A tango couple, the woman performing a hooking action over the man’s waist. Photo by No. Pip, no!!!

Organizational agility: shall we dance?

This is an essay about dance, with a special emphasis on tango, a partner dance, as a powerful metaphor to help us understand what organizational agility really is.

This is also an open invitation to a mature discussion about organizational agility and how to nurture it.

Gentle advise: grab something to drink before continuing :-)

Feeling lost…?

Over the past six months, I’ve been struggling with some serious family issues. Some events have the power to bring you clarity: you just have to be ready to listen to yourself, slow down and process the apparently incomprehensible burst of information and emotions that is coming.

One of the pictures that was on my mind for several weeks in a row was a puzzle comprised of happy and despairing people, life, work, music, dance, harsh and gentle rules, coherence, meaning, discipline, daylight, different colourful places, aesthetics, paths, movement and change.

Intuitively I knew that picture was important: I just had to figure it out why.

After searching, reading, wondering and silencing myself for a while, I discovered this:

A rare gemstone of clarity, simplicity and wisdom…

Many thanks to:

• Alan Watts (philosophy).
• Sleeping At Last (music).
• Tree of Life (footage).
• David Lindberg (producer).

“The whole point of dancing is the dance.”

Those closest to me know that sometimes I ramble around a lot, trying to connect apparently unrelated pieces of information in a graphical manner using boxes, circles and arrows, colours, mind maps, post-its, and speaking out loud my own thoughts with my family and closest friends during the entire process, hoping to make sense of it all.

As you can imagine, this is an high energy consumption undertaking: quite often I end up exhausted and, frequently, make my family and friends despair. This is especially true when I try to transfer learning from one context to another for the first time. In short, ‘chaotic’.

Recently, maybe because of the recent events, I decided to change my own creative process and let the silence come in for a while before getting feedback from others. Somehow it feels more harmonious. And it makes more sense.

After assimilating Watts’ message, I began to ponder to myself for a while:

1. Can that message be transferred to organizational agility?
2. And if so, what are the implications?

And without further delay, the short answers are:

1. Yes…
2. … and the implications are profound.

But wait, what is organizational agility? Well, the purpose of this post is exactly to enlightening you about this powerful concept. Keep reading!

And why organizational agility? Why does an organization need to practice it in today’s increasing VUCA world? Well, in a nutshell and to keep it simple, I usually give my clients the following answer:

• Make change easier.
• Unleash human creativity.
• Create value for everyone.
• Align with how life thrives.
• Become a learning organization.

Is it clear?

As other Lean Agile Coaches guiding organizations towards business agility and sustainable growth, I pride myself for not relying solely on known frameworks, methods or other mainstream ideas that comprise the current status quo regarding agile, lean or change management approaches.

This is not easy: we need to study and practice a lot. We need to connect to people, share ideas, listen and offer constructive feedback, make sense of new concepts and realities, run experiments, leverage critical thinking as a core ‘hard’ skill, and be always ready to learn with each person, team and organization we are lucky to work with. In short: connect, share and learn.

So, here is the potentially disruptive idea:

Organizational agility is a dance, not a journey…

Why? Let’s start with a failure…

Recently Daniel Mezick shared an interesting story about an agility transition failure at MIT on the Enterprise Scrum Facebook Group, along with two captivating questions. You can read the entire thread here.

The discussion appealed to many different professionals from different fields: Mike Beedle, Dave Snowden, Christopher Avery, David A. Koontz, Jon Jorgensen, Mike Leber, Kurt Häusler, Michael Herman, and many others.

The debate raised, of course, even more interesting questions and triggered the exchange of different points of view, knowledge and experiences.

By the time Daniel instigated the group, I had already made sense of this idea and integrated it onto my professional coaching practice. Since it was related with the story and questions raised, I jumped into the conversation.

The discussion that took place afterwards made me improve the rationale behind it. Thank you all for your feedback!

