conversations across chains of command. Instead, you need to simply dive in. And if you can apply an agile approach that harnesses the collective expertise of your colleagues — all the better!

After two days of training in agile ways of working, the team held a remote Ideation workshop , where we created a roadmap for the coming month. From this shared alignment, we sprinted across the map, completing a goal every week. In keeping with the essence of business agility, the goals were clear, concise, and focused on the needed outcome.

What’s more, because the team was small and tightknit (that’s another key agile ingredient), we didn’t need endless strategy meetings or status presentations. All we needed were micro goals and a high-level scope.

A High-Trust Team

Did I say the team was tightknit? That quality, perhaps more than any other, was the secret to their success. Because most of folks had been with the company for many years, they enjoyed an amazing breadth and depth of experience. Mutual respect and a strong shared history created a high-trust environment in which rapid, empowered actions were the norm.

This approach was crystallized in the first week when a senior member of the team, concerned about an unknown, suggested a meeting to create a risk-mitigation plan. A colleague’s response was not only perfect; it also set the tone and trajectory for the whole project:

“We just heard the key to agile is to begin. So, instead of drawing up a document, let’s just do the work.”

Amen! Rather than holding extensive discussions, empower your teammates to make their own decisions. Once everyone knows the goals, executing them becomes a lot easier.

Sweet Success

Does an agile approach work for every project? No.

Was ours perfect? No again.

Yet it was incredibly inspiring to see how quickly the team embraced the agile mindset . Against dramatic odds, the team succeeded. The impact of this result was immediate and well received, with suppliers expressing pleased reactions to the new forecast. All of this while learning a new way of working that many are keen to replicate.

If that’s not sweet success, I don’t know what is.