The Five Habits of Highly Effective Agile Organizations
It's the classic leader's lament. Driving organizational performance in a way that delivers on business outcomes while engaging employees. A year after presenting this at TAC 2018 it is more relevant than ever.
Organizations have been deploying Scrum, SAFe, DAD, and a host of other practices in the hope of achieving better business outcomes. We all know that practices alone don't generate the kind of powerful results you need to succeed. The missing ingredient? We hear the word culture a lot. But it is really about operating norms, or habits and behaviors. What I've observed through dozens of transformations within my company and clients are 5 habits that the leading organizations all possess. When these 5 habits are ingrained, the practices fall into place, and performance starts to rocket.
In this session you'll learn the habits, and why they drive performance. You' also learn about the key questions you can start asking to encourage the habits to take hold in your team, or more broadly, in your organization. The path to performance is paved by changes in behaviors that are reinforced daily. Asking the right questions at the right time can be a powerful way to nudge behaviors in the right direction.
Having said that, it's not enough to create the conditions for new habits to form. Countless studies, including famous ones by Wolfram Schultz, neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, have shown that a cue and reward on their own aren't enough to create a lasting habit. Only when your brain starts to anticipate a reward will the habit become automatic.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
We will begin with an overview of the session and objectives. (5 mins)
Exercise 1: At your tables, identify the operating norms or habits that are holding back your organization's ability to be the best. We will summarize the output. (5 mins)
Introduce the Five Habits with some explanation of why they are the key, foundational habits.
- Improve Everything
- Focus on Finishing
- Real-time Cross Functional Communication
- Real-time Feedback
- Release as a non-event
We will also share examples of the habits in action. (10 mins)
Exercise 2 - Discuss the habits and determine how they could be applied in your organization. Pick the top three approaches at each table. Readout by table. (10 mins)
Techniques for encouraging the habits in your organization
We will share some of the things we have tried to help organizations implement the habits. Some worked better than others. At the heart of it is the crafting of safe questions that provoke different thinking, and therefore, different responses. We will share an approach for crafting meaningful questions. (5 mins)
Exercise 3: Discuss and build some safe, yet provocative questions. Review at your tables and then we will do a group read out. (10 mins)
Questions we've used
We will share questions we have developed and used with teams and leaders at different levels. In addition we will share some observations from our experience on which questions can be more effective and why. (10 mins)
Q&A + Recap and close the session (5 mins)
Learning Outcome
Learn the habits and the tools for embedding these habits
Target Audience
Change agents and leaders who want to improve organizational outcomes and performance
Prerequisites for Attendees
This session is ideally suited to those leading organizations and teams who are undergoing transformation.
Links
- Toronto Agile Conference 2018 - THe Five Habits of Highly Effective Agile Organizations
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Toronto Agile Conference 2017 - Changing Culture: A Primer for Leaders
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Agile 2017: Session Moderator for the Stalwart track for Steve Denning (Author of The Age of Agile)
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Agile2016: “Design your Agile Organization using SOA: Service Oriented Architecture Principles” with Catherine Louis
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Toronto Agile Conference 2016 - 1000+ Org Agile Transformation that nearly raced off a cliff
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Agile2016: “Design your Agile Organization using SOA: Service Oriented Architecture Principles” with Catherine Louis
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Agile 2015: The Sprint 3 Revolt- How our large scale transformation nearly failed
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Agile2015: Whole Team Dynamic Organizational Modeling - co-facilitated an org design workshop using lego
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Agile Toronto 2014: Making large-scale agile work for 1000+ people, 50 teams
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Scrum Gathering 2013 - Paris, FR, - “Whole Team Dynamic Organizational Modeling” - Co-facilitated a three hour workshop on modeling organizations for large, geographically distributed product development teams.
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Agile2013 Conference - Nashville, TN - “Co-creation - working with customers to create valuable products” - A talk on co-creation models, experience and a how-to guide for first time co-creators
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Agile 2012 Conference - Grapevine, Texas - “Whole Team Dynamic Organizational Modeling” - Co-facilitated a three hour workshop on modeling organizations for large, geographically distributed product development teams.
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Agile 2011 - Salt Lake City, Utah - “Cultural Architecture” - Delivered a talk on how cultures of the world influence the way people work, and discussed tools for evaluating organizational values against different cultural landscapes.
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Agile Tour Conference - Raleigh, North Carolina, 2010 - “The Trajectory of Change” - Delivered a talk about the challenges of leading change and the issues a change leader can expect to encounter.
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Educator’s Honour Roll, Telford School of Business, University of Ottawa, 2007 - Guest speaker, discussed the real-world challenges of policy and legal issues when working across international boundaries in the regulated telecom industry.
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Sessional Lecturer - Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, 1999-2000 - Taught undergraduate programming for business systems using, Perl, C, C++, on Windows & Unix platforms.
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