Getting Agile

Getting Agile

Reflections on the Business Think Tank results

The Synthetron team recently organised a business think tank session on the subject of Business Agility, defined for the session as the ability to react quickly to change.The session gave me pause to reflect, not least about my own agility.

Download the report here .

 

Most of us started the session thinking that more agility would be a good thing. We have read the stories about the modern technology companies who seem to be able to create and implement new business models in a few weeks, and most of us have seen our own companies struggle to do very much at all in that timescale.

People in the conversation also had a good idea what an agile environment would feel like. We’d be able to get decisions and take risks and make mistakes. There would be a lot of listening and learning, and not much bureaucracy. Things would feel small and fresh.business agility stock img

But then we were asked to think about what first steps would help make our environment more agile, and what KPI an “agility czar” might be judged against. This was harder. The energy in the discussion increased, but there were few synthetrons and more disagreement. It was generally agreed that attitudes and behaviours would be key. Somehow we would have to demonstrate trust and empowerment, and engage and listen more. But how?

There were plenty of interesting thoughts. Someone made a connection between agility and relentless performance management: if we are all given strict tasks and targets and judged against these, we might have less incentive (and less time) to react to what we see changing around us. That felt credible, and also disturbing: surely intense performance management is a good thing?

 

Sacrifices for Agility

Why was agility seen as so desirable, but so little seemed to be available to practically achieve it? The menu for everyone in the discussion would be quite different. And there might be wider messages available too.

The comment about performance management got me thinking. Perhaps other well-established practices also come at the expenses of agility. Many of us have endured attempts by our companies to become bigger, to harmonize practice, converge regions and demand standardisation. That is hardly likely to support agility – not only is personal initiative downplayed in favour of conformance, but also decision chains get slower and more complex. In my own career, I’m convinced I’ve seen more diseconomies of scale than I have economies, and every time I’ve been part of a standardisation programmes I think it has made things worse – at great expense and great distraction from the customer. Mergers are even worse.

Who wins from all these so-called good practices? Winners include managers who love predictability and control, and people looking to build senior careers in service functions like finance. Power hungry CEO’s can see the allure. Weak management teams can create distraction from losing to their competitors.27._scissor_1024x1024

But the group who gains the most are consultants – especially the biggest ones and the IT ones like Accenture – and other advisors like lawyers. They win from the standardisation projects and they win from the customer that emerges at the end – more centralised, offering bigger projects and unlikely to hire boutique competitors.

I wonder who is conning whom here? It is certainly worth thinking about. It is not only agility that loses out every time, but simplification too. Work-life balance usually loses as well, as expectations at work become more global.

We produced a From-To table as part of the report. Looking down the To column, and imagining a large company run along those lines, it would certainly be refreshing, but it might be a bit chaotic as well. For some situations, it might work well, but for others it would clearly lack discipline. So even the desire for agility should certainly be contextual, and for sure not everyone could thrive in that environment, since we have spent most of our careers developing skills in the opposite direction.

So agility does not come for free. Just as someone has to suffer for lower taxes and someone has to pay for higher spending, something has to be lost in order to acquire agility. So how much do we really want this? It is all very well hankering after an agile environment, but what would be sacrifice to achieve it? My suspicion is that most corporate leaders would take a lot of convincing to change radically in the direction of agility, and their consultants and advisors would certainly not help. It does not help that, judging from the conversation, KPI’s and links to financial performance are hard to come by.

 

Longer-term Consequences

Are we storing up later problems by under-prioritising agility? We can use tricks like creating hothouse environments where agility is most required. But surely the ability to react quickly to change really is critical in the whole business, and will become more so? Perhaps it is more important in the long run than standardisation or control. Firms can die from a lack of agility, paralysing complexity, or burned-out key staff. But I suspect the top pay lip service to the aspiration to improve, but are not really convinced and not ready to make the sacrifices. I’ve known many senior managers who thought things like agility are for wimps.

A frightening parallel might be climate change. We all want to stop it, of course. But it is hard to see meaningful first steps, and leaders are driven by opposing objectives and are not ready to pay the price. Until when?

I sense there is fertile ground here for smart consultants, ready to go against the grain. What are the smart moves that have low cost? When can they be applied with low risk? What are the hidden downsides of established methods? Can we find good KPI’s and prove links to financial goals? And how can we develop leaders who will see things another way?

 

Always start with I

One thing we can always do is look at ourselves. This may be one of those areas where we all think we are a little bit better than we really are. Are we part of the problem? My first advice to new managers is always: Get out of the way! But how well am I following my own counsel? This might be one of those irregular verbs: the boss should get out of my way, peers should respect my creativity, and subordinates should just do as they are told!

How do I know that I empower and engage more than my colleagues – or is that just wishful thinking? When did I last seek out feedback on these things, or do an assessment?