Enlighten organizational agility…

So, and without further delay, here’s my first attempt to codify what organizational agility really means, and also an open invitation to a mature dialog within this space with all experienced practitioners and coaches who are willing to learn and contribute:

1. Agility is about capability, ability and mastery.

What is organizational agility? Well, if you search for it on the internet you will find several definitions. For my clients I start with the following ones, using Wikipedia as a reference:

Organizational agility is the degree of adaptive capacity a human based complex adaptive system (*) has, resulting in a greater or lesser resilience in the face of disturbance.

Organizational agility is the ability of a human social system (*) to rapidly respond to changes (either external or internal) by reconfiguring its initial coherent state with minimum loss of function.

(*) A business, a NGO, a political party, a community, etcetera.

But being able is not the same as being capable: ability is a competence to do something (right now), whereas capability is a capacity to do something (in the future). In other words, most of us have the potential (capacity) to dance tango, but you need to develop that potential into an ability (competence), through learning and practice, in order to be able to perform that dance.

But is agility capacity something organizations are born with? Yes, to a certain a degree, if their founders already understand it and know “how to play the game”. But any organization, as an open system, can strengthen its agility capacity by hiring lean-agile well-versed individuals and/or grow it from within by inviting its own people to learn. As a coach I do prefer the learning approach, but this is a topic for another article.

How about agility ability? How can an organization develop this competence? The answer is, as the tango example above, practice. You have to start “dancing”: build customer-facing teams, ask them to develop and deliver products and services clients love, fund value streams and not projects… In short, and as with any other competence, you just have to start practicing and be ready to fail. A lot. As with tango, it will be a painful evolutionary process but is that simple: just start practicing.

So, you need to hire and/or invite people to learn (to build capacity) and start practicing (to develop ability), but from where should you start?

Here’s my simple answer:

Just start from where you are: run short re-planning sessions from time to time, schedule product demos with your customers and/or stakeholders, build MVPs, visualize your workflows… In other words, try something lean or agile however minimal today, this week or the next. But never forget that acquiring a competence, any competence, is always an evolutionary process. The goal is to change for the better, step by step, whether they be people, teams, products, services, processes... In other words, continuous learning and improvement, aka, kaizen. In fact, kaizen is one of the most well known roads towards mastery.

From a learning perspective, and this is a very simplistic view, people and organizations achieve excellence on a certain field (being agility the main topic here) by going through the following 3 stages, similar to ShuHaRi (a Japanese martial art concept):

1. Learning, to build knowledge (capacity).
2. Practicing, to develop competence (ability).
3. Kaizen infinitely, to achieve excellence (mastery).

Finally, as you already figured it out, agile is not just something you do (your practices), but is fundamentally what you are (your capabilities and abilities) and what you do with the knowledge and competences you already possess or master.

2. Agility is about space, direction and coherence.

To dance tango or any other partner dance, well… you need a partner :-)

In an organizational context a partner can be your teammates, a customer, an end user, a stakeholder, a manager, an executive, another team, and so on.

When you decide to practice tango, during an exercise you and your partner will need to think about space, direction and coherence, besides the selected sequences (practices) you are going to play.

But you don’t dance in a vacuum, you need a space to do that. Space can constrain your movements or extend them: the floor may have been designed for the practice of dance or not at all, you may be just rehearsing with your partner or be in a competition in front of a jury, the room may already be in use by other pairs, shared with an orchestra, or totally free for you…

Therefore, the organizational space is inevitably something you need to take into consideration when starting your agile transition initiative, as it always constrain, to a heavier or lesser degree, the envisioned agile transformation or transition. “Things” like hierarchy, existing teams, departments and silos, management practices, distributed teams, performance reviews, decision making mechanisms, office politics, etcetera, can can throw away all your efforts if ignored.

Now, when you start dancing with a partner you need to agree about direction within the space available to you. You never dance tango randomly. You need to make choices about where to move. And you also have to agree about the changes we need to make on a given direction while performing your repertoire of movements, in a timely manner.

The same goes for when you start an agile transition initiative: you do so because you and your partners have a purpose, and most probably some goals you want to achieve in the future. But you need to create a vision to fulfil your purpose. This is what I call a focal point, a potential coherent state that you draw on your minds beforehand. When you visualize that focal point you are establishing a direction, from where you think you are today (a reference coherent state) towards somewhere near that envisioned future (a potential coherent state).

