How to be Agile and Responsive in digital transformation?

Agility and responsiveness are two of the most important factors governing your potential success in digital transformation. Things happen fast and furiously and your business needs to be able to be both agile and responsive if you want to stay in the sweet spot of what digital technology has to offer your company.

Before we start considering what this actually means in practical terms let's look at the converse of these two key competencies.

The opposite of Agile is Rigid. What kind of organisations are rigid?

A bureaucratic organisation is one with rigid and tight procedures, policies and constraints; and the company reacts with stringent controls as well as a reluctance to adapt or change. Bureaucracies are very organised with a high degree of formality in the way it operates. Organisational charts exist for every department, and everyone understands who is in charge and what his responsibilities are for every situation. Decisions are made through an organised process, and a strict command and control structure is present at all times.

The opposite of Responsive is Reactive. What does a reactive organisation look like?

The description above typically also represents the kind of organisation that would be reactive.

Reactive organizations don’t change until situations force them to act. For example, an emerging new competitor might spur a company to remain competitive and find ways to improve its performance. Or a company might wait for an economic crisis before it researches ways to increase productivity and cut costs. By waiting for extenuating circumstances and by failing to anticipate major developments, reactive organizations put themselves at risk: Sooner or later, aggressive competitors overtake slow-moving companies.

Why don’t rigid or reactive organisations fit well in a digital revolution?

Simply put these organisations either will not, or cannot, adapt and adopt fast enough to the pace of change and innovation that the digital revolution brings with it. An organisation that is rigid cannot make decisions fast enough, or act differently enough, to take advantage of digital innovation at the right time.

An organisation that is reactive generally finds itself ignoring, or denying, the new in favour of holding on to its own tried and tested ways and methods until it is often too late to make the necessary changes to maintain a competitive position against less rigid and reactive competitors.

Digital transformation requires flexibility, and it requires an openness to thinking and acting differently to scale your organisations capabilities into digital.

What is an Agile organisation?

The agile enterprise strives to make change a routine part of organisational life to reduce or eliminate the organisational trauma that paralyses many businesses attempting to adapt to new markets and environments, especially technology. Because change is perpetual, the agile enterprise is able to nimbly adjust to and take advantage of emerging opportunities. The agile enterprise views itself as an integral component of a larger system whose activities produce a ripple effect of change both within the enterprise itself and the broader system.

What is a Responsive organisation?

The Responsive Organisation is built to learn and respond rapidly by optimizing for the open flow of information; encouraging experimentation and learning on rapid cycles; and organising as a network of employees, customers, and partners motivated by shared purpose.

Many organisations, especially the larger ones, are not built to be either agile or responsive, which means these organisations will always be on the back foot when it comes to adapting and adopting to change and innovation. When I think about it these are not the organisations I have in mind when I decided to write this post. Instead I am looking to help newer and smaller organisations to take the biggest advantage of these competencies in relation to digital enablement.

Many of the larger media and advertising companies are finding themselves behind the curve when it comes to adapting and adopting to the radical innovations of digital enablement and the major possibilities these innovations offer to the smaller and more agile and responsive players out there.

How do you go about establishing an agile and responsive organisation positioned for digital transformation?  

Here are some Agile and Responsive design principles to help you structure your organisation to take advantage of digital transformation

These points are taken from a great article written by www.insitesoft.com

“So how can companies develop a customer-relevant digital business when change is the only constant and best practices are being redefined at warp speed?”

So, how can they?  How do they?

Companies experiencing success in their digital transformation efforts are aggressively developing a new attribute as they learn how to put the dynamic voice of their customer into first place and reorganize their people, processes, and technology to respond.

That attribute is agility.

The Power to Move Quickly and Easily

Whether companies are becoming agile by intent or by accident, these organizations are putting pressure on their ability to respond quickly to the opportunities or challenges that stream in from their always connected customers.  They have turned an important corner—no longer defending their old ways of doing business, instead intentionally empowering people in a variety of ways across the organization to ensure that change happens—customer-driven change.

When we think about how companies enable agility in their digital technology ecosystem, a few key characteristics come to mind:

First, these companies identify the technologies they need in their core systems tier (ERP, ecommerce, CRM, BI, etc.) and they drive an efficient integration between them, reflecting the key business processes and workflows of the business. Within this is the key to a consistent and accurate multi-channel experience across all touch points for customers—a must-have.

Second, they invest in digital technologies that are extendable and configurable and avoid invasive customization wherever possible. In fact, many companies are now shedding custom code as much as they can in order to enable agility.

Third, the digital technologies they invest in are architected and focused on their vertical. If you are a retailer, invest in technologies built for retail.  If you are a manufacturer or distributor, invest in technologies built for manufacturing and distribution.  In fact, the complexity of business constructs, programs, and policies in manufacturing and distribution demands a platform that is built for these verticals or custom code will remain the order of the day.

Fourth, the commerce technologies they invest in are “pluggable,” allowing new technologies, especially in the area of marketing, to be easily plugged into their ecosystem for testing, iteration, and once proven, for full scale launch.

Fifth, the technologies they invest in provide an efficient upgrade path.  We are at the beginning of this new technology revolution.  It shows no sign of slowing down soon.  Keeping up will be increasingly important as this evolution continues to take place.

Agility Brings Quick Wins and Fuels Momentum

If you can put a checkmark by these characteristics in your digital ecosystem, you are well positioned to flex your technology muscle within your organization.  If you can’t put a checkmark by these characteristics, it’s time to initiate change.   While the breadth of change may seem overwhelming, approaching the change in a model enabled with agility will bring quick wins and fuel your momentum.  To get agility into your DNA, consider coming up with a scorecard that measures the number of agile initiatives started and completed on a quarterly basis as well as giving high scores for the ones started that fail before evolving into success.  It’s a new way of thinking.

