Week 2, 2020
Business Agility: Fit for Purpose, Listen & Learn, and Continuous Reconfiguration
Each week I share three ideas for how to make work better. And this week, those ideas are all about Business Agility: what it is, why it’s important, and how it can be achieved.
Why am I writing about this? Ask your favorite Chief Transformation Officer what they are hoping to achieve with their latest initiative, and chances are they’ll say “greater Business Agility”. It’s a laudable goal. But what exactly does Business Agility mean? What is it that agile businesses do differently? And what have they done to get where they are?
Those answers and more, below.
1. Fit for Purpose
Business Agility is a capability that allows an organization to remain fit for purpose over the long haul. And the reason why everyone and their grandmother are now falling over themselves to “be Agile” is that the rate of environmental change is steadily increasing. Technology has made the world a much more interconnected and complex place. And Business Longevity (i.e., the amount of time the average business stays in businesses) is steadily declining as a result.
For more on this longevity decline, check out w182019 (and w172019 and w192019) for takeaways from Aaron Dignan’s excellent Brave New Work.
2. Listen and Learn
What Business Agility does is that it allows the organization to rapidly respond to environmental change by continuously reconfiguring how it works. That’s my definition. And it basically boils down to two things. First, agility is about active listening. In a world of constant change, where long-term planning is all but impossible, the only viable route forward is experimentation and continuous improvement. Agile businesses take a build-measure-learn approach to everything they do.
For more on decision-making in complex environments, check out w452018 for takeaways from Steven Johnson’s book Farsighted.
3. Continuous Reconfiguration
The second capability is the means with which to continuously reconfigure how work gets done. Because while listening and learning are important, it means little unless combined with a bias towards action. Agile businesses complement an experimental mindset with an operating system geared towards trust and responsibility. Their teams don’t need permission to change, they are free to experiment and adopt new configurations as long as they adhere to the organization’s mission and core values.
For more on this last bit about alignment, check out w152019 for definitions and pro-tips in regards to mission, vision, and core values.
An analogy might be helpful. Imagine a cargo ship on the one hand and an armada of speedboats on the other. The cargo ship is big and powerful and it can carry lots of cargo. But it’s not very nimble. And it only has one radar. The armada, on the other hand, is very nimble. And while each boat can only carry a small amount of cargo, they make up for that fact in numbers. They can use multiple (smaller) radar systems to complete a variety of missions simultaneously.
The cargo ship and the armada are not necessarily better than one another. They’re just fit for different purposes. But the moral of this story is that the armada is a better choice when you don’t know what the future holds; when you need to experiment and iterate. Because let’s face it, you probably don’t want to send your sole cargo ship on a risky mission. Failure could spell disaster. But a speedboat or two? That’s another story. Because the armada makes it safe to fail.
Until next time, stay calm.
