Tag Archives: agile change

The Resilience Conundrum

From the Webb Space Telescope to Dishwashing Liquids

The Resilience Conundrum

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

Many of us have been watching the spectacular photos coming from Webb Space Telescope this week. It is a breathtaking example of innovation in action. But what grabbed my attention almost as much as the photos was the challenge of deploying it at the L2 Lagrange point. That not only required extraordinary innovation of core technologies, but also building unprecedented resilience into the design. Deploying a technology a million miles from Earth leaves little room for mistakes, or the opportunity for the kind of repairs that rescued the Hubble mission. Obviously the Webb team were acutely aware of this, and were painstaking in identifying and pre-empting 344 single points of failure, any one of which had the potential to derail it. The result is a triumph.  But it is not without cost. Anticipating and protecting against those potential failures played a significant part in taking Webb billions over budget, and years behind it’s original schedule.

Efficiency versus Adaptability: Most of us will never face quite such an amazing but  daunting challenge, or have the corresponding time and budget flexibility. But as an innovation community, and a planet, we are entering a phase of very rapid change as we try to quickly address really big issues, such as climate change and AI. And the speed, scope and interconnected complexity of that change make it increasingly difficult to build resilience into our innovations. This is compounded because a need for speed and efficiency often drives us towards narrow focus and increased specialization.  That focus can help us move quickly, but we know from nature that the first species to go extinct in the face of environmental change are often the specialists, who are less able to adapt with their changing world. Efficiency often reduces resilience, it’s another conundrum.

Complexity, Systems Effects and Collateral Damage. To pile on the challenges a little, the more breakthrough an innovation is, the less we understand about how interacts at a systems level, or secondary effects it may trigger.  And secondary failures can be catastrophic. Takata airbags, or the batteries in Samsung Galaxy phones were enabling, not core technologies, but they certainly derailed the core innovations.

Designed Resiliency. One answer to this is to be more systematic about designing resilience into innovation, as the Webb team were. We may not be able to reach the equivalent of 344 points of failure, but we can be systematic about scenario planning, anticipating failure, and investing up front in buffering ourselves against risk. There are a number of approaches we can adopt to achieve this, which I’ll discuss in detail later.

The Resiliency Conundrum. But first let’s talk just a little more about the Resilience conundrum. For virtually any innovation, time and money are tight. Conversely, taking time to anticipate potential failures is often time consuming and expensive. Worse, it rarely adds direct, or at least marketable value. And when it does work, we often don’t see the issues it prevents, we only notice them when resiliency fails. It’s a classic trade off, and one we face at all levels of innovation. For example, when I worked on dishwashing liquids at P&G, a slightly less glamorous field than space exploration, an enormous amount of effort went into maintaining product performance and stability under extreme conditions. Product could be transported in freezing or hot temperatures, and had to work extreme water hardness or softness. These conditions weren’t typical, but they were possible. But the cost of protecting these outliers was often disproportionately high.

And there again lies the trade off. Design in too much resiliency, and we are become inefficient and/or uncompetitive. But too little, and we risk a catastrophic failure like the Takata airbags. We need to find a sweet spot. And finding it is still further complicated because we are entering an era of innovation and disruption where we are making rapid changes to multiple systems in parallel. Climate change is driving major structural change in energy, transport and agriculture, and advances in computing are changing how those systems are managed. With dishwashing, we made changes to the formula, but the conditions of use remained fairly constant, meaning we were pretty good at extrapolating what the product would have to navigate. The same applies with the Webb telescope, where conditions at the Lagrange point have not changed during the lifetime of the project. We typically have a more complex, moving target.

Low Carbon Energy. Much of the core innovation we are pursuing today is interdependent. As an example, consider energy. Simply replacing hydrocarbons with, for example, solar, is far more complex than simply swapping one source of energy for another. It impacts the whole energy supply system. Where and how it links into our grid, how we store it, unpredictable power generation based on weather, how much we can store, maintenance protocols, and how quickly we can turn up or down the supply are just a few examples. We also create new feedback loops, as variables such as weather can impact both power generation and power usage concurrently. But we are not just pursuing solar, but multiple alternatives, all of which have different challenges. And concurrent to changing our power source, we are also trying to switch automobiles and transport in general from hydrocarbons to electric power, sourced from the same solar energy. This means attempting significant change in both supply and a key usage vector, changing two interdependent variables in parallel. Simply predicting the weather is tricky, but adding it to this complex set of interdependent variables makes surprises inevitable, and hence dialing in the right degree of resilience pretty challenging.