So much talk of change and enabling agile change to happen fast and with focus.

How does an organisation initiate an agile change management approach that enables digital transformation to happen successfully?

Here are some great tips from www.futureofcio.blogspot.co.za

Digital Master Tuning #109: Change Management in Digital Transformation

There is a particular mix, of the many things needed to effectively achieve change. Almost all of the forward-thinking organisations are at the journey of digital transformation. Digital means the increasing speed of changes, hyper connectivity, and always-on businesses. And digital transformation is the leapfrogging from the accumulated changes, so how to manage changes more effectively? Anyone repeating the 70% failure rate for change programs should immediately arouse some suspicion. This would indicate that for nearly 20 years managers have been condoning and embarking on something which is known to fail 70% of the time. Would we really have accepted such incompetence over such a long period?

Digitisation on itself often requires huge cultural change. Change Management is seldom effective because many companies try to build the highly valued building before ensuring there is a sufficient “foundation" to support them (define, specify, prioritise, prepare, execute, implement and stabilise / consolidate, harvest or forming, storming, norming and performing. If digitisation does not succeed in changing the mindset, beliefs, and behaviours of management, the change efforts will be deemed to fail. Even optimised processes and smart tools aren’t bringing the expected effects if not driven by dedicated professionals - therefore, select potentials, reform them, then go by such multiplicators. So if you have the right balanced insight, knowledge and experience needed to create trust and confidence and believe that we are all in this together in the same boat, then employees should not show resistance, and then you can utilise tools to help with efficiency, communication, structure and control, but you need to get the basics right first.

Involvement is the Key! Change delivery performance is often blunted by poor disciplines, organisational culture and lack of competency. The trick is also to find the balance between Change direction control and real involvement of the affected employees. Change is a dance between top management and the affected parts of the organisation where it must be clear who is responsible for what part of the Change. Digital is good at and for crunching numbers and analysing, dissecting, and even fast and wide dissemination, but it does not really mean to automatically build the trust and empathy needed to bring people along and engage them....

There is a particular mix, of the many things needed to effectively achieve change. As with all change management, whether this might be a successful mix or otherwise will depend on an individual’s perspective of view about the right mix and relative importance of ingredients. Before managers learn to manage / lead the way from start to end, they can not enlighten employees on the current (as-is) situation, the future (to be) situation. Vision, the current and future mission, the path / plan / strategy / program / project on how to get from current to future situation and mission and the value / benefit of “walking the talk” / executing the change. That said how should employees ever trust and have confidence in the digital journey, they must walk together as a team / group / company in order to create the desired successes and benefits - especially if their experience tells them that they too often walk alone in the dark too much of the often insufficient time.

Tools (systems/solutions) for Change Management are capable of increasing speed and consistency (identical repetitions). Information, preferably structured and focus, cut to fit the need or at least prioritized to fit the need, will be extremely valuable if used for the purpose it's created for. Acceptance of digitisation and tools will succeed only when there is a ''buy-in'' across levels right till the last link of the chain. Often the knowledge of and appreciation for digitised tools and their effectiveness is not the same between the top management and the levels below. Organisations need to have the tenacity to train, audit, review and handhold till it becomes the organisational culture to use the tools.

The challenge is to "Talk the Walk," rather than "Walk the Talk," in other words, practice first then share. We have problems with the change management when the project moves from the design phase to exploration. Different procedure and owners of processes are different. While there is a need for inside out approach and outside in approach to change, it is critical to making personal transformation at the core of the change process. Any strategy and model has limited utility unless each individual decides to change, owns the process of change, and take the adventure into inner landscapes. No change can be forced, let it unfold. A change management facilitator needs to be a "Non-Doer" as expressed in Tao.

The other pitfall for Change Management is that most change projects overspend their budgets. This is true because people are very bad at estimating. However when sponsoring projects, executives know this and mentally make an adjustment for the overspending when approving the understated amount. Unless there is naive behaviour, the impact of an overspending is rarely significant to most organisations. The last area where you could identify failure is that the business outcomes have not been achieved. Leaders as Change Agent, you need to be clear about the state of the performance.

There is no panacea, no magic bullet with regards to change management. Statistically, about 70% of change initiatives fail, rather, they fail to meet stakeholders’ expectations. A subtle but significant difference in meaning. Working with expectations may make it impossible to compare between organisations as the expectations will be contextual and possibly subjective. This would make it virtually impossible to determine if one approach to change is better than another in terms of outcomes as expectations are the success measure. This would be a nightmare for those promoting services, methodologies etc. However, generally, we are much better at it than some would like us to believe. The only way forward for real change to be effective is if ALL the Senior Executives have bought into the change and fully support it. Changes are part of a well thought out and planned strategy. The planning of a strategy is an evolving animal, that is why it must be revisited regularly and the changes made are communicated properly and effectively.

It is clear from this article that the bigger threat to achieving digital transformation is the process of change itself. The theory of change and the practice of it in real terms is often very different.

Conclusion

So what kind of organisation are you and how do you need to go about enabling agility and responsiveness in your organisational culture. The biggest challenges affecting the successful adaptation and adoption of digital transformation are definitely organisational culture, change management and leadership alignment and behaviour in driving these changes successfully and consistently.

Being agile and responsive is more of an organisational mindset and a way of being long before these competencies translate into methodologies, organisational structures and getting your hands on the latest technologies.

Without the mindset / paradigm shift towards agile and responsive thinking at a senior leadership level a suitable culture cannot be formed to support an agile and responsive approach to digital transformation.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” - Richard Dawkins