Eight months ago organisations entered a period of continuous change, uncertainty, and evolution. Covid-19 has forced through digital and behavioural changes that organisations had unsuccessfully tried to make for years.
Organisations have learned to survive and thrive. They have learned rapid innovation, edge decision making, and creative solutions. Company politics has been ignored, silos have been burst open and bureaucracy has been bypassed. The information has been shared and a bias for action developed. Urgent tasks have been identified and tackled at speed, unimportant tasks shelved, small cross functional teams formed and IT teams have moved mountains.
The impossible has become possible. Servant leaders have arisen and personal ambitions tossed aside as everyone sought to meet business and customer challenges head on. Businesses began to care and kindness has ensued. Organisations began to work with agility unknown to them before. What organisations did not realise is that they have had begun their Agile journey. Organisational agility is catching fire.
Is Agile the right answer for the increasingly complex, uncertain, and rapidly changing business environment in which firms now find themselves facing? Will Agile help teams communicate better compared to collocated colleagues? Will Agile help organisations focus on what is critical at times of great uncertainty?
This article looks at why Agile is critical for an organisations survival and why it is the answer to these questions and many more.
1. Agile teams don’t bet the firm: Organisations cannot afford to bet the entire firm on one single decision. Agile encourages small teams to make multiple small bets that are grounded in consumer research and feedback every single day. Working software is prioritised over comprehensive documentation. Customer feedback is obtained and fed back into the next delivery cycle. Every 2 weeks new products or features are developed that will be used and valued. That way, organisations know they are delivering what a customer wants (or not). They don’t run the risk of going down a very long path, investing heavily into a product or features that a customer won’t buy or use. This is a more precise way to develop and deliver benefits for the customer.
2. Servant leaders: Colleagues respond better to leaders who work to ensure the team is successful, compared to leaders who work to make themselves successful. Servant leaders remove obstacles, empower individuals, act as the glue in projects rather than a barrier. That is why servant leadership is so effective in project delivery and cultivating a positive and trusting workplace environment.
“In agile organizations, leaders act more as visionaries, architects, and coaches, and less as directors and controllers. They put in place processes that reinforce this and give their people clear accountability combined with the freedom to pursue opportunities.”
McKinsey, An Agile HR leads to Happier Employees
3. Primacy of the customer. The highest priority, as the Agile Manifesto states, is to satisfy the customer. Agile practitioners are obsessed with delivering value to customers. Small teams work in networked organisational arrangements rather than top-down bureaucracy and silos. They deliver value in a short delivery, receiving continuous feedback from the ultimate customer or end user. This is then used to deliver even more value.
4. Organisations need to achieve more with less. Agile is not about working harder, it’s about working smarter. Agile is not about doing more work in less time: it’s about generating more value with less work. At a time when customer and business capital is constrained due to Covid, it is more important than ever to squeeze every ounce of value possible out of every dollar invested.
5. Small, empowered, self organising teams: With managers and leaders off ill or unavailable, teams have had to make decisions for themselves. They have had to self organise and make decisions with the information they have available. Small teams help build resiliency and make it easier to change direction when needed.
6. Transparency, trust, and accountability. Before Covid, office bound employees were actively watched and monitored by managers who incorrectly equated hours in the office to hours spent working. Colleagues were not trusted and responded in kind (e.g. skiving off, shirking responsibility). Covid has forced managers to trust their workers. Six months ago mobile phones were not permitted onto the contact centre floor. Now those same individuals are forced to use PCs in shared spaces with their desktops visible to other members of their household or flatmates and managers are grateful to staff who are working.
Agile encourages servant leaders who work hard to enable team members and remove obstacles to progress. Team members are given a challenge and trusted to deliver a solution. This does not mean Agile squads are left to their own devices. With responsibility comes accountability. Daily stand-ups, retrospectives, Kanban boards, customer feedback, and planning sessions encourage transparency and accountability from peers and managers alike.
7. Working remotely encourages people to work autonomously: Organisations need to encourage individuals and Agile teams to set their own goals, in line with company goals, and have them hold each other accountable for their delivery. The days of micromanagement are no longer affordable nor are they advisable.
Innovation from the bottom up: Agile ceremonies such as scrums, stand-ups, team meetings, retrospective, and brainstorming sessions encourage communication, problem solving, and most importantly creative thinking. Employees that are encouraged and supported to problem solve are more engaged in their work and less likely to have sick days or exit an organisation. Organisations that bring the whole of the person to work gain greater productivity and experience higher net promotor scorer from their staff. Happier staff deal with customers better than unhappy staff which in turn drives customer NPS and ultimately profit.
“Happy employees are more productive, more creative, and better at problem-solving than their unhappy peers.”
HBR, Positive Intelligence 2012
8. Agile encourages cross functional teams which in turn breaks down silos and encourages better inter departmental communication and cooperation: Agile teams are by their very nature, cross-functional teams of approximately five to ten employees. These teams are small enough to collaborate closely but large enough to possess the necessary skills to execute a task successfully from beginning to end. Cross functional teams who have brief regular interactions, resolve questions and solve problems more quickly than teams that throw issues back and forward over departmental walls.