Which brings me back to Synthetron. It is a great way to capture signals and ideas, bring forward issues and find solutions and actions that really involves people, all in just an hour. This Think Tank helped to open my own eyes: somehow most Synthetron sessions seem to achieve that, often in surprising ways.

– By Graham Bobby

Agility – not just a buzzword

Agility – not just a buzzword

by Klaus-Michael Erben

Based on learnings using crowd intelligence in two separate dialogues on January 28th and April 14th 2015, we derived five lessons in connection with eight imperatives to reflect upon how to improve on agility. With few exceptions the need for agility is mostly anchored in external effects (market, technologies) and less in internal factors. Almost everybody sees agility as important or critical. But, while most acknowledge a gap from best practice, they argue whether agility should be part of their personal performance evaluation.

These five recommendations emerged:

  1. Become more agile by creating strategies built around extensive listening
    to the customer and the market, which proactively reflect digital trends
  2. Create an entrepreneurial organisational culture relying on trust, involvement, flexibility, risk taking, a bias for action and ongoing learning from mistakes
  3. Watch out for key blockers – top dogs afraid of new ways of working and excessive internal complexity
  4. Add value through an operational approach with agility-related KPI’s for areas like meetings, reports or protocols designed for agility, the provision of open spaces for innovative thinking, and fostering open feedback for learning
  5. Encourage management to cross hierarchical boundaries, using engagement opportunities and learning curricula, to improve agility.

Eight top tips: must-haves from the dialogues:

  1. Agility to respond appropriately
  2. People from different backgrounds to broaden thinking
  3. Engagement, empowerment and collaboration
  4. Give people the right to make mistakes, to speak-up about red lights or cxontroversial issues and to experiment in new ways of working
  5. Put the decision power in the team, not at the top.
  6. Ensure meetings, protocols and reports have clear added value – or drop them
  7. Balance ‘lean working‘ with soace for innovation
  8. Resist old ways of working. Initiating change helps to improve agility.

Download the full report here

 

by Klaus Michael Erben

 

The value of Positive Behaviour

get ahead with a cropwdsourced approach to Inclusion and diversity

The value of Positive Behaviour

On August 11th, a Synthetron session was held together with Sequoia, our partners in Singapore and their partners Anima Convivência Produtiva, High Peaks Group and Real world group.
The session was held on the value of positive behaviour, moreover the effects it can have on workplace behaviour.
The synthetron study was part of a larger study into the value of positive behaviour. Here are some of the results:

A regionally well-spread group of 59 corporate leaders participated in the one-hour crowdsourcing session on theme of Value of Positive Behavior (“VPB”). Participants were consultants, executives and leaders from the private and public sectors.

Positive behavior is defined as the actions that create a positive working environment and/or enabling others to work more effectively through what we say or do. Participants indicated that they highly valued the aspect of trust and authentic interactions. They shared their experiences and quoted the following positive behavior which mattered the most to them:

  • listening
  • nurturing individuals’ strength
  • being proactive, motivating and supportive to fellow colleagues
  • expressing appreciation and positivity verbally and non-verbally (i.e. smile, eye contact, saying thanks and please)

Participants greatly recognised the importance of positive workplace behavior (with 73% of participants rating it as ‘very important’ and 23% of ‘rather important’).

During the discussion, barriers to positive behaviour (PB) , metrics of PB, key enablers of PB and the importance of PB were found. These are shown in the table beneath.

Download the full report below.

 

What does Synthetron do?

What does Synthetron do?

We know that decision makers in organisations don’t want to miss out on the important insights they need to move forward. We engage the people that matter in crowdsourcing online dialogues to discover their winning ideas.

Traditional methods never seem to capture the range of emotions, frustrations thoughts and opinions of people. And if they do, they are time consuming, slow, and often only represent a small part of the target population.

Using our bottom-up online, anonymous discussion platform, Synthetron harvests the opinions and ideas of the group and helps you understand the implications for your organisation.

We believe in these underpinning ideas

  • Smart generative listening goes far deeper than just measuring people through surveys. We focus the dialogue on what matters most with tried and tested triggering questions. We have a passion for engaging people in order to connect ideas and tap into the collective wisdom.
  • Authentic conversations avoid groupthink and motivate participants to share ideas anonymously. They focus on what is said not who said them so the integrity of ideas is uncontaminated by politics and peer pressure
  • The wisdom of the crowd has the capacity to generate, evaluate and filter out the most important ideas – facilitated by our evolutionary crowdsourcing system
  • We love to discover actionable meaning from the data by rigorously analysing what people talk about, how they express themselves and where there is energy or resistance. Our report includes a “So what?” table and communication guidelines to trigger or accelerate change.

Get in touch to take part in an open session and find it out for yourself how easy it can be to discover how people are thinking.