4 Steps to Business Agility
Why should You care about business agility?
It’s common for today’s executives to ask why they should care about business agility. It’s a good question, and this article has some answers.
Block Buster Video's Demise
In the Summer of 2018, it finally happened. Blockbuster Video closed its last two stores in Alaska, leaving only one store. The last store, which has become a tourist attraction, is located in Bend, Ore.
What happened to this once-familiar icon of the entertainment industry?
This is my speculation based on my personal experience.
The Internet was commercialized in 1995. In that same year, a colleague and I developed a revolutionary new business model proposal that was presented to our customer Blockbuster Video. In our proposal, we told them the future of home video is home delivery. We asked them to let us fulfill videotapes for them through the mail. We said we would also begin working on the ability to download videos directly to their customers’ homes over the Internet.
We knew it could be done. We were already running a mail-order video lending library for school teachers nationwide.
The Blockbuster Video executives' response was something like this: “No thanks; our current business model is working fine just the way it is.”
Two years later, two other men had a similar idea in Scotts Valley, California, and Netflix was born.
How many times a week, do you watch movies on Netflix or one of the many streaming services? Until today, did you even know where the nearest Blockbuster Video was located?
At its peak, Blockbuster Video had 9,000 stores spread out in nine countries.
Blockbuster’s demise was due to the executive's inability to perceive technological changes and market demands and pivot to lead its industry in a new direction. It was not agile.
If you are a business executive, you might want to pause a moment and let this sink in.
What Are Agile organizations
At this point, one question you might be asking yourself is, “What does it mean to be an agile organization?
First of all, agility is a cultivated (educated) capability. It doesn’t happen without intention. At a very high level, it’s the cultivated capability to make timely, effective, and sustained organizational changes as part of the normal course of business. And, that’s what I can help your organization do. Even more, I can help all the teams in your organization do business in your new agile way.
Let’s dive a little deeper.
To start, agile organizations can sense or anticipate relevant environmental shifts better than their peers. Blockbuster Video dropped the ball on that one. Then, agile organizations do a better job of selecting the shifts that will be the most relevant to their customers and their stakeholders. Then, they make incremental sustainable changes to address those shifts.
But, they do not pursue change for change’s sake. They do so when change is strategically relevant. They pursue change for the sake of competitive advantage.
How to become an agile organization
By now, I’m hoping you are convinced and want to know how to become agile?
At a high-level, here’s how to become an agile organization. After you’ve digested this, let’s talk if you want help becoming an agile organization.
A 30-year study identified four routines that distinguish outperforming organizations from the rest.
High-performing organizations had the ability to:
Strategize dynamically
Accurately perceive changes in the external environment
Test possible responses to these environmental changes and chose the most relevant changes to address.
Implement sustainable changes in products, technology, operations, systems, and capabilities using a whole-system approach.
All four of these routines are deeply embedded in the world’s top scalable agile frameworks used by many IT organizations. We combined these four routines with Proactive Leadership to come up with our list of Agility Factors.
One of the most game-changing aspects of Agility Factors is a collection of team performance tactics we call Engaged Team Dynamics or ETD.
Engaged Team Dynamics
ETD is a collection of team performance and agile tactics that we’ve used for over 20 years. Some of the agile tactics in ETD are derived from the agile software development tactics used since the late ’90s when agile software development started to become popular. But, they’re not only for IT anymore.
The most impactful team transformation we’ve led used some of these tactics to transform a group of unengaged software development and operations people into a highly engaged team that enjoyed coming to work every day. That transformation gave the company the capabilities to grow its business from $6 million to $60 million in 5 years and positioned them for acquisition.
Some Results From Agility Factors Transformations
Improved software development and IT operations productivity by 83% to enable increased sales from $1 million to $20 million in 5 years.
Increased consulting revenue from $600k to $4.2M annually by building a high-performance agile development team that exceeded customer expectations.
Saved $2.6+ million annually through process and systems redesign; reduced software quality assurance testing time by 35% and improved accuracy.
Saved $9 million in 9 months by creating and leading a multi-cultural team to turn around a troubled project.
As you can see from those numbers, the agile and team performance tactics in Agility Factors work.
Let me break down the Agility Factors and show you how you can implement some of the agile routines yourself and how we can help you further develop the four agile routines using Agility Factors.
Strategize Dynamically
Agile strategy is achieved when top management teams establish an inspirational mission and vision, develop a widely shared strategic roadmap, and give the rest of the organization the resources and autonomy to execute their strategy.
The Engaged Team Dynamics Encounter is a one day facilitated encounter with some individual prework and follow up tasks that results in a shared mission, vision, values, objectives and strategic roadmaps. In this encounter, we also help your teams understand how to use each other’s natural strengths to increase the effectiveness of team collaboration.
Continuous Innovation Pipeline
We recommend implementing Continuous Perceiving, Testing and Implementing using a Continuous Innovation Pipeline to:
Accurately perceive changes in the external environment.
Test possible responses to these environmental changes and chose the most relevant changes to address.
Implement sustainable changes in products, technology, operations, systems, and capabilities using a whole-system approach.
Perceive Changes to the External Environment
Perceiving is enabled by continually exploring the market and user needs, and defining a vision, roadmap, and set of products and services that address those needs. Perceiving market needs happens in the first phase of the Agility Factors continuous delivery model.
The first phase of the continuous delivery model is called continuous exploration. Continuous exploration includes tactics for collaborative research where a product manager facilitates a continuous and collaborative process of soliciting input from groups of stakeholders to understand possible needs. The product manager also performs various research tactics to determine the most relevant needs to address.
Test and Choose Possible Responses
Agile testing is how the organization sets up, runs, and learns from experiments. The product management teams work with other internal teams to test, evaluate and choose changes that would be the most relevant for the company to address.
Implement Sustainable Changes
Agile implementation is how the organization maintains its ability and capacity to implement changes and its ability to recognize when it’s time to discontinue. Agile implementation is also the ability to verify the contribution of a change to performance. This is the third phase in the ETD continuous delivery model.
Closing
In closing, agility is not just the ability to change. Agility is the cultivated capability to repeatedly make timely, effective, and sustained organizational changes as part of the normal course of business.
Individually, the routines of agility come from good management practices. However, the hard work necessary to orchestrate them into a cadence of activities that produces consistent high performance is advanced and hard to achieve without help from an experienced coach.
Organizations that execute these routines successfully consistently outpaced their competitors. Those who choose to stay the course of how they do business often end up like Blockbuster Video. They are no longer IN business. Agility is imperative for the success of your business.