The Grass is Always Greener: And even if we anticipate all of that complexity, I strongly suspect, we’ll see more, rather than less surprises than we expect.   One lesson I’ve learned and re-learned in innovation is that the grass is always greener. We don’t know what we don’t know, in part because we cannot see the weeds from a distance. The devil often really is in the details, and there is nothing like moving from theory to practice, or from small to large scale to ferret out all of the nasty little problems that plague nearly every innovation, but that are often unfathomable when we begin. Finding and solving these is an inherent part of virtually any innovation process, but it usually adds time and cost to the process. There are reasons why more innovations take longer than expected than are delivered ahead of schedule!

It’s an exciting, but also perilous time to be innovating. But ultimately this is all manageable. We have a lot of smart people working on these problems, and so most of the obvious challenges will have contingencies.   We don’t have the relative time and budget of the Webb Space Telescope, and so we’ll inevitably hit a few unanticipated bumps, and we’ll never get everything right. But there are some things we can do to tip the odds in our favor, and help us find those sweet spots.

  1. Plan for over capacity during transitions. If possible, don’t shut down old supply chins until the new ones are fully established. If that is not possible, stockpile heavily as a buffer during the transition. This sounds obvious, but it’s often a hard sell, as it can be a significant expense. Building inventory or capacity of an old product we don’t really want to sell, and leaving it in place as we launch doesn’t excite anybody, but the cost of not having a buffer can be catastrophic.
  2. In complex systems, know the weakest link, and focus resilience planning on it. Whether it’s a shortage of refills for a new device, packaging for a new product, or charging stations for an EV, innovation is only as good as its weakest link. This sounds obvious, but our bias is to focus on the difficult, core and most interesting parts of innovation, and pay less attention to peripherals. I’ve known a major consumer project be held up for months because of a problem with a small plastic bottle cap, a tiny part of a much bigger project. This means looking at resilience across the whole innovation, the system it operates in and beyond. It goes without saying that the network of compatible charging stations needs to precede any major EV rollout. But never forget, the weakest link may not be within our direct control. We recently had a bunch of EV’s stranded in Vegas because a huge group of left an event at a time when it was really hot. The large group overwhelmed our charging stations, and the high temperatures meant AC use limited the EV’s range, requiring more charging. It’s a classic multivariable issue where two apparently unassociated triggers occur at once.   And that is a case where the weakest link is visible. If we are not fully vertically integrated, resilience may require multiple sources or suppliers to protect against potential failure points we are not aware of, just to protect us against things we cannot control.
  3. Avoid over optimization too early. It’s always tempting to squeeze as much cost out of innovation prior to launch. But innovation by its very nature disrupts a market, and creates a moving target. It triggers competitive responses, changes in consumer behavior, supply chain, and raw material demand. If we’ve optimized to the point of removing flexibility, this can mean trouble. Of course, some optimization is always needed as part of the innovation process, but nailing it down too tightly and too early is often a mistake. I’ve lost count of the number of initiatives I’ve seen that had to re-tool or change capacity post launch at a much higher cost than if they’d left some early flexibility and fine-tuned once the initial dust had settled.
  4. Design for the future, not the now. Again this sounds obvious, but we often forget that innovation takes time, and that, depending upon our cycle-time, the world may be quite different when we are ready to roll out than it was when we started. Again, Webb has an advantage here, as the Lagrange point won’t have changed much even in the years the project has been active. But our complex, interconnected world is moving very quickly, especially at a systems level, and so we have to build in enough flexibility to account for that.
  5. Run test markets or real world experiments if at all possible. Again comes with trade offs, but no simulation or lab test beats real world experience. Whether its software, a personal care product, or a solar panel array, the real world will throw challenges at us we didn’t anticipate. Some will matter, some may not, but without real world experience we will nearly always miss something. And the bigger our innovation, generally the more we miss. Sometimes we need to slow down to move fast, and avoid having to back track.
  6. Engage devils advocates. The more interesting or challenging an innovation is, the easier it is to slip into narrow focus, and miss the big picture. Nobody loves having people from ‘outside’ poke holes in the idea they’ve been nurturing for months or years, but that external objectiveness is hugely valuable, together with different expertise, perspectives and goals. And cast the net as wide as possible. Try to include people from competing technologies, with different goals, or from the broad surrounding system. There’s nothing like a fierce competitor, or people we disagree with to find our weaknesses and sharpen an idea. Welcome the naysayers, and listen to them. Just because they may have a different agenda doesn’t mean the issues they see don’t exist.

