Unlocking Opportunities For Your Business

Your organisation is stuck, slow and holding you back, right?

Business structure and organisation has remained fairly constant for most of the last 100+ years.

But the biggest companies of last century are no longer the biggest.

The shift is partly about a movement to China but its also about technology. None of Apple, Amazon or Google were in the big 5 or ten global companies just 20 years ago.

But it's not about the tech, per se.

Its about the changes the tech have led and shadowed.

Tech dis-intermediates. It disrupts how we buy, how we choose, how we learn.

These disruptions reverberate through the structures on which our companies are built.

The old structures, R&D, technology, capabilities, marketing, sales as distinct stages on an almost linear journey become silos of constraint.

In those ‘olden days’ the customer was something which happened at the end, an after thought.
But no longer.

Now the customer, with her increased choice, access to information, new ways to research, to follow, to buy is rendering the old unfit for purpose.

The customer is no longer something which happens at the end of the process.

Agile methods grew up 20-30 years ago - to help developers make more useable software more quickly with less waste. Developers realised that making things outside in made sense.

Agile is booming. There is not a Technology division anywhere in the land not someway through an agile transition. If not yet begun, it’s being discussed.

But agile is not something to leave for Technology. Agile represents a huge opportunity.

More Agile, More Often?

It’s important to understand agile more broadly than technology.

Agile tools, methods and behaviours can help an organisation create more effective products and services more quickly.

That’s better products which cost less and people want more.

And this is true whatever your business. Gillette is a well documented story. Near domination of the men’s shaving category. And with the domination came a seven year product development cycle. And that’s seven years per iteration; seven years from thought to extra blade,

That was fine when you ‘own’ the market, when you control distribution.

And then Dollar Shave Club happened, which, although well known and documented, remains a sobering and timeless warning.

They’re small by Gillette standards but came to the market with a perfectly good product, their own distribution channel and a great story. And with it they flip the model. Customers flock. Sure, only small percentage points of the whole market but when your business is built and financed to support the seven year journey from thought to blade even small shifts cost much.

And, more importantly, the organisational ability to shift, to change, to respond, adapt is zero.

But we see this everywhere and have done since the dawn of time.

The car killed the cart.
Nokia killed Kodak.
Apple killed Nokia.
Expedia killed Thomas Cook.
Google killed, well, almost everything.

And <?> will kill Google?

The march to new, better, different is inevitable and ongoing. We know it is so.

Agile represents such a big opportunity because it builds the ability to adapt, to evolve, to iterate, to respond, into the organisational DNA - which means less waking up to find that your film processing technology has no film to process. Or waking up to find that your camera less phone looks decidedly less smart. Or waking up to find that piling new debt onto old will not change how people book their holidays.

Agile need not only help make better software. Agile tools, methods and behaviours can stitch into an entire organisational DNA to help keep you relevant, responsive, in touch with your ever changing market and genuinely outside in. It’s not a silver bullet, all companies die in the end, but as technology and other social, environmental and commercial changes rage, understanding agile, organisation wide, represents a real opportunity, most of the time.

Unlocking The Organisation: Principles To Oil The Commercial Wheels Of Opportunity.

1. Know Your Horses.

- The tools and methods of agile are not right all the time. It’s not a silver bullet.
- Knowing when to utilise, and how to integrate with other systems and processes, is key.; known vs unknown and stable vs unstable.
- That said, a little ‘a’ agile mindset is, increasingly, a non negotiable condition of success; the spirit of adaptability, iteration and continual improvement.

Are the challenges you’re addressing known or unknown? Are they stable (consistent) or unstable (rapidly changing)? To agile or not to agile starts here.

2. Cohere, genuinely.

Agile is a method and system and a state of mind.

Optimising it requires a clearly expressed and understood vision and story…a vision and story which helps front and back office align and understand respective roles.

Ultimately, what you do speaks more loudly than what you say - organisational actions, behaviours and incentives need to be crafted in support of the most important things.

How singular are your teams or departments? Do you organise and incentivise around common objectives? Or do you say one thing but do another (he mother of organisational dysfunction)?

3. Don’t Make Agile An Island.

- Failure to align back office with a front office agility creates more harm than good

- Agile methods, tools and process place new demands on back office functions - finance, HR,
procurement, recruitment, comms etc; work with these departments and teams to educate on agile
principles and design agile processes which work for them, one step at a time.

- Agile organisations need to incentivise and reward staff differently. We respond to incentives - the
behaviours we create in our teams and employees are consequence of what we incentivise.

Do you know what Agile means for the finance division yet?

4. If Being Customer Centric Doesn’t Hurt, You’re Not Doing It.

- Customer centric doesn’t mean: “I am a VP, I own our product, therefore I speak for the customer”.

- Almost all companies say they’re customer centric but few are. If you’re the same old silos wrapped
in new words, you’re not.

- Customer centric organisations recruit, train and incentivise staff for empathy. They have dismantled silos and reorganised around understanding and delivering to a customers constantly changing
needs; that means new teams working in new ways with the customer at its heart. (note; can we find examples which support this? Who’s doing it well?)

- It it’s not hurting, you’re not doing it.

Are the C-Suite incentivised in part against a customer performance metric?


5. Think Like A Designer

Agile is more than a technical term. It’s a state of mind too. It means being fleet of foot, thinking and acting quickly. It means learning about and responding to what the data tells you. But it also means making intuitive leaps; leaps in understanding and anticipating what the customer might want, where the customer might be headed. Making these intuitive, emotional leaps requires you to think like a designer.

- Teams and individuals should continually ask; who is this for and how will it help them?

- Bring different voices, different perspectives, different people with different experience, together to ask these questions.

- Walk in the customers shoes. Always.

- Frame and check everything you do via the customer lens - that being the real customer. See point 4!

Do all team members know the two most important questions: who is this for and how will it help them?

6. Your Organisation Is The Sum Of Its Conversations… (or, ‘are you your teams problem?’).

Teams get stuck in rabbit holes. Chasing and forcing decisions about this or that.

Decisions are easier when context is clearer.

Why are we doing this? Who is it for?

Get your teams out of the immediacy of their day-to-day. Give them context, perspective, help them reconnect to the bigger goal, the organisational purpose.

The broader your teams perspective, the greater their understanding, the more dynamically they’ll think.

Give them space and clarity of direction and you’ll unleash a creative, adaptive, free thinking organisation.

This doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design; it’s about taking time each week, each month or quarter to step out of the day-to-day, to connect (and reconnect) with the purpose.

You are the leader. This is your job. Get out, make it happen. It’s how dynamic, adaptive, resilient organisations (and leaders) behave.

When did you last get your teams offsite to reflect?

7. Little and Often.

Whether you’re shifting an organisational tanker or a dinghy, little and often works best. People will follow when they’re believe it’s in their interest to do so. Prototype new behaviours, let the successes be seen, copied and only then scaled. Shift to agile with agility.

Is the organisation stuck or is it you?

What ten things will you do differently, today?