Four misunderstandings among executives about "being agile"

"How could old dogs ever learn new tricks, if they are rewarded for old behavior?"

Many of the professionals working in the agile and lean field just don't believe the current sitting CEO's, Boards and executives can lead the ongoing digital transformation and turn companies agile, adaptive, flat and open.

Do you believe an executive, who has been leading with a certain (industrial) thinking pattern, suddenly can turnaround their whole way of conceptualizing the world together with their patterns of decision making, influencing and following up the business? Is it worthwhile to wait for the current executive to "get this scene", or just better to wait for the X- and Y-gen leaders, who know the choreography for agile, to step up to the challenge? More importantly, does your company have the time to wait?As an executive or a member of the board you will find yourself in the situation where you need to decide on implementing a (scaled) agile way of working and experimental product/service development.

How do I know this? Well, I bet your company sells products or services that somehow land within the domain of digital, software development, applications, IoT, artificial intelligence, media, communications, marketing, data, analytics, design or any R&D at all. These domains are rapidly moving into a new way and methodologies of working - agile and lean.

Which leader is able to navigate in and support this enormous organizational change and in which order would activities take place?

Writing about this would take a whole book, but I hope it is helpful to bust at least the most frequently heard misinterpretations and misunderstandings about agile... (heard from executive level people)

1. Agile does not mean "everyone are doing what they want"

Agile is not a way of working without objectives, rules or restrictions invented by some beard-growing-kale-smoothie-drinking-hipsterdevelopers. Agile methodologies bring on self-directiveness, customer value centricity, delivering incremental value, very much discipline, and cyclic order. This way of working is all different from the usual defining targets top-down, delivering a whole ready product to a deadline or following up according to the lovely annual clock and quarterly reports. The deepest meaning of agile needs to be clear to all the way up to the executive team and the board if you want to lead a digital business.

... Please continue reading the four-point list of misunderstandings in the full post here.

(This blogpost was originally posted in the Finnish business magazine Kauppalehti and Tekes - Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation. It got great feedback so I translated it. Enjoy!)

About the author: Riina Hellstr?m

Riina is recommended internationally by peers and strangers as a brilliant agile & people professional. She is a misfit of "old-school" organizations' HR, where she worked for 10 years, until she founded her own consultancy to drive the Agile HR scene forward. Her recently co-founded, boutique people & business consultancy, People Geeks (www.peoplegeeks.net), is helping clients with any needs concerning succeeding in business by HR, people analytics, agile change and leadership. She holds a M. Sc. Tech, a few agile certificates and a degree in applied neuroscience to support her work with theoretical background and hard science. Riina helps you redesign your people practices to fit digital, service design, self-directive and agile.