Of course, this is all a trade off. I started this with the brilliant Webb Space telescope, which is amazing innovation with extraordinary resilience, enabled by an enormous budget and a great deal or time and resource. As we move through the coming years we are going to be attempting innovation of at least comparable complexity on many fronts, on a far more planetary scale, and with far greater implications if we get it wrong. Resiliency was a critical part of the Webb Telescopes success. But with stakes as high as they are with much of today’s innovation, I passionately believe we need to learn from that. And a lot of us can contribute to building that resiliency. It’s easy to think of Carbon neutral energy, EV’s, or AI as big, isolated innovations. But in reality they comprise and interface with many, many sub-projects. That’s a lot of innovation, a lot of complexity, a lot of touch-points, a lot of innovators, and a lot of potential for surprises. A lot of us will be involved in some way, and we can all contribute. Resiliency is certainly not a new concept for innovation, but given the scale, stakes and implications of what we are attempting, we need it more than ever.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScl

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Integrating Agile Practices into Non-Software Projects

Integrating Agile Practices into Non-Software Projects

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Agile practices are often celebrated in the software development realm, promising flexibility, responsiveness, and enhanced collaboration. But, the principles of Agile can be extended beyond software. At its core, Agile strives to deliver value and facilitate continuous improvement, making it a valuable methodology for a variety of disciplines. In this article, we will explore how Agile practices can be integrated into non-software projects, supported by two compelling case studies.

Case Study 1: Agile in Marketing Campaign Management

Background: A global retail company, RetailCorp, faced challenges with their traditional marketing campaign management process, which was rigid, slow to adapt to market trends, and resulted in delayed campaign launches.

Agile Implementation: RetailCorp adopted Scrum, one of the most popular Agile frameworks, for their marketing team. They formed a cross-functional team including designers, content creators, data analysts, and campaign managers to collaborate and focus on delivering incremental value. Daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives were introduced to the non-software team.

Outcomes:

  • Increased Flexibility: The marketing team could swiftly pivot strategies in response to competitors’ actions or new market data.
  • Enhanced Collaboration: The cross-functional team dynamic fostered innovation and creative problem-solving.
  • Reduced Time to Market: Campaigns were launched 30% faster compared to the previous process.

Case Study 2: Agile in Product Design and Development

Background: DesignStudio, a company specializing in developing consumer electronics, sought a way to accelerate their product design and development timeline without compromising quality.

Agile Implementation: DesignStudio embraced Kanban, aiming for a leaner workflow. They visualized the design and development process using Kanban boards, which provided transparency and facilitated the spotting and resolution of bottlenecks.

Outcomes:

  • Improved Workflow Efficiency: By limiting work in progress, DesignStudio minimized context-switching and improved focus.
  • Enhanced Quality: Continuous feedback loops ensured that design flaws were identified and corrected earlier in the process.
  • Faster Development Lifecycle: Products were designed and ready for market 25% quicker.

Keys to Successful Agile Integration in Non-Software Projects

Here are several strategies for successfully integrating Agile practices into non-software projects:

  • Adapt and Tailor: Customize Agile practices to fit the unique requirements and constraints of your non-software projects.
  • Focus on Training: Provide comprehensive Agile training to ensure teams understand the principles and can swiftly adapt.
  • Emphasize Collaborative Culture: Foster an environment where open communication and collaboration are prioritized, breaking down traditional silos.
  • Measure and Iterate: Regularly assess the effectiveness of Agile practices in achieving project goals and iterate for continuous improvement.

