BUSINESS AGILITY: HOW TO MAKE YOUR ORGANIZATION MORE RESILIENT

The truth is that sometimes, it is difficult to know what this so-called “Business Agility” really means. There are countless articles, books, webinars, events, experts, and coaches around the world to explain it. I won’t reinvent the wheel, instead I’ll provide you with a summary of the parts you’ll need, with a lot of love and some humor added in to awaken your curiosity.

The first thing would be to understand what Business Agility does for you. Perhaps you have read or been told that this is going to achieve almost magical things:

For example, that even in a changing, competitive and volatile business environment, your business can improve its results, adapt quickly to changes, stand out from the competition and make your customers fall in love with the products and services that everyone will love because you add cool value to them and you engage with your customers to the fullest.

Even if there are pandemics, wars, inflation or your competitors discover an unexpected gold mine with delivery riders (just a random example), Business Agility allows you to always adapt with agility so that your business generates good results even in the face of storms or hurricanes.

The wheel has several parts, some of which are, for example:

• Focus on the customer: mindset focused on the value provided to our customer.
• Organizational culture: attitudes, mental models, communication, behaviors, habits, empowerment, diversity, equity, inclusion, etc.
• Leadership: agility in decision-making, leadership at all levels, leadership in the form of coaching, leadership as a service, etc.
• Innovation: speed in the adoption of new technologies and mindsets, etc.
• Psychological security: a culture that stays true to the mantra "Fail fast, be fearless"…
• Tools, techniques and practices: for example, DevOps , Automated Forecasting, etc.
• Learning and continuous improvement: Guided by metrics (Data-Driven)…
• etc. etc.

Maybe it’s not super clear explained like that... it sounds like words in a "Business Bingo" game, right?

For example, SAFe mentions these 7 skills, which may leave you thinking "OK, so where do I start?"

It would be best to see it with real examples. In fact, I have contacted several Thought Leaders, Business Coaches, Business Agility Experts, several universities and people in the real world to explain real examples of companies that have adapted to disruptive changes and based on poor business indicators have gone on to achieve spectacular indicators after a Business Agility initiative.

I will explain the examples that I receive in future posts, for now, here we have a fitting metaphor, given that yesterday was the Concurs de Castells, something akin to the Champions League final.

Castells (Human Towers) is a Catalan tradition in which an agile organization of several hundred people manage and arrange themselves to build a product based on a complex architecture in the cloud. Well, they do not reach the clouds but almost, sometimes the towers are 10 floors high.

The culture of Castellers empowers people and is inclusive. At the last Castells I attended there were people from China, Senegal and Madrid, not only Catalonia. There were also obese people, short people, strong people, thin people, 60-year-olds, 6-year-olds, people of different gender orientations, people with motor difficulties in their legs and blind people... All the people were brilliant in this multidisciplinary team called a “Colla”.

Leadership is found at every level of the Colla. There are "caps de colla” which are the leaders per se, but each person shares a purpose and the leaders act as coaches. There are no orders but a common purpose: make the people of the Colla reach as high as possible.

The climbing in Castells is something natural, the upper parts of the Castell with the Canalla (typically children or women making up the top of the tower) can be tested separately from the Pinya (the base of the tower), but coordinated to finally build the final product.

And making the people of this complex organization grow, the Colla achieves architectures like this one, securing the love and loyalty of its “users”, the public.

Would you like to know more about how to implement real Business Agility in your organization? To learn more, we recommend reading about the importance of people in an organization, the DevOps culture and/or watching the webinar "3 Lessons We Draw from the Game of Thrones".

If you want to take a step further to improve your organization, contact us!