But while walking the path, there will be times when you will need to make a decision involving mutually exclusive alternatives, incurring an opportunity cost. That will force you to make a trade-off, to forgo one option for another, changing your direction but giving you new options to consider. And to navigate the new unfold territory you will need to inspect and adapt, to update the potential coherent state, and the cycle repeats itself…

The bottom line is that you will never reach that envisioned coherent state, it’s all an optical illusion. As you already know, “the honey pot behind the rainbow” is unattainable (Winnie the Pooh). But the right direction is important, and the sense of achievement underneath is what makes you keep improving… everything… forever.

Finally, when you start dancing tango with a partner you also have to agree on what aesthetics means to you. Even if you don’t know much about tango, concepts like beauty, intensity, unity, conveyed symbolism, expression and communication of emotion, are always present on your minds when you practice. But throughout a succession of learning cycles your sense of aesthetics will improve from weak to strong coherence. When “something” has coherence, “all of its parts fit well together”. Without coherence “everything will fall apart”. Weak coherence means you can barely dance tango, but an outsider can already spot it as tango. Strong coherence means you and your partner already think and feel as great performers :-)

Similarly, when you start learning any agile or lean practice you go from weak to strong coherence. You start clumsy and through practice you will get better overtime. And if you feel that is true, it means you are evolving.

3. Agility is about tension, alignment and trust.

“No mistakes in the tango, darling, not like life. It’s simple. That’s what makes the tango so great. If you make a mistake, get all tangled up, just tango on.”

— Al Pacino as Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, Scent of a Woman.

Good dancers don’t make it look easy, they make it easy. How do they do it? Well, they strive to achieve a continuous balance between different tension patterns and postural alignment, while learning how to trust each other along the way.

In tango, as in all other partner dances, tension is the primary means of communication. Dancers create variations of rhythm in moves by introducing changes in tension.

The same goes for teams, departments and organizations: you need to learn how to use tension and conflict to foster creativity, sparkle innovation and drive change in a intentional, explicit and systematic way. Without it no organization can successfully achieve sustainable growth.

Alignment in tango, on the other hand, reflects the way partners use their bodies, and how they integrate them together while interacting and relating in movement. As they practise new sequences, existing alignment rules are reviewed or new ones are created. It’s a dynamic process.

Alignment in organizations is intimately related with autonomy. Contrary to the mainstream view, high alignment doesn’t constrain autonomy of individuals or teams. In fact, it’s the other way around: high alignment enables high autonomy. How? Because alignment is not about coordination, it’s about mission and purpose: you align individuals around a team mission and different teams around an organization purpose, mission and/or goal, and let them figure out what works best for them. Your job as a business person is to communicate what problems need to be solved and why, and create the best possible environment so individuals and teams can thrive while designing, developing and delivering the solutions you are looking for. In short, “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”: market people should own problems (and value), and creative people should own solutions (products, services and processes).

Back to dance. As partners evolve together, trust grows between them: they learn how to protect each other, how to maintain a strong connection, how to put themselves in their partner’s hand, how to gently handle difficult conversations to overcome disagreements and misunderstandings, and how to setup physical or emotional boundaries as needed.

Trust within teams and/or organizations is always an hot topic. Maybe because trust is such an elusive concept… To better understand trust, one’s is better to start by seeing it in a state of tension with freedom. Let me explain:

Freedom is the power or right to act, speak or think as one wants, that is, the independence of the arbitrary will of another. At the opposite end of freedom is slavery, the subjection of your free will to the will of another. But what we really want is something like… “your freedom ends where my nose begins”. So the question is: how do you balance one’s freedom with your partner’s freedom? The simplistic answer is: with laws and rules that apply equally to all members of a society or organization. Therefore, laws and rules preserve and enlarge (positive) freedom. Some rights we know and take for granted are born this way: freedom of speech, of thought, of conscience, of religion, of the press, from discrimination, from torture, from slavery, etcetera…

But along with rights come responsibilities. A quick example: in most organizations employees have the right to a safe and healthy workplace. But employees have also the responsibility to ensure that they work in a manner that is not harmful to their own health and safety and those of others.