By harnessing Agile practices, non-software projects can achieve higher levels of efficiency, flexibility, and quality. The principles underpinning Agile aren’t limited to software; they are about fostering a culture of adaptability, continuous learning, and value-driven outcomes. As organizations continue to evolve in competitive landscapes, Agile methodologies offer a powerful tool for achieving sustainable success.

This article provides an insightful exploration of integrating Agile practices into non-software projects, featuring two illustrative case studies. It demonstrates practical examples and key strategies for successful Agile adoption beyond the realm of software development.

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Change Leadership for Agile Organizations

Adapting to Rapid Change

Change Leadership for Agile OrganizationsGUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s complex and unpredictable business landscape, change has become a constant rather than an exception. Agile organizations that embrace change and adapt rapidly are more likely to succeed in an increasingly dynamic marketplace. However, achieving agility requires effective change leadership that empowers employees, aligns organizational values, and ensures seamless transitions. In this thought leadership article, we will explore the principles of change leadership for agile organizations through the analysis of two compelling case studies.

Case Study 1: Spotify’s Agile Transformation

In recent years, Spotify, the global music streaming giant, underwent a profound transformation to embrace agile practices and foster a culture of innovation. Their shift from a traditional hierarchical structure to a “tribe-squad-CT” model empowered autonomous cross-functional teams. Top management encouraged experimentation, where squads were free to take calculated risks and learn from failures. This cultural shift required strong change leadership that aligned the organization and inspired employees to embrace change.

Spotify’s change leaders focused on three core aspects:

1. Communicating a Compelling Vision: Leaders articulated a compelling vision that emphasized the need for agility and explained how it aligned with the organization’s strategic goals. They emphasized the benefits of empowerment, collaboration, and adaptability, ensuring that employees felt a sense of purpose and understood the value of change.

2. Nurturing Change Agents: Change leaders identified, trained, and empowered change agents within the organization. These agents served as advocates, mentors, and facilitators of change, supporting their respective teams through the transition. By creating a network of change agents, Spotify established a grassroots movement that accelerated the adoption of agile principles and practices.

3. Encouraging Continuous Learning: Recognizing that agility requires continuous learning, Spotify’s change leaders established a learning-oriented culture. They encouraged employees to embrace experimentation, learn from failures, and share their experiences. This created an environment that fostered innovation, collaboration, and rapid adaptation to change.

The successful transformation of Spotify showcases the effectiveness of change leadership in enabling organizational agility.

Case Study 2: Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing Revolution

Toyota’s journey towards becoming a global leader in automotive manufacturing is a testament to the power of change leadership in fostering agility. In the 1950s, Toyota faced significant challenges, including a resource-constrained post-war economy. They responded by developing the groundbreaking Toyota Production System (TPS), which revolutionized manufacturing processes and established the foundation for lean manufacturing.

Toyota’s change leadership approach encompassed the following elements:

1. Empowering Frontline Employees: Change leaders at Toyota recognized the value of frontline employees’ expertise. They empowered workers to identify and solve problems, emphasizing the importance of continuous improvement. This empowered culture fostered a sense of ownership, creating an environment where employees actively contributed to adapting to rapid changes and driving innovation.

2. Embracing Kaizen: Toyota’s change leaders popularized the Kaizen philosophy of continual improvement throughout the organization. They facilitated cross-functional collaboration and encouraged employees to seek incremental improvements in their work processes. This focus on Kaizen nurtured a culture of proactive responsiveness to change, benefitting not only the production line but the entire organization.

3. Leadership through Servant Mentality: Toyota’s change leaders assumed a servant leadership mentality, seeking to serve and support employees rather than commanding them. Leaders actively listened to the concerns and ideas of employees and provided the necessary resources and guidance to implement change.

By implementing these change leadership principles, Toyota transformed into an agile organization capable of rapidly adapting to shifting consumer demands and market conditions.

