Designing for Agility
The common pattern across organisations is change. Many organisations turn to the Agile framework to become more adaptive. Then the question arises: can you really achieve agility by simply adopting an agile tool such as Scrum?
An adaptable organisation excels in setting and achieving a shared vision while continuously reinventing itself to address the rapidly changing context. Known as agility, it involves building new capabilities for adaptation to any given situations. But how does this translate into practical actions?
Designing For Agility: The Mindset Shift Comes First
There exist many methodologies tailored to enhance business agility. But before embarking on any transformation and introducing "agile" tools, it's crucial to establish clarity and alignment by addressing the following questions:
Designing an Adaptive System: How can we create a work system that enables our company to swiftly adapt to a dynamic environment?
Mindset, Culture, and Leadership: How our approaches to work culture, people interactions, and leadership need to change to instil adaptability in our organisation?
Step #1. Design
Thus, the first step involves crafting an operating model that aligns all key business functions toward embracing and thriving in a changing environment:
Organisational Structure: Defining key structural changes to support high adaptability.
Organisational Culture: Identifying cultural shifts necessary to achieve adaptability.
New vs Existing Work Models: Determining the extent of implementing the agile work model, its interaction with traditional models, and metrics for success.
Budgeting & Governance: Adapting budgeting and governance models to embrace an experimental mindset, quick iterations, and continual course correction, instead of following preestablished plan.
Leadership: Considering changes required in the leadership approach to support the transformations in organisational structure, culture, governance, and introduction of new work models.
Step #2. The Actual Implementation
The practical phase involves putting the new, flexible way of operating into action. While changing processes and models is manageable, transforming people is the real challenge. A human-centred approach is essential, building the capacity within the staff to sustain the mindset change.
The “Going Agile” Trap
Many organisations overlook this foundational design step and rush into implementing agile. Rather than simply "going agile" by tools, better approach is to redesign your business to support a more agile operational model.
Getting To the Agile Mindset
Instead of a binary choice to fully adopt or reject the Agile framework, companies can start with the key principles of the agile mindset:
Structure teams for intended, intense collaboration.
Promote experimentation and turn failures into a learning practice.
Build-in frequent feedback for short iterations and swift course adaptation.
Review work experiences often to incorporate direct improvements in the next iteration.
These simple principles enhance agility in any framework. Rather than striving for a specific agility index or blindly following a practice like Scrum, they help you to focus on improving your ways of working and become more adaptable over time.