But how can a society or organization guarantee people will live and work up to their responsibilities? Well, we have some options on the table: one is to use coercion and compulsion to induce a desired response. But I trust you that History has already taught you that this is a dubious choice. Another way is to trust people will do the right thing. And here lies the tension between freedom and trust on modern societies and organizations: you ensure people have some rights and hope for the best, trusting people will live and work up to their responsibilities.

Yes, if you choose to trust people, it will be messy as people tend to fail often, and you will need to nurture and deepen human connections, develop empathy and compassion, have some difficult conversations to overcome disagreements and misunderstandings now and then, and set and update minimal constraints, boundaries and rules when needed.

That’s a lot of work, even in smaller organizations. Is there any cheaper alternative to trust? Sorry, I’m afraid not.

4. Agility is about invitation, timing and fluency.

Dance etiquette is the set of conventional rules which govern the social behavior of dance by its participants. One subset of those rules is related to invitation. In order to dance tango, a partner, typically the man, initiates the exchange, but the lady can also be very active looking for a partner.

Organizational agility should also begin with an invitation from one partner to another to initiate a conversation about pull-based change (of practices, ways of working, behaviours, etcetera). A partner should never impose or push change: agile adopted in a non-agile way is not agile and will never be sustainable in the long run.

One of the most basic requirements for a partner dance like tango is to be performed at the right moment in the right place. It’s all about timing: the right moment for a move is stipulated by the rhythm of the music, whereas the right place is the result of the selected sequences from a repertoire of movements, fixed by choreography.

Likewise, organizational agility is all about timing: decisions about changes to be made, products and services to be designed and developed, and so on, should be made at the right moment (until the last responsible minute) and in the right place (by the right partner or both), accordingly to a minimal set of rules and protocols (the choreography).

“So You Think You Can Dance” is a franchise of television shows in which contestants compete in dance. The franchise share a premise of placing dancers in a competition which requires them to adapt to multiple styles of dance: dancers are trained in a variety of dance genres during the entire contest, showcase their talents and may move forward through successive additional rounds of auditions to test their ability to adapt to different styles.

Fluency here is the secret ingredient for success. Being fluent is about being easy and graceful in shape, and expressing yourself readily, clearly and effectively. At the core, “So You Think Can Dance” is about building fluency through practice, from start to the end of the competition, not in a single style, but in many. It’s like learning how to be a polyglot in different dance styles.

With organizational agility is the same… it’s not enough to master a single science, practice, technique or tool, be they management, technology, product development, marketing, agile, lean, whatever… For an organization to thrive in today’s increasing VUCA world, the key is to be fluent in a wide variety of fields simultaneously, and leverage those competences by changing style, rhythm and direction as needed.

But how can an organization achieve that? One possible answer is to layout work as a continuous partnership with others, like tango: partner with a colleague to learn new concepts, practices and techniques, partner with a supplier to improve your supply chain lead time and the quality of your products, partner with your customers to deliver value to market as fast as possible… You get the picture :-)

5. Agility is about intent, self-management and performing.

Accordingly to Wikipedia, dance “is a performing art form consisting of purposefully selected sequences of human movement. This movement has aesthetic and symbolic value, and is acknowledged as dance by performers and observers within a particular culture. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoire of movements, or by its historical period or place of origin”.

Continuing with Wikipedia, “in dance, choreography is the act of designing dance”, the exercice of creating and organizing dance sequences into a meaningful whole, the process of building a dance composition, that is, a finished dance work. Therefore, in dance, a choreographer is one who envision a dance.

Every choreography has an intent. Intent is defined as an aim or purpose of a certain action or thought. Thus, a choreography intent is the purpose behind a dance composition to make an audience sense a certain emotion, feeling or thought. Dancers will interpret and improve that intent while practicing and later will deliver it before an audience. But dancers and choreographers can’t do their work alone: they are supported by a plethora of other professionals acting as stewards (a production designer, a costume designer, a music composer, etcetera).