Conclusion

Change leadership is the catalyst for agility in organizations navigating rapid change. The case studies of Spotify and Toyota demonstrate how effective change leadership enables organizational adaptability, fosters a culture of innovation, and empowers employees to embrace and drive change. By communicating a compelling vision, nurturing change agents, encouraging continuous learning, empowering frontline employees, embracing Kaizen, and practicing servant leadership, organizations can pave the way for successful transformations in an increasingly volatile business environment. Embracing change leadership is the key to thriving in the face of rapid change.

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Latest Interview with the Everyday Innovator Podcast

Everyday Innovator Podcast

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Chad McAllister of The Everyday Innovator Podcast, about my work as a popular keynote speaker, workshop facilitator, and thought leader on the topics of continuous innovation and change, and some of my work with clients to create innovative strategies, digital transformations, and increased organizational agility.

But mostly in this information-packed interview, I reveal key lessons from the Change Planning Toolkit™ and my book Charting Change, including what’s hard about change, and how the visual, collaborative approach of the Change Planning Toolkit™ can revolutionize how we plan our projects and change initiatives.

1. Click here to visit the Everyday Innovator Podcast interview page

2. Click here to get your copy of Charting Change

3. Click here for more information on the Change Planning Toolkit™


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Join Me at the Virtual Change Management Summit 2017

Virtual Change Management Conference

On July 12, 2017 I will be speaking at Change Management Review’s Virtual Change Management Summit 2017™, a curated collection of brand new pre-recorded global webinars bringing thought leaders and senior practitioners in the change management profession together.

The purpose of the event is to help participants discover, learn, and reinforce how change management practices and principles are applied in today’s business world.

Click here for more information and to register for this outstanding event

Why is the Virtual Change Management Summit 2017™ important to change management professionals today?

Our profession is currently fragmented and formalizing at different rates across the globe resulting in confusion about how to take part in professional development for those who have just joined the profession and for those who are in the mid-range of their career as a change management practitioner. Aside from formal certification training, there really isn’t a tangible mode to learn more about what is going on and what works unless one attends a conference or an in-person seminar.

The Virtual Change Management Summit 2017™ is an inexpensive means for change management professionals to learn, grow, and understand the business world around them from the perspective of well known experts and senior change management practitioners.

(from the Change Management Review web site)

In addition to myself, the rest of the speaking lineup will include:

  • Theresa Moulton, Editor-in-Chief, Change Management Review™
  • Dr. Dean Ackerman and Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson, Co-Founders, Being First Inc.
  • Tim Creasey, Chief Innovation Officer, Prosci
  • Jason Little, Agile Management Consultant, Coach and Trainer
  • Kimberlee Williams, President, Center for Strategy Realization
  • Linda Hoopes, President, Resilience Alliance

The title of my presentation will be:

The Future of Project Management is… Change!

… and I will be exploring the intersections and relationships between project management, innovation management, change management, lean, six sigma, agile, lean startup, and design thinking and how organizations can fundamentally transform how they plan and execute what matters most.

I hope you’ll join us on July 12th!
(or watch the sessions on demand after their scheduled times)

Click here for more information and to register for this outstanding event


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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The Eight Change Mindsets

“While there is risk to change, just like with innovation, there is often potentially more risk associated with doing nothing.” – Braden Kelley

The Eight Change MindsetsIf your organization is seeking to create a continuous change capability, it must have a strong focus on increasing its organizational agility.

As you use the Change Planning Toolkit™ to kick off your next project or your next change initiative, keep thinking about what the minimum viable progress (MVP) might be in order to maintain momentum. This is very similar to the idea of a minimum viable product, a key lean startup concept popularized by Eric Ries, author of the bestselling book, The Lean Startup.

Minimum viable progress means that for change initiatives and projects to be successful, it is mandatory to have a successful planning session where strong buy-in is achieved at the start. It is equally important at all stages of the process to show a level of progress sufficient to maintain the momentum and support for the project or change initiative you worked so hard to achieve at the start.

This is where the agile principles highlighted later in this article come into play. The goal of our change or project planning efforts should be not just to prototype what the change might look like, but to also build a plan that breaks up the work into a cadence the organization can cope with and successfully implement into a new standard operating procedure. Many thought leaders extol the virtues of quick wins, but I believe structuring your project or change effort into a series of similarly sized sprints will give you a sustainable flow of wins (and thus momentum) throughout all of the transitions that will lead to success. In the end, momentum wins.

