Organisational agility is not just a buzzword; it’s a competitive advantage that can make or break a business in today’s fast-paced market. I’ve seen firsthand how many agile transformations stumble because organisations mistakenly place agile itself at the centre of their focus, rather than using it as a tool to achieve a vital outcome: the ability to respond swiftly to market changes.
The Real Purpose of Agile
At its core, agile, along with practices like DevOps, lean, and Kanban, is designed to enable organisations to react more quickly to shifts in the market. The faster you can respond to changes—whether they stem from customer feedback or broader market trends—the better positioned you are to seize opportunities before your competitors do.
Here’s what I’ve observed:
- Speed Matters: The first mover often reaps the rewards. If your organisation can adapt quicker than others, you’re likely to capture the market share and gain a competitive edge.
- Communication Breakdown: Many organisations struggle with the speed of response. When a market signal arises, it often has to navigate through multiple layers of hierarchy before a decision is made. This can lead to delays that cost the business dearly.
- Escalation Issues: Employees on the front lines may hesitate to escalate issues because they perceive the process as cumbersome. They might think, “It’s not painful enough for me to bother Bob,” leading to missed opportunities for timely action.
The Importance of Empowerment
One of the key tenets of agile is pushing responsibility down the organisational hierarchy. This means empowering those closest to the market—those who have the most relevant information—to make decisions without needing to seek approval from higher-ups.
To illustrate this, I often refer to David Marquet’s book, Turn This Ship Around. Marquet emphasises the need for contextual information to enable decision-making. When team members understand the broader context of their work, they can make informed choices that align with the organisation’s goals.
Enabling Quick Responses
For your business to respond effectively to market changes, consider the following strategies:
- Provide Context: Ensure that your teams have access to the information they need to make decisions. This could involve regular updates on market trends, customer feedback, and strategic goals.
- Encourage Ownership: Foster a culture where team members feel empowered to act on their insights. This not only speeds up response times but also boosts morale and engagement.
- Streamline Communication: Work on reducing the layers of approval needed for decisions. The more streamlined your communication, the quicker your organisation can pivot when necessary.
Conclusion
Agility is about more than just adopting a set of practices; it’s about fostering a mindset that prioritises responsiveness and empowerment. By focusing on these principles, your organisation can navigate the complexities of the market with greater ease and confidence.
If you found this discussion valuable, I encourage you to engage with me further. I always welcome comments and questions, and if you’d like to chat about agile, scrum, or DevOps, feel free to book a coffee with me through Naked Agility. Let’s explore how we can enhance your organisation’s agility together!
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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