Are you agile?

What would you say if you were approach by a stranger who asked you: “Do you consider your organisation an agile one?”

How would you answer?

Would you, for instance, say: “Yes, we have Product Owners and Scrum Masters, and we work in 14 days sprints using the Scrum methodology”?

I guess not. But what is agility and how would you assess the agility of your organisation?

What is agility?

Well, to me it is NOT a bunch of roles, processes and artefacts in a particular framework (however useful in transforming your business).

Instead, I find agility is well defined by the Oxford Dictionary as: “the ability to move quickly and easily”.

Equally inspired by the various agile frameworks[i] I believe an agile organisation is characterised by:

1. Being driven by a strong strategy and working towards common goals
2. Measuring the success of the organisation by the ability to reach those goals
3. Having a strong customer/stakeholder focus, always including the voice of the customer/stakeholder in decision making and development
4. Consisting of people (and teams) working together to reach the common goals
5. Working towards the goals in short iterations, learning and adapting (and consequently having the courage to adjust the strategy)
6. Having a shared consciousness (allowing everyone to know “what is going on”)
7. Having decentralised decision making, allowing everyone to make decision based on the shared consciousness and with the aim to reach the common goals (within their area of responsibility)
8. Focusing on continuous learning
9. Having a flexible technology and capability base (yes, that includes your colleagues), allowing the company to “change direction” quickly
10. Ensuring that the execution capacity is not fully committed (ensuring capacity to handle the foreseeable unforeseen events which will occur)
11. Having a leadership style supporting decentralised decision making by focusing on setting objectives, facilitating collaboration and communication and building a strong culture & skilled people

With the above in mind, ask your self: Is your organization an agile one?

[i] SCRUM, SAFe, LeSS, “Spotify” and the excellent book “Team of teams”