Our previous post shared perspective on how to develop organizational agility, and noted that to do so leaders must build in their organizations four enablers:
- Create fast & effective information flows. We’d all like to be Wayne Gretzky and “just skate to where the puck is going to be.” What a brilliant idea! Of course, if we knew where the puck was going to be, everyone would be there. We don’t know. That’s why we need to build fast and effective information flows so that when indicators emerge about developing changes in the customers or markets, we spot them quickly. Here are some things we can do to accelerate critical information flows.
- At each customer touchpoint, we need to solicit, capture, and quickly flow back feedback to be understood, prioritized and used to improve the work and better align the products and services with customer values and unmet needs.
- Engage in rapid prototyping with customers. Develop small experiments and try them out with some real customers to accelerate learning about what they really think, want, and value.
- Find out what data you have available, and develop ways to use it to understand how your customers are using your products and services. Many businesses have access to an astonishing amount of information, but do not yet know how to use it. Start by identifying the questions you and your team would really like to answer — and then explore what the data can tell you. When millions of answers are available, the advantage goes to whomever has the best questions.
- Accelerate internal communication
- Strong leadership and teamwork to turn insight into action. Here are some things a leader can do to create the strong teamwork needed to operate with agility:
- Foster trust on the team. Knowledge is becoming obsolete at a faster rate than at any time in history, so an agile team must be absolutely fearless about admitting their gaps in knowledge and questioning what they have long believed. This challenging, learning and growing does not happen when team members cannot let their guards down.
- Establish a cadence of frequent and effective team communications: both formal and informal. These ensure the team is on the same page, and even able to write a really good page together.
- Time is short and agile management teams leverage the tools available to help them get further faster. Some examples include affinity diagramming, interrelationship diagrams, cause & effect diagrams, FMEA, prioritization matrices, and quality tables.
- Because innovations and process improvements have a shorter shelf life than ever, they must be executed more quickly. Make and stick to prioritization decisions and use a Kaizen approach or Design Sprints to accelerate results.
- Streamlined, simplified processes. If the processes that comprise your value stream are held together by patches, expediting, and human vigilance, or are full of inspection, rework, delays, over-specification, redundancies, excess inventory, complexity, etc. you will find it very difficult to execute changes you need. An agile organization must relentlessly streamline, simplify, and error-proof the work.
- Flexible Investments. Acceleration of change makes acquired assets obsolete faster, so both the investment and hiring strategy should consider the need for flexibility.
- When making investments, consider what choices we could make today that will ensure the asset retains value if the expected use disappears.
- How quickly and easily can this asset scale up, scale down, or change uses?
- What skills should we hire for?
- When should we use contract resources?