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.

CHOICE, Australia's consumer advocate, is more than 50 years old and has +180,000 members. For most of those 50 years CHOICE's default was testing appliances and then mailing out the results in a magazine. We had a website, but it was seen as a supplement to the magazine.

Only a few years ago, we were stuck. We had a website, but no mobile presence. We had no product managers, no scrum masters, no UX skills, and work on our critical platform, choice.com.au, was outsourced because it was deemed "non-core". Our agility, velocity and ability to innovate were almost zero and part from rebuilding our website, we hadn't launched a new product in 15 years.

Fast-forward to 2017, every metric we use to understand the value of our organisation and measure its success is heading in the right direction. And that includes employee engagement and customer satisfaction.
How on earth did this happen? Come join us for a lively discussion on how an agile journey in one part of our organisation led to an organisation-wide Lean quest.