I used to say, “I love solving problems”. Now, I’ve refined that to say, “I‘m driven by creating success”. The difference is important: the first statement is essentially an activity (solving problems), the second statement encompasses an outcome (creating success). That’s a relevant distinction for me because in my profession success is ultimately measured by outcomes and not merely activity.
Regarding my profession, what I do is lead teams that define and deliver successful agile transformations of all sizes and across all organizational disciplines. Some call this Business Agility; others call it creating adaptive organizations, and still others call it transformations. Whichever terms you apply, how I create successful outcomes is by collaboratively leading executive, leadership, and execution delivery teams in driving organizational agile transformations beyond the traditional agile core. That scope and opportunity requires more than simply taking best practices for agility in the IT disciplines and expanding them to apply into the business disciplines. It means success has a broader outcome: creating adaptive results through adaptive organizations. I think of it as “adaptive flow”; by convention, let’s simply call it Business Agility.
Over the past several years, I’ve had the opportunity to collaboratively deliver successfully over a dozen times. Through those experiences, I’ve come to realize and codify three key prerequisites in creating successful Business Agility outcomes:
- Proper executive engagement
- Aligned, business-driven, success objectives
- A cadence to evaluate error and value
This codification of these prerequisites makes them simple to see, and maybe even so obvious as to say, “of course”. However, in my experience, they are often assumed incorrectly to be in place and in effect. Therefore, a system for validating that the three prerequisites are activated and operational becomes important and timely.
Here’s why this is topic is both important and timely: addressing the prerequisites changes the outcome and creates success beyond merely solving a problem. The success rate increases from below 20% to greater than 90% when the prerequisites are effectively fulfilled and validated.
Let’s elaborate a little bit on what each of the prerequisites means and why addressing them is important.
Proper executive engagement is important because you’ll need executive cover to reinforce “we’re going to stick with this” when things get bumpy during the adoption and execution process, and things will get bumpy. Additionally, the executives need to be engaged, and not simply “endorse”, because we need their active participation; we need executives to model the behavior and set the example. That does not mean they’ll be forming agile teams as executives, as they would if they directly applied traditional agile practices from the IT domain, but it does mean they’ll be iteratively forecasting outcomes and adaptively adjusting expectations based on the validated feedback that is created through execution at the team level.
Aligned, business-driven, success objectives highlights the fact that the objective of the transformation is not to transform, and the objective of business agility is not to follow agility practices. Rather, the objective is to achieve business-relevant outcomes in a timely manner. The window of “timely manner” is increasingly shrinking, particularly as the pace of change accelerates, which means organizations need to respond to perishable opportunities with aligned and adaptable behaviors. The alignment needs to be on the outcomes (i.e., success objectives), since those are the business metrics of success in the market.
Measuring only the activities or adherence to practices misses the need to focus on the actual outcomes produced. Measuring activity is like measuring intention; as the saying goes the “pathway to hell is paved with good intentions”. The missing need is rectified by placing the business-driven success objectives as the core focal point for alignment.
A cadence to evaluate error and value creates an explicit rhythm for evaluating feedback. While it has become a common saying, it is not a good practice to simply “fail fast”. The objective is not to fail; the objective is to get closer to success. That means we need to evaluate our feedback in the context of how that helps us progress toward a specific objective. The insight here is that we need to evaluate “what is an error” and “what is value” in the feedback we receive, relative to the specific outcome we intend to achieve. “Errors” require correction; “value” validates continuation.
A related insight is that we need to monitor the rhythm with which we provide or receive that feedback. The rhythm of the feedback cycle is called the cadence. The faster the cadence and its corresponding feedback, the faster we can react with a response that brings us closer to success. This is very different than an outcome of simply documenting something we learned; it becomes an outcome of leveraging feedback as one of two specific things: a) explicit validation of value or b) an error signal than triggers corrective action.
Regarding the inevitable question, “what do I do about this?”…
The simple answer is that the fulfillment is accomplished at the execution level by applying the 7 Dimensions of Business Agility. As a more thorough answer, I plan to elaborate on the “what to do” action topic in a subsequent post.