How much competitive advantage does organizational agility offer versus traditional management?

So organizational agility provides a competitive advantage for organizations, not because agile’s the point, because it’s not, right? Lots of organizations, that’s why a lot of our agile transformations fail, is because the agile becomes the point, not a tool to get to the outcome that the business really needs, which is being able to respond to the market faster. That’s ultimately what it is that we’re trying to do with agile, with DevOps, with lean, with Kanban. All of these practices are designed to enable your organization to respond more quickly to market changes. If you can respond more quickly than your competitors to market changes, you get there first, and quite often the person who gets there first is the one that gets the prize, right?

Um, it’s really hard for a lot of organizations to be able to respond to the same, right? So I think something in the market changes. It could be a customer complaining, it could be like a fundamental shift in the actual market, and your business needs to respond. How long does it take to respond? Because the signal happens, we need to make a change, and does it have to go up your organization through different layers to the person at the top? And then the person at the top makes a decision, and then those decisions go back down. It sounds like, well, that could be quite quick; we’ve got quite a flat organization. But the problem is that because the person who’s dealing directly with the market doesn’t actually care, quite often they don’t. They don’t care that much, right? They want to do the right thing, but it’s a job, right?

Um, they’re looking at that change and going, well, that’s not painful enough for me to escalate it to Bob because it’s a pain in the ass talking to Bob, so I’m just gonna shut up for a while. And then a couple of months later, well, this is now getting painful enough, I’m gonna escalate it to Bob. So it goes and talks to Bob, and then it has to be painful enough for Bob for him to escalate it to the next level, and then painful enough to escalate it to the next level.

So it can be a really long time before it escalates up the chain. And then how often have you heard leadership in your organization say, you know, we’re changing strategic direction and we’re going this way? And nothing happens, right? And it’s because that communication has to come all the way back down the organization. So a lot of agile and a lot of agile practices is about pushing responsibility down the organization, enabling the people who have the most information about what it is we need to do to actually respond themselves to the market, right? They don’t have to go ask anybody; let’s just deal with these things that are happening.

So your business responds more quickly, but that means you have to provide those people with a lot more context, a lot more understanding. If you go look up “Turn This Ship Around” by David Marquet, that’s a perfect story talking about that. How do you know when you can do something if it’s within your power to do it? Well, you need more contextual information about the right decision to make.

Um, and that’s really what agile is all about. It’s about enabling us to go faster in the market, right? Deliver things more quickly, respond to that change more quickly. And surprises, there’s good changes and bad changes, right? But respond to the market more quickly.

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