9. Improved human connection: Humans are social animals. Connection with other human beings reduces stress, increases our sense of purpose, and drives innovation. Agile ceremonies encourage regular, consistent communication with colleagues (e.g. pair programming, huddles, retrospectives, sprint and release planning, daily stand-ups). Agile ceremonies, such as a retrospective, can be a place where a team feels safe and comfortable, allowing them to talk freely about their frustrations and have an ‘official’ window of time in which to be listened to.
10. Retrospectives encourage learning and action: Agile encourages continuous improvement. To learn, organisations must stop and reflect on what has happened. One of the most powerful benefits of Agile is the ability to quickly recognize when things are going off course and to adjust on the basis of that learning. Retrospectives encourage teams to stop, reflect, and fine tune processes before moving forwards. They help create a learning culture. Retrospectives allow teams to grow and avoid making the same mistakes in the future. Retrospectives can act as a team energising when teams get together and get excited as they find new ways and new possibilities to solve problems.
11. Common objectives and basic rules: To function effectively teams simply need common objectives, some basic ground rules, given responsibility, and then left alone to provide creative solutions that meet customer objectives. Agile teams are set up to deliver in this very manner.
12. Agile encourages greater information sharing: Organisational learnings shared internally and broadly distributed are vital to restoring, growing, and improving organisational performance. Agile encourages people to share information by democratising information. Documents, communications, scoreboards, visual displays, etc. all promote information dissemination.
13. Agile teams are encouraged to make decisions based on data: Agile methods such as sprints planning, retrospective learning, and A/B push teams to analyse user data. Organisations that make decisions based on data, not gut feeling, usually end up making better decisions compared to those that don’t.
14. Prioritization. Creating backlogs and constantly refining them makes sure that teams can only work on the most valuable activities, even when they are remote.
“In a well-managed agile transformation, results spur employee engagement across the organization and a faster response to emerging priorities….Critical talent initiatives are completed faster with better outcomes and greater visibility of value delivered.”
McKinsey, An Agile HR leads to Happier Employees
15. Rapid responsiveness to market variability and customer needs: Teams that are empowered to think for themselves and rapidly react to changing conditions, become front line sensors that detect and deal with issues more quickly than teams that are not Agile. In the future, organisations are going to have to learn to deal with more, not less, uncertainty, and change than today. Life has never been faster and it certainly won’t get any slower. Implementing Agile teams that are able to rapidly sense and react to changes in customer demand will be essential to the survival of organisations in the future. It is key that executive leaders capture this information so that the wider organisation can react in real time to such change.
“Agile organisations often speak of a shared purpose and vision—the “North Star”—which helps people feel personally and emotionally invested in the organization. This North Star allows employees to individually and proactively watch for changes in customer preferences and the external environment, and then, act upon them.”
McKinsey, Agile Resilience in the UK: Lessons from Covid 19 for the next normal
Covid has been a catalyst for technological and behavioural change on a global scale. Simple, clear, consistent communication has become more critical than ever. In response, organisations developed greater agility and in the process, adopted Agile by default. Agile practices have enabled organisations to be more resilient to crises such as Covid.
Agile arose as a response to rapid change, growing organisational, and market complexity, as well as a shift in power from producers to consumers. Today it is no longer the technology itself that makes a difference. The same technology is available to all organisations. It is how teams coordinate and communicate that differentiates the winners from the losers. In the digital era, every aspect of a business needs to move faster. Speed and agility matter more than ever before.
When companies implement Agile across their entire organisation, their ways of working, communicating, and delivering can improve dramatically. When the whole organisation truly embraces Agile it becomes a fluid and transparent network of players that work together as a team. Teams deliver better results when everyone is focused on delivering value.
When teams understand their purpose in customer and business terms, and act within well-defined guardrails, they are more engaged and productive. Organisations need to take steps to integrate Agile principles into their ways of working so that teams are constantly identifying ways to become more productive through constant listening, tweaking, and improving to better meet changing customer needs. Agile encourages teams to eliminate delay, break siloes, solve problems, and continually improve the customer experience. Agile is a natural bedfellow of an organisation that faces complexity, variability and uncertainty. Agile is a set of cultural values, principles, and behaviours, rather than a set of specific practices.
The challenges presented with remote working have not killed Agile. Rather, the Agile organisations know today, have changed and organisations are better for it (i.e. higher productivity, engagement, and better decision making).
However, Agile is not a panacea. A completely Agile structure can create challenges when organisations try to balance short term tactical goals with long term strategic vision. Organisations must plan for the longer term, but create value in the short term. Today must pay for tomorrow. Executive teams must set a long term strategy and sprint to get there ahead of the competition. If they don’t, then organisations will quickly fail as rapid changes in competition, consumer demand, technology, and regulations make it more important than ever for organizations to respond rapidly and adapt quickly.
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