Quick Wins versus Momentum

One of the ways to create sustainable momentum is to take an agile approach to change and to segment your overall change effort into a series of work packages that you can properly staff, execute, and celebrate. Many projects and change efforts get off to a roaring start, achieve a few quick wins, but stall when longer, more substantial pieces of the work must be completed, often with only limited communication and little visible progress.

The change initiative then begins to lose the support of key stakeholders (and potentially resources) as members of the change leadership team begin to lose enthusiasm, break solidarity, and withdraw support. This dooms the effort, preventing it from ever being completed as intended.

Momentum beats quick wins, and engaging in a more visual, collaborative, agile change planning method like the one described in my book Charting Change will lead you to more successful change efforts because these methods can help you maintain momentum. The Agile Change Management Kanban is a useful tool that toolkit buyers can leverage to visualize and track change effort progress.

Building and Maintaining Momentum

There are many different reasons why people will do the right thing to help you build and maintain the momentum for your change initiative and to help you achieve sustained, collective momentum. The key to building and maintaining momentum is to understand and harness the different mindsets that cause people to choose change; these include:

1. Mover ’n’ Shaker

  • give these people the chance to be first

2. Thrill Seeker

  • these people like to try new things and experiment

3. Mission-Driven

  • these people need reasons to believe

4. Action-Oriented

  • these people just want to know what needs to be done

5. Expert-Minded

  • teach these people how to do it, and they will seek mastery

6. Reward-Hungry

  • these people want recognition for adopting the change

7. Team Player

  • these people are happy to help if you show them why the change will be helpful

8. Teacher

  • show these people how to get others to choose change

Change leaders and project managers should read through this list and imagine what might happen if you don’t address any of these mindsets in your change plan. In doing so, you might find yourself quickly identifying eight potential explanations for why people may be resisting your change effort. If any of these mindsets are playing out in the negative, then you must try and identify ways to turn these individuals back toward the positive as you work through the different phases of change.

Please include attribution to BradenKelley.com with this graphic.
Embed code available below (click here to request a PDF download)
Eight Change Mindsets Infographic

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(click here to request a PDF download)

Bringing More Elements of Agile to Change

As you begin to move from the widespread chaos-driven change management model (“we do it differently every time”) to using the concepts presented in my book Charting Change and reinforced through the use of the Change Planning Toolkit™ to spread the knowledge of how to use the collaborative, visual change planning process, you will crave a more coordinated approach to change readiness evaluation. Instead of looking at change readiness on a case-by-case basis for each individual project or change initiative, you will quickly find yourself considering the use of a more agile approach to managing change readiness. You may begin asking yourself these ten (10) questions:

  1. Is it possible to have a change backlog?
  2. Do we need a burndown chart to measure how quickly we are burning through our backlog?
  3. Is it necessary to begin prioritizing the change backlog in order to phase in change into different parts of the organization at a pace each part can absorb?
  4. Should we carve up our change initiatives into a predictable series of sprints with a regular cadence?
  5. How long should our change sprints be?
  6. How much of the change initiative can the organization absorb at any one time in order to maintain forward momentum?
  7. Is there a need for periods of settling in (scheduled periods of equilibrium) between change sprints?
  8. Is there a need for the status of various projects and change initiatives to be visible throughout the organization?
  9. Is there a need for a business architect to build a business capability heatmap that highlights the amount of change impacting different business capabilities?
  10. Do you have a business capability map? Do you have business architects in your organization?

If your organization is trying to become more capable of continuous change, then answering many of these questions in the affirmative and taking appropriate action will result in an accelerated change planning capability and faster change absorption.

An Appropriate Pace of Change

For your change effort to be a success you need to find the appropriate pace of change. Finding the right pace of change is very similar to trying to fly an airplane: Go too slow and your change effort will stall. Go too fast and you will face an increasing amount of resistance, potentially depleting the support for your change faster than expected.

In many cases, using up the energy for change too fast may prevent you from reaching your intended destination. One other danger of trying to change too fast, especially if you are trying to run too many change initiatives (or projects) at the same time in the same areas of the company, is that you may run into issues of change saturation.

