The Shape of Agility
No matter what the future brings.
These 6 words are the heart of agility - but they are also an invitation. Does your organization have the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose - no matter what the future brings?
And to complicate matters; it is a continuum, where the question is not whether you have it, but rather how much you have and is it enough?
There aren't many of them, but those organizations who can answer yes to these questions can instinctively seize emerging and unforeseen opportunities for their customers’ benefit. But copying their processes isn't going to help you. There is no single framework, method, or system that can create business agility — and, by definition, because an organization is a complex adaptive system, there can never be one. In many cases, even different business units within the same organization need different approaches.
Yet, while no two organizations follow the same journey, common patterns of behavior emerge. And I can tell you how they behave.
Since 2017, ongoing research from the Business Agility Institute continues to study what it means to be an agile organization, regardless of industry, size, or context. Since then, over a thousand companies have taken part in this research, culminating in a behavioral model for agility.
In this talk, together we will explore these behaviors to better understand the characteristics of an agile organisation.
Outline/Structure of the Presentation
This is a relatively new talk and is based on nearly 2-years of research. To date, I have given a version of this talk a couple of times at virtual meetups and most recently at the Agile2022 conference in the US.
The approximate flow of the talk is as such;
- Introduce the concept of business agility. Starting with the high-level definition and then highlighting what organizations are seeing. The focus here would be on customer-centricity, resilience, and productivity (rather than disruption or competition).
- Introduce the challenges that organizations see. This will focus on how organizations are made of competing tensions and the role of management is to identify and manage those tensions. And how important this is for agility. Make sure people understand the fundamental nuance and variation that exists within an organization. Given the advanced audience - I won't need to spend too much time here.
- Introduce the key findings from our research about how business agility expresses itself in organizations. And this expression is fundamentally about behaviours. People aren't meant to read the behaviours (we don't have time to go into detail). We will showcase a couple of behaviours as an example.
- We really start talking about the journey that companies go through. We'll be using 3 examples (starting slide 16). These three slides set the context for the rest of the presentation.
- Highlight the shape of a non-agile organization. This is an Australian Government Agency (I can't name them). I'll talk about how, even the least agile organizations, have some innate agility. Cultural behaviours that can be built upon.
- Refer back to the concept of tensions and how this applies to agility
- Talk through a moderate agile organization (this is a financial services organization). What is the shape of their agility? Which behaviours are they strongest in? And which behaviours contrast the strongest with low-agility organizations?
- Talk through a mature agile organization (this is a technology). What is the shape of their agility? Which behaviours are they strongest in? And which behaviours contrast the strongest with moderate-agility organizations?
- Refer back to the concept of tensions.
- Close and provide credibility for the following slides by highlighting the organizations who have taken part in BAI research.
I've kept 5-minutes aside for buffer and tangents.
Learning Outcome
You can't change culture (culture is an emergent property). But you can change behaviours. But which behaviours do you need to change? This presentation will provide the understanding and tools to help identify the behaviours constraining an agile culture.
Participants will also understand the behaviors of leading agile organizations and be able to contrast them to their own organizations journey.
Participants will also be able to communicate the value of agility (to business leaders) in terms of new and improved business capabilities that emerge from these behaviors
Lastly, participants will be able to distinguish the behaviors between those organizations just getting started and those towards the end of their journey
Target Audience
Anyone interested in exploring agility beyond technology
schedule Submitted 10 months ago
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Do we know our stuff?
OKR Quickstart coaches and consults businesses on how to create strategic clarity, achieve audacious goals and build high performing teams. We've helped hundreds of people and businesses introduce OKR so that everyone finds crazy value out of them (not just the exec team). We've made every mistake in the book and this session summarises some of our biggest learnings!