Achieving Agility Series: Article 2 of 12

This is the 2nd of 12 articles sharing my experience with successful, failed, partially successful, and successful for a while and then died…organizational transformations. See my opening article on Achieving Agility.

Transformation to agility is not one journey. It’s one journey per person. It’s hundreds or thousands of individual journeys. Every person, each team, each department, group, division, unit, HR, finance, procurement, development, support, security, sales, marketing, service delivery, legal, and every other functional and operational area of the enterprise has to go through it’s own journey.

I help organizations become more agile. That means and includes a lot of different things. It’s a combination of business agility, doing the right things to understand your users, customers, vendors, partners, market and staff and current technical environment, and based on all those variables, prioritize what the organization, and internal teams should focus on next (product/service roadmaps and prioritized backlogs), combined with team agility, portfolio agility, a product operating model, technical agility including modern development, deployment (CI-CD) and evolutionary continuous improvement by teams empowered with empathetic user and customer feedback (aka, data).

Many organizations approach a transformation like a project, thinking they can create a single plan, a set of activities and workstreams, train people, and then predict a timeline for when they expect to see a ROI. Agile adoption and transformation simply don’t work that way. There are known success and anti-patterns, trends and themes that lead to a variety of outcomes from total failure to pretty-good success, but each organization is truly unique because they have unique DNA. Their combination of systems, configurations, policies, processes, individual people, challenges and opportunities, along with dozens of other micro-variables make each organization unique. By that logic, they make each business unit unique. Each division. Each area. Each team is unique. And each person is for certain unique.

You cannot send a team to Scrum training and expect them to be agile the day back from training. You can’t send leadership to training and expect them to fully understand a new operating model or how to support it. Yet many organizations do that. They budget for training, send everyone, and then check the box. But each person is unique with a past, experiences, beliefs, values, dreams, goals, desires, wants, and needs.

It’s for all of these reasons, and much more, I have come to believe, actually know, that Total Organizational Agility requires that a certain amount of time (and budget) be planned and reserved for everyone (individual) who has questions, concerns, or simply wants to vent or push back, has a real (empathetic and patient) listening ear from someone in a position of leadership, authority, and otherwise influence and involvement in the transformation. We are talking about organizational transformation that should lead to decades of competitive advantage, innovation, and increased profits. Why would we skimp on the most important resource in the entire company. The staff! Right?

If we want our staff to be engaged, innovative, self-accountable, and pro-active, that requires each person to understand and believe in the new and future ways of working that are being advocated and they are being trained on.

Treating enterprise agility transformation as a 1:1 sport allows for a more nuanced, empathetic, and effective change process by acknowledging and addressing individual differences. However, it also presents challenges in terms of resource allocation, scalability, and maintaining a balance between individual and organizational objectives. The key lies in finding a middle ground that respects individuality while still driving toward a common goal of organizational agility.

Below I’ll address likely challenges and methods you can try to overcome.

CHALLENGES

Resource allocation & scalability – Tailoring the transformation process to individuals requires more time, effort, and potentially more resources, which can be challenging to allocate in large organizations. While effective on a small scale, a 1:1 approach can be challenging to scale across large, diverse organizations where the number of individuals is high.

• Have a discussion with leadership about the value of individualized transformations, and then agree to spend a % of the transformation’s team on individual 1:1 coaching, mentoring, or otherwise open Q&A sessions. Create a 1:1 coaching feedback form-survey so you can capture the value of each 1:1 and use it to prove the overall value of taking them time with each person and sustain support to keep the program and time investment throughout the transformation
• ‘Just keep swimming!’, Finding Nemo. In the immortal and wise words of Dori, just keep doing it. Persistence overcomes resistance
• And do you remember the lessons from the backward bike? Unlearning a lifetime of culture, leadership style, and working norms is not instant. It can take 8 months or longer to unlearn a pattern, a habit. And replace it with something new that has to be learned, tried, fail, try again

Balancing individual needs and organizational objectives – There can be a challenge balancing between catering to individual needs and maintaining a cohesive, organization-wide transformation strategy.

• Identify (find) and work with those creating the objectives and help them understand the option and value of taking an individual approach to transformation. It’ll take longer but it’ll have a higher % chance of yielding greater benefits and improvements and it’ll be more likely to truly change the culture and stand the test of time, or be ‘sticky’
• Develop a very short survey you can send to EVERYONE quarterly to ascertain where they are in the journey and track the transformations progress, stalls, and any setbacks

Here’s some suggested information to capture:

• Awareness and Understanding: Rate your understanding of our agile transformation goals on a scale of 1-10; Identify specific changes in your work due to the agile transformation.
• Readiness to Learn: How comfortable are you with transitioning to product and agile methods? What additional support or resources do you need for this transition?
• Application of Agile Practices: Describe how you have applied product or agile methodologies in your role; Share any challenges you’ve faced while implementing agile practices.
• Maturation and Improvement: Note any improvements in workflow or team output since adopting agile; Suggest ways to further integrate agile practices in our operations.
• Feedback and Support: Evaluate the effectiveness of communication and support during this transformation; Identify areas needing more clarity or training.
• Personal Impact: How has the agile transformation impacted your motivation and engagement? Reflect on your professional growth since the start of the agile transformation.

In conclusion, transformation an organization is not a project and it’s not one transformation. Why do you think for the last 16+ years, every survey on the challenges of become more agile start with the challenges of culture change and lack of adoption or buy-in from staff.

Call to Action: Give everyone the respect they deserve and dedicate a % of your transformation teams time to offering 1:1 Q&A sessions, coaching, mentoring, and other small group forms like townhalls, focus groups, feedback forums, transformation open office hours, or any other space that has the sole purpose of allowing staff to ask questions, learn, interact with transformation change agents and/or their colleagues.

Robert Wallace first published this article on LinkedIn here.

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Robert Wallace
Director of Enterprise Agility
Robert.Wallace@trissential.com

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