A choreographer doesn’t perform before an audience. Dancers do. Instead, a choreographer “sets the stage” for the dancers to perform at their best, communicate intent and co-design the choreography with the dancers. A good choreographer combines centralized intent with decentralized design and performance, protecting the space, freedom and ingenuity of the dancers for collaboration, self-management and innovation to emerge, within predefined constraints and boundaries.

These powerful concepts are also at the core of organizational agility: every agile organization on the planet has dancers and choreographers, besides other important roles that make it possible for a “superorganism” to rapidly respond to changes on its surrounding environment (market shifts, political turmoils, weather catastrophes, new competitors, …) pretty much like social colonies of bees or ants. Without entering into much detail, and over-simplifying it, there are at least 6 types of roles on every agile organization (to elaborate further later):

• Customers, the organization’s “raison d’être”, a dancer role.
• Suppliers, the organization’s value partners, a dancer role.
• Explorers, market-oriented people, a choreographer and dancer role.
• Creators, solution-oriented people, a dancer role.
• Gardeners, system-oriented people, a stewardship role.
• Carers, holistic-oriented people, a choreographer role.

I will briefly explain the last 4:

Explorers are market-oriented people (business owners and developers, some executives, product managers, …), who partner (dance) with existing and potential customers, surfacing the market for growth opportunities. Market people own the problems to be solved by product/service teams (the creators) and work closely with them by setting value intent (purpose, vision), by communicating any constraints or boundaries to take into consideration, and by sharing critical market intelligence (strategy and market research, business models and financials, and so forth). Innovation and value creation in the form of new or improved value streams and business models is their realm.

Creators are solution-oriented people (artists, designers, crafters, engineers, …), self-organized into product/service teams, who directly partner (dance) with customers and explorers, nurturing a healthy relationship along the way. Product and service teams fully own the solutions for the problems brought by explorers to be cracked, by developing and delivering products and services that customers love, by fulfilling the envisioned value intent and by complying with any constraints and boundaries set by explorers. Innovation and value creation in the form of new or improved products and services is their realm.

Gardeners are system-oriented people (managers, some executives, …), who protect the space, freedom and ingenuity of explorers and creators for collaboration, self-management and innovation to sprout. They take care and improve the complex adaptive system that comprise the fertile soil where the collaboration between customers, explorers and creators can flourish. Good gardeners know how to design a garden that can produce the desired outcomes (collaboration, self-management and innovation being the main ones), how to maintain and grow a healthy garden, and are always inquisitive about the conditions that can positively and/or negatively impact a garden. However, they don’t set value intent neither own the garden: value intent is set by explorers only, and the garden belongs to everyone working there. In that sense, they play a stewardship role for the whole organization, being its “garden” authority granted by the organization executives.

Carers are holistic-oriented people (coaches, some executives, …) who also protect the space, freedom and ingenuity of explorers and creators for collaboration, self-management and innovation to sprout. But they take a different approach than Gardeners by seeing the organization unabridged, where all parts are intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole, where people (customers, explorers, creators, gardeners, …) interact and co-evolve together to fulfill the overall organizational intent (the organization purpose set by the executive carers). Therefore, they tend to focus on the big picture (the whole) and on “game” dynamics (the interactions between people, teams and business units, and between them and the system underneath), and invest heavily on developing people’s competences in the long haul, displaying kindness and concern for others.

Self-management is not a new invention: it is the way life has “orchestrated” itself for billions of years, shaping beautiful and complex living beings and ecosystems we can hardly grasp, even today. Self-management is also nature’s secret ingredient for infinite scaling. Just think of an ant colony with millions of individuals: no one’s in charge, yet the colony can quickly decide where to build its new nest when facing a death threat. In other words, a single ant isn’t smart, but their colonies are. This same rationale applies to bees, wasps, termites, …

But we are not ants. To begin with, we are smarter. Hence, self-management in a human social system is not about having no managers (the gardeners). It’s about enacting autonomous teams and letting them self-manage around a value or organizational intent. Autonomous teams should be the organizational basic unit for inspecting and adapting to changes, for problem-solving, for continuous learning and improvement, for quality, for safety and, ultimately, for performance (either organizational, operational, value related, product, service, …). In fact, almost all organizational flows should revolve around self-managed autonomous teams.

