Going agile? First, create agency.
As a Brit living in New York, I long ago got used to familiar words being pronounced differently. And I am well aware that some words have very different meanings — a friend of mine in London once turned down a job from an American firm because the offer letter suggested she would do “quite well.” Sadly this translated from the American “very” to “not at all” in Brit speak.
But there is a similarly challenging linguistic problem I’m seeing now in business: It’s the problem when a word means one thing to leaders and another to employees.
No word better exemplifies this communications challenge than “agile.”
In the minds and mouths of leaders, agile conveys a great leap forward into a digital world in which slow moving incumbents can work in attractive new ways. It conveys an ambition to unlock growth. It conveys organizational zest and vitality.
To the ear of the recipient, agile often conveys something entirely different — the next shoe to drop in top management’s relentless efforts to take cost out of the business. It conveys a mandate to do even more with even less. It conveys human upheaval and suffering.
And yet, the problem with the way many companies launch agile initiatives isn’t just linguistic. It may start that way, but leadership behavior often compounds employees’ worst fears. While agile is meant to help employees get closer to the customer, experiment and see what works, move fast, fail and adapt, when it comes to leaders’ own behavior, they don’t always practice what they preach. Executives don’t tend to choose agile when it comes to communicating up; they drop A/B testing when it comes to their own ideas; and they seem to choose risk mitigation over messy experimentation.
So, with one rule for employees and another for executives, agile can be a lightning rod for the class system that increasingly divides the C-suite from the rank-and-file employee.
On top of this, there is a third problem with agile: It’s unevenly applied across the organization. Agile originated in software development, so fits well with a certain kind of technology culture. And its methods apply easily to marketing and social communications. But for many, it’s hard to conceive of an agile finance department or even an agile HR department. Acknowledging the fact that different teams will likely work at different paces, going agile requires not just a shift to new ways of working, but the development of new connections between teams that end up reinventing their ways of working and those that remain in control over broader process and policy for the entire organization. The mash-up of the two is rarely pretty.
So, what’s to be done — is there a better way of going agile?
At SYPartners, we think there is. Indeed, we’re working closely with a number of large organizations that are taking a different approach. They’re not just getting the language right in the way they first introduce agile. They’re also engaging their employees as owners of their time and designers of new ways of working. In short, they’re focusing their implementation on creating “agency.”
By agency, we mean the belief that as an employee, you matter. You make a difference to the way things are. You have power to influence events small and large. Here’s what we’re learning as we help clients build the beliefs that make agile the obvious and desirable thing to cultivate:
Agile is about speed and adaptability which, let’s face it, is about how people make the best use of time. In most large organizations, employees rarely feel they control their time. So what if before launching agile as the latest panacea, leaders first sincerely engaged their employees in a conversation about time and how they can better apply their own time against the organization’s purpose?
We’re hearing leaders ask three questions to unlock purposeful time:
- How does your role contribute to our purpose?
- What proportion of your time advances our purpose?
- How would you redesign your role to focus on the most purposeful activities?
In response, what we see rapidly emerging is not just a more honest exchange of ideas between employees and leaders, but a much more sustainable approach to going agile. We are seeing movements of employees asking for better tools, embracing co-location to facilitate agile ways of working, and coming up with ingenious ideas for the reallocation of resources in everything from running better meetings to creating new forms of collaboration.
Ultimately, this is another example of the great things that can happen when change is based on the belief that every employee in any role can have agency over their work. So as you approach your agile implementation, recast your role. Put aside your top-down approach to mandating change. And give people the chance to surprise you with their bravery, creativity, and skill.
Create agency and watch agile go.
[Agility/speed is one of the key themes I discussed in my previous article: The Cultural Agenda for 2018. I’ll expand upon the other themes in the coming weeks.]
Richard (Dickie) Steele has more than two decades of experience in corporate strategy and organizational consulting, advising leaders in consumer goods, media, financial services, and social sectors. Dickie has written extensively on strategic management for publications including Harvard Business Review.
