Building Organizational Murmuration with Agile Planning
COVID crisis: True encounter with VUCA
So far everyone has just spoken about VUCA, but the latest COVID crisis has been the embodiment of a VUCA world — a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity! The core activities essential to drive organizational success, such as corporate strategic planning, are almost futile in the VUCA world, and any attempt to plan and forecast a future is useless too.
Business leaders forestall ambiguities and uncertainties every year, taking into account the internal and external factors at the start and end of the year. By the end of 2019, they would have made the best plans and predictions for 2020 but the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 left the planned quite unplanned. The strategies defined earlier are no longer relevant, proving once again that change is the only constant, and quickly reacting & adapting to change is the only normal!
Survival of the quickest: Who will survive & succeed in this situation?
Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent — Bill Gates
Only those organizations will succeed that are agile enough to respond and resilient enough to survive these unexpected black-swan incidents. The survivors, or rather winners in such unprecedented times, are those who do not plan in silos, who plan continuously, who forecast in real-time, and who are quick to read and act on signals of change.
Business is continuous, planning should be too
Planning is not a once-a-year activity. Companies can no longer rely on long-range planning that takes weeks or longer to incorporate market changes. Continuous planning is the need for the hour, in conjunction with all business functions in the company, predicting all potential scenarios every week or month, not just once a year, based on historical data, guts/intuition and, more importantly, using intelligence insights, and constantly updating the plans.
Does Murmuration of Starlings strike your mind too?
It must certainly have, because a huge flock of starlings and agile organizations have so much in common. The way these birds organize themselves, travel fast and respond quickly to changes as one group to find food and avoid attacks is simply astonishing.
For an organization to achieve agility and resilience, similar to starlings, each business function in an organization needs to quickly communicate changes to other functions, and react quickly when the entire ecosystem is in danger of disruption, as in the COVID crisis.
Let’s apply the 3 basic rules which starlings follow into our Business Planning:
- Alignment: Always be in contact with one another:
Each starling ensures that it flies in line with the seven nearest starlings to establish a strong network through which information can be quickly exchanged.
Similarly, each business function must develop and update its plans and data in a timely manner and share it with other functions that may also be affected.
Example: Large sales organizations live in a world of constant change, territories change, sales-rep change, new products are launched, and accounts are re-assigned. Now all this should be in sync or aligned with compensation plans so that sales reps are rightly credited/compensated for the right deals.
2. Cohesion: Fly at the same speed:
Every starling within the murmuration flies at the same speed, not necessarily in the same direction.
In the same way, each business function — finance, sales, HR, operations, supply chain, or marketing — must ensure that they collaborate and update their data, plans, and forecasts in agreement with each other in order to provide an accurate picture of the business.
3. Separation: Avoid possible danger immediately:
As soon as a risk or change is observed within the environment, the starlings react by changing direction immediately afterward.
In the same way, each business function must predict well in order to avoid and cope with an unprecedented event.
If all business functions across the organization act and respond as a single entity in an agile way, the magical organizational murmuration can happen!
Future of planning: Plan quickly and re-forecast rapidly
Agile, intelligent planning allows businesses to continuously shift as the market demands and to stay tuned to the end customer’s behavior, market risks, and competitions.
Few things have come out clear from the COVID situation:
- Agile strategic planning over the traditional long-term is the future of planning
- Connected planning is the key for better alignment across business functions and their goals