And what does self-management mean for teams? Well, generally speaking, and excluding scaling and descaling considerations (another future article), self-management for autonomous teams include, but are not limited to:

• Ownership of products/services being developed/delivered.
• Ownership of all required working processes and related tools.
• What to do to fulfil a given value or organizational intent.
• How to do it, that is, their own way of working.
• All forecasting activities related to their own work.

In performing arts like dance, a performance “generally comprises an event in which a performer or group of performers present one or more works of art to an audience”. But to deliver a great live performance dancers have to perform (practice) during weeks or months on end, perfecting their choreography. The previous two, practicing and delivering, are commonly referred to as performing.

Thus performing, in dance, has nothing to do with performance management which, accordingly to Wikipedia, “includes activities which ensure that goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient manner… focusing on the performance of an organization, a department, employee, or even the processes to build a product or service…”.

Let me explain the above in other terms:

• Performing (practicing) during weeks is what dancers do to prepare themselves for a live performance. It’s deeply related with their working process and mastery.
• Performing (delivering) before an audience is what spectators will see, hear and feel, that is, the value they will get for the money.
• Revenue from ticket sales is what an audience will pay to attend a show, a type of financial metric related to performance management.

With organizational agility, the same rationale applies:

• Performing is about practicing, process improving, achieving mastery, and delivering value to an audience, be they customers, employees, teams, stakeholders, investors, organization, …
• Performance is usually about the outcomes after delivering value, either related with finance, operations, marketing, sales, supply chain, or manufacturing, … In other words, it’s the perceived value by an audience translated into one or more key performance indicators (KPIs).

And regarding organizational agility, what should we prioritize first, performing or performance in organizational agility?

Well, the straightforward answer is: you should prioritize performing (practice, kaizen, mastery, value delivery) over performance (KPIs) because performing is the best leading indicator you can use to predict the outcomes you are looking for.

Potential takeaways

The current essay aims to describe what organizational agility really is by using the power of metaphor and analogy, and a language rooted in simple examples taken from the day-to-day work experience.

Thus, and similar to a partner dance like tango, organizational agility is about: capability, ability, mastery, space, direction, coherence, tension, alignment, trust, invitation, timing, fluency, intent, self-management and performing.

Another takeaway is that organizational agility is not the same as agile.

As written above, agile, as defined by the Agile Manifesto in 2001, is something you, an individual human being or a single team, are or aim to be, and thus, the well known journey metaphor applies to you and me.

On the other hand, organizational agility is something you should focus on when managing and/or coaching an organization towards an evolutionary learning whole with your partners, as defined by this essay. Therefore, organizational agility is indistinguishable from a management philosophy, and thus, the current dance metaphor (using tango, a partner dance) to convey it.

As we may already have felt, we are living in a time of transition between a mechanistic view of society, inherited from the industrial revolution, and a new systemic, evolutionary and sustainable view of the world. Therefore I’ll leave you with a question:

• Is it time for us to reflect again on the “territory” in which we live?

Closing

As stated at the beginning, this is an essay about tango, a partner dance, as a powerful metaphor to help us understand what organizational agility really is, but it’s also an open invitation to a mature discussion about organizational agility and how to nurture it.

Therefore, I would love:

• Your feedback :-)
• To invite you to the following discussion group at Linkedin:

Sign Up

Thank you for reading!

I hope you have enjoyed!

This essay is dedicated to:

• My son: thank you for being you :-)
• My wife: thank you for your love and for always being there for me.
• My mother: thank you for everything.

Final words:

• This essay may not match some of the ideas eventually sold to you by the Agile Industrial Complex , an essay written by Daniel Mezick you should definitely read.
• This essay is, obviously, published under an open source license :-)