Getting Agile - The Simple Way
Middle management of a company usually knows everything the company needs to know of how to move faster, more efficient, getting higher on competitiveness scale, bust sales or fast growth and even being best in the sector.
Anyhow these strategic issues are usually treated as unrealistic by top management. What are the "usual suspects" - excuses, or even myths causing that very little actually happens:
#1 Those development issues are matter of top management only.
#2 The propositions or comments of a middle manager could be wrong and therefore cost him his position. The safe side for a middle manager is to run the operations, hide there and not interfere with strategy.
#3 "If we just had more money". Well, this one really raises my blood pressure. No starter has money. Successful crisis management reshaping is not made on much money. And doing the right thing always brings money.
#4 "We are getting bigger and therefore becoming complex."
#5 "We are doing that for many years and it is the right way."
The more the company grows, the more such obstacles and "values" it generates.
Overcoming such pat-positions might be done by different more or less complex and time consuming methods, but there is always a simple solution - usually to close to be visible on first sight. Just look at whole the picture from far away and get it simple.
In my last cases I was avoiding complex methodologies. We just took some time of middle management's daily operations and guide them through brainstorming sessions getting a lot of useful changes and solutions resulting in what was mentioned above - faster, competitive, efficient, new business models and wins. Everybody was surprised not only on possibilities but on realisation too.
What can we learn from practical evidence cases?
I was working with quite some clients who expressed process problems. I of course first looked what is the reason for bad processing and not the processes themselves. The diagnosis often showed that there was someone on the top of the company who didn't let lower levels to decide or to change anything without fear of punishment. On the other side in the propulsive companies one can always find people saying and trying things which doesn't seem useful. Thinking about which is cause and which is consequence does not take much time. The key of getting agile is in activation of middle management. And this is very simple. A matter of couple of days.
Nevertheless - if we talk about lean and simple, why achieving it should take complex steps? It is not logical from the beginning itself. At least begin with simple, essential fundament and do the rocket science later.