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What would be an example of a great agile consulting outcome for a client?

Discover how agile consulting can transform complex challenges into valuable outcomes, enhancing business agility and driving success in your organisation.

Published on 26 January 2023

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

5 minute read

https://nkdagility.com/resources/Cgy1ccX7e7Y

What would be an example of a great agile consulting outcome for a client?

It’s an interesting question because a valuable outcome looks different for every customer.

The ability to consistently deal with surprises.

The reality of the complex world we work in is that things are consistently changing, being disrupted, or have a myriad of opportunities and threats to contend with. A business generally experiences two types of surprises on a consistent basis.

Positive Surprises
Negative Surprises

Positive Surprises

Positive surprises are the kinds of opportunities that organizations want to take advantage of. Sometimes, these are as a result of consistently producing great work whilst at other times, they are presented from a perspective of luck.

Negative Surprises

Negative surprises are the kinds of threats or disruption that the organization desperately wants to avoid. Things like a competitor achieving a breakthrough that is hard to follow or a massive disruption to the market like Brexit.

These are generally things that are outside of your control but have a significant impact on your business and require you to actively respond or suffer some kind of loss.

Having a system that allows you to flow.

Surprises are things that you don’t anticipate or are unlikely to predict. So, you need some kind of system or structure that allows you to respond and adapt appropriately to exploit the good and navigate the bad.

Most organizations are designed to be robust and rigid, and so a great agile consulting outcome is an engagement that helps you remove the impediments to responsiveness and agility.

This is what the majority of agile consulting engagements are trying to achieve. An increased ability to adapt and respond to threats and opportunities in the client environment.

The dichotomy of organizations.

Most organizations are trapped between the consequences of the past and the need to work in a style that is appropriate for the 21st Century. Taylorism, an industrial era style of management and project management tends to reign in most traditional organizations, and that can be incredibly hard to navigate if your focus lies in innovation and product development rather than simply command and control of static resources.

If the primary model is command and control, where the thinking is developed at the top and trickles down to the workers at the bottom, via a hierarchy of managers and supervisors, you are going to battle to be responsive.

If the primary model is agility, where decision-making is pushed down to the experts who are doing the work and are proven experts in their field, the likelihood of becoming more agile escalates significantly.

As an agile consultant, this is the challenge that you face most often.

Working within a traditional organization but attempting to grow agility despite the constraints and limitations within the organizational structure.

Ideally, you want to help create an environment where the leadership teams are at the centre of the organization, providing services to the teams of teams who interact directly with customers and product stakeholders.

Helping an organization rethink how they work, why their policies exist, and how that can evolve will help you become more effective as an agile consultant and help the organization achieve a great deal more of their objectives and goals.

Organizations evolve over time, and agility is simply the next evolution on their radar, but it does take time and patience. It also takes a lot of demonstrable evidence to prove that the new style of working is actively helping to move the needle on the metrics that most matter to the organization.

So, the ultimate goal of an agile consultant is to help the organization shift from the traditional command and control, Tayloristic style of organization into the responsive, agile organization that is node-based with decentralized decision-making and autonomous, empowered teams.

The challenge is that whilst it is incredibly hard for a legacy-oriented organization to advance into an agile, responsive organization, it is incredibly easy for an agile organization to revert back to doing things the way they have for decades prior to the agile transformation.

One of the things that a successful agile consultant will do is work directly with people in the organization to develop a more flexible, resilient mindset and culture.

You will help them discover:

How do I remain nimble in the face of disruption and complexity?
How do I embrace adaptability in the face of disruption and challenges?
How do I choose to respond when presented with either opportunities or threats?
How do I stave off the rigidity and rigor mortis that comes with complacency or stagnation?

This need to exist in every part of the organization, in every person that is a part of the leadership story, rather than in pockets of consultants and coaches.

The organization needs to develop their own agile capability and they need to grow their resilience. It can’t be limited to one or two individuals who are consulting or coaching.

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We recognize the positive impact that a happy AND inspired workforce can have on customer experience, and we actively help organizations to tap into the power of creative, collaborative, and high-performing teams that is unique to #agile and #scrum environments.

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The question is what would be a great ideal consulting outcome for a customer. And that’s an interesting question because I think it’s different for every customer, right? But it ultimately comes down to trying to think of the right words and the right phrasing. It comes down to being able to consistently deal with surprise. Not sure that’s the best way to describe it, right? But the reality of the world is that things are changing and happening all the time, and businesses have two types of surprises. They can have positive surprises and negative surprises. Positive surprises they want to be able to take advantage of; negative surprises they want to be able to, like, let’s make sure that doesn’t mess with us.

And though they’re surprises, you don’t know what they’re going to be; you don’t know when they’re going to happen. You have to have a system that is able to roll with it. Most organizations are very, very rigid. So an ideal outcome for an agile consulting engagement is that the organization has less bureaucracy and more adaptability, right? I mean, that’s ultimately what organizations are trying to do.

The difficulty is that there are two fundamental mental constructs that seem to be mutually exclusive, and it’s very hard to move from one to the other. It’s very easy to move from the other to the one, right? This is the bit that’s difficult: you have that Tayloristic type of organization, which is top-down command and control, 18th-century Industrial Revolution thinking, right? That’s their model, that pyramid model. And then you’ve got organizations all the way over on the other side, which are fewer in number, who are completely decentralized, node-based organizations where the people making the decisions are the people that are up close to the market.

Whereas in the pyramid organizations, the people making the decisions are furthest away from the market, right? The CEO—one of my favourite quotes is from Simon Sinek. Yes, absolutely, Simon Sinek. So one of my favourite quotes is from Simon Sinek, and he talked about speaking to a CEO and saying to the CEO, or the CEO saying, “You know, I know what my customers want.” And Simon says to him, “Well, you haven’t spoken to a customer in 15 years; how would you know what they wanted?” And that’s the person that’s furthest away from the market making all of the decisions.

Whereas in the node-based organization, the CEO is at the centre providing services to the organization. There, he’s the cost centre, right? The CEO, or he or she, the CEO is the cost centre, and the rest of the organization is the value creation, and they’re interacting directly with the market, invoicing, getting money from the customers. So ultimately, the ultimate goal is to move from that top-down Tayloristic organization towards this node-based, people-orientated.

It was Mary Follett, so I guess Follettism. I don’t know organizations; I’m going to think over here. But it’s very hard to move from Tayloristic to Politistic, okay? But really easy to fall back the other way because all you need is for rigor mortis to set in to move back to that rigid top-down model because that’s what it is. And one of the things that I think a successful agile consultant will do is work with people in that organization to help them have a more flexible mindset.

So from top down, left to right, at all levels, you want every single person in your organization to be thinking about how do I remain nimble? How do I remain adaptable? How do I stave off the rigor mortis, right? That is bureaucracy, and that needs to be in every part of the organization. It’s not something that you can just hire somebody in and they install in your organization. Every single individual in your organization needs to be part of that story.

So successful agile consulting looks like building understanding in the organization, building tools that people in the organization can use to remain nimble. Otherwise, they’ll fall back to the age-old tools that everybody talks about. And not being there full-time, right? It’s almost like a crutch when somebody is there full-time; it’s a crutch for the organization. They need to learn to stand on their own; they need to learn to make their own mistakes.

So that—I know that probably doesn’t really answer that question of what does it look like, right? But I think what it looks like is different in every organization. I could articulate what it looks like at Microsoft, although they’re only some way along that transition towards that goal. Every organization is completely different, and it’s so different because their market is different, their products are different, their people are different, and there’s no one right way to answer that question.

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