The importance and story of 3As — Adopt, Adapt, and Adept | Agile Story 26
The importance and story of 3As — Adopt, Adapt, and Adept | Agile Story 26
While working with various transformation projects with different technologies, structures, and people, you might often wonder why some organizations succeed, and others fail at utilizing the processes and tools developed elsewhere. Is there some magic formula?
We address the same because picking the best practices and tools from another organization and then adopting them is not easy. It stems from the fact that every organization is unique ( the organism that makes the organization is different in all of us) — with different business markets, commercial goals, organizational structures, history, ways of working, leadership styles, and prevalent organizational culture. The question then arises if best practices are not easily adaptable or universal, then how come the learning be shared and transferred to other companies for other people ( could be within same organizations different departments)?
This makes us come to the sentence or motto,” “ Adopt, Adapt and become Adept”? Throughout history, the Japanese have followed this three-step approach to localizing and improving ideas and artifacts to fit within their cultural domain. The idea behind this slogan was to send their people to other developed nations and have them learn the best industry processes and find out who excels in which area. Then, when these people returned to their nation, they became efficient creators of the nation to help them succeed faster.
Adopt — is a verb, and it means” to legally take something as your own” or” “to begin to use something.”
Adapt — is a verb that means “to change for a new situation or purpose” and” Adapt to the new ways of doing the thing which you adopted. Adhere to the principles and values.
Adept — is an adjective, and it means” very skilled or proficient at doing something” This does not need much explanation as becoming efficient is everyone’s goal, and practice makes it as perfect.
While doing the agile transformation, we have seen that not all organizations succeed with direct adaptation (without customized) due to a lack of adaptation to take on a process or tool without tailoring it to the new environment. It will require knowing the tools or process and understanding the rationale behind it so that it fits into your environment and organizational culture.
The next challenge is to utilize a borrowed process or tool without full leadership support and commitment, as though just having the tool and process itself will generate the desired results is a lack of adoption. However, I have seen that it becomes really challenging to reap the desired fruits without leadership alignments and support.
So, great characteristics of organizations succeeding are that they keep on adapting and actively learning from others, go beyond identifying and taking the best practices, and in fact start practicing and living those adopted processes and tools.
By tailoring the lot of adopted processes ( choosing the best framework/process and in fact customized that to meet our requirements meeting the nature of our initiatives by focusing on high end volumes and direct customer impacts , we defined our ways of working while retaining the essence of the adopted best practice.
During my Agile learning and journey, I have observed that the interactions are unique to a particular organization. The principle of ‘Context Counts ‘matters a lot and it means that we must make intelligent choices based on the situation we are in, that means we must not try to figure out the best way to do things upfront but rather create a series of steps, each either making improvements on what we’re doing or by learning something that will increase the likelihood of improvement the next time.
I have seen during my engagements that the organizations who provides their employees the conducive environment, giving the opportunities to generate new ideas, keep learning from each others experiments ( I won’t call any attempt as failed attempt but its your next step to further improve upon) , freedom provide the required support to become self-organizing and proficient to become Adept.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are my own and don’t reflect company’s opinion. They should not be considered as an advice or suggestion in any way. Every organization will have different needs depending on culture, preferences, size, etc.
#letscreate2succeed, #teamHCM, #manage2succeed, #ibmconsulting, #teamagile
This is the continuation of sharing our Agile Stories/Thoughts Series. I strongly recommend referring to the links below for previous insightful blogs from our #teamagile in IBM
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