The key for you as change leader is to identify a regular cadence for your change initiative (or project) that is comfortable for the organization as a whole. That cadence must be slow enough so that the incremental change can be readily adopted and absorbed but fast enough so that your positive forward momentum, executive sponsorship, and overall support are maintained. The pacing and the approach must ultimately help enlist the broader organization in the change effort by reducing feelings of uncertainty, reinforcing that the change is a team effort, and accumulating reasons to believe in the change outcomes and so that people choose change.

Finally, you must have a plan for harnessing each of the eight change mindsets in your organization and leveraging them to advance your change effort, otherwise these mindsets will occupy themselves in negative ways and actively resist your change initiative or project. So, harness these mindsets, leverage the infographic and link back to this article using the embed code, and get yourself a copy of the #2 new release on Amazon for Organizational Change, my new book – Charting Change.

Thank you for your support and Amazon reviews are always appreciated! 🙂

Get the PDF version of the Eight Change Mindsets framework:

Eight Change Mindsets to Harness for Success PDF

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Increasing Organizational Agility

Increasing Organizational Agilityby Braden Kelley

Companies seeking to cope with the pace of accelerating change are looking for ways to go faster, and managers in non-technical disciplines have become increasingly infatuated with the Agile Software Development methodology and many are finding ways to adapt parts of it to create agile change or agile marketing or other such things. Sure agility sounds like a good thing and sure agile marketing sounds like it must be better than regular marketing, but is it?

What is agility really?

According to Dictionary.com, agility is:

“The power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness”
OR
“The ability to think and draw conclusions quickly; intellectual acuity”

When it comes to a business context, I however prefer to define agility a bit more simply, a bit more concisely. Agility, or organizational agility in our case, is:

“How quickly an organization can change directions”

Many people, especially in an organizational or commercial context, get confused between agility and flexibility. They are NOT the same thing.

Agile vs. Flexible

Organizational agility is about how quickly an organization can change directions, while flexibility in an organization gives it the ability to do different things with the same resources, often by purchasing more flexible equipment (at a higher price) or by training people to do more than one thing (resulting in higher training costs) or by hiring people that are skilled at more than one thing (higher salary/benefit costs). Flexibility definitely has its benefits (being able to shift resources among purposes) but it also has costs like the ones mentioned above, and probably more importantly, flexibility usually decreases the efficiency of systems.

Fixedness on the other hand, reduces variability, allows you to focus on the things that do vary and get really good at executing all aspects of a system, including the acquisition of the very best tools and technology to perform each particular function. But, as you can imagine, fixedness has its downside too. If a human resource goes down due to illness or a piece of production equipment breaks, potentially, the whole system grinds to a halt.

So, as you can imagine, increased organizational agility is achieved by establishing the right balance between flexibility and fixedness.

The Organizational Agility Framework

I have captured this principle below in the Organizational Agility Framework:

Organizational Agility Framework


Click to access this framework as a scalable 11″x17″ PDF download
(Tooklit purchasers also get access to the Organizational Agility Worksheet)

The Organizational Agility Framework helps organizations:

  • Adapt to changing environmental conditions
  • Stretch existing resources and the organization itself to do new things in new ways
  • Enable faster change inside the organization and faster adoption by customers
  • Evolve profitable customer relationships to keep the organization strong and vibrant

The Organizational Agility Framework (and corresponding worksheet in the Change Planning Toolkit™) also helps you ask two key questions:

  1. Where can we stretch our existing resources and the organization itself to do new things in new ways?
  2. What should we keep the same to enable faster change inside the organization and faster adoption by customers?

Flexibility vs. Fixedness

Too much Flexibility and it will take too long to make decisions and changes.

Too much Fixedness and you will suffer from organizational rigidity.

Companies seeking increased organizational agility and an improved ability to cope with the accelerating pace of change and ever-evolving customer expectations must seek to strike that optimal balance between fixedness (so you can go fast) and flexibility (so you can quickly adapt to changing customer needs).

Can your organization find the right balance?

More on digital transformation and organizational agility soon, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, please get yourself a copy of Charting Change as a hardcover (or ebook) and get your free downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™ (or go ahead and purchase a license now).

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