Making agile transformations succeed

Accord­ing to a McK­in­sey glob­al sur­vey, more than 80 per cent of respon­dents say their organ­i­sa­tions have under­tak­en dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion ini­tia­tives over the past five years, but a mere 16 per cent report suc­cess and only 3 per cent claim suc­cess­ful sus­tained trans­for­ma­tion.

Simon Pow­ers, chief exec­u­tive and founder of Adven­tures with Agile, the glob­al coach­ing and train­ing provider for agile and organ­i­sa­tion­al change, says a major rea­son behind the issues enter­pris­es face when embark­ing on trans­for­ma­tions is the reliance on pre­de­fined tem­plates or best prac­tices that have worked at oth­er organ­i­sa­tions.

“What we are doing is help­ing com­pa­nies achieve their busi­ness goals through new and more col­lab­o­ra­tive ways of work­ing, rather than fol­low­ing a fixed frame­work. When exter­nal ele­ments such as the process­es are pri­ori­tised, rather than build­ing bet­ter rela­tion­ships and fos­ter­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion, busi­ness­es can find staff aren’t real­ly get­ting the inno­va­tion they had expect­ed,” explains Mr Pow­ers.

Agile coach­ing plays a vital role in help­ing com­pa­nies on their jour­ney, but only if the coach­ing aspect is tak­en as seri­ous­ly as agili­ty. When more skil­ful busi­ness rela­tion­ships and high-trust envi­ron­ments are estab­lished, com­bined with coach­ing to unlock employ­ee poten­tial, organ­i­sa­tions are bet­ter placed to lever­age the process­es of agile.

What we are doing is help­ing com­pa­nies achieve their busi­ness goals through new and more col­lab­o­ra­tive ways of work­ing, rather than fol­low­ing a fixed frame­work

“Through coach­ing and facil­i­ta­tion tech­niques, we are able to unlock the behav­iours and the lim­it­ing beliefs that peo­ple and organ­i­sa­tions have about them­selves, which enable peo­ple to focus on col­lab­o­ra­tion and then results that enable organ­i­sa­tions to be in the 3 per cent of suc­cess­ful last­ing change,” adds Mr Pow­ers.

The impor­tance of behav­iour­al change dur­ing the enter­prise trans­for­ma­tion process is often under­val­ued, but agili­ty is fun­da­men­tal­ly a shift in the way staff relate and behave to achieve bet­ter results. In many tra­di­tion­al busi­ness­es, the hier­ar­chi­cal, top-down approach to change is sim­ply too slow to man­age staff in a fast-paced and com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment.

For com­pa­nies to achieve last­ing ben­e­fits from agile ways of work­ing, all employ­ees need to be intri­cate­ly involved in this fun­da­men­tal busi­ness change, not just the man­age­ment team or change experts.

“When we work with a com­pa­ny, we ensure the lead­er­ship team are aligned and work­ing in a very cohe­sive way, as well as col­lab­o­rat­ing in a much more skil­ful way. By focus­ing on co-cre­ation, rather than trans­ac­tion­al or dis­parate ways of work­ing, the lead­er­ship team can ful­ly visu­alise what their busi­ness chal­lenges are and what oppor­tu­ni­ties the busi­ness can take advan­tage of,” says Mr Pow­ers.

Change pro­grammes that fol­low a top-down mod­el often encounter resis­tance among employ­ees as they will not have played a role in cre­at­ing these solu­tions. This leads the trans­for­ma­tion to stall, leav­ing employ­ees dis­en­gaged and unequipped to inno­vate.

The Adven­tures with Agile approach leads with co-cre­ation, side­step­ping the dis­rup­tions that come with oth­er mod­els, and through their sys­temic coach­ing tech­niques, the entire sys­tem is being coached rather than just indi­vid­u­als. Man­age­ment teams incor­po­rate new knowl­edge into their skill set via pro­fes­sion­al coach­ing, enabling con­tin­u­al low-cost sus­tain­able adap­tion to a chang­ing mar­ket­place, with­out the need for exter­nal coach­ing spe­cial­ists.

This incre­men­tal change, with­out dis­rup­tion to work in progress, in the form of small, safe hypoth­e­sis-led exper­i­ments designed by those who are chang­ing their ways of work­ing, aligns the organ­i­sa­tion at the speed at which they’re com­fort­able with change, so they can con­tin­ue to adapt to their evolv­ing mar­ket­place. This trans­lates to new ideas and inno­va­tion aris­ing from employ­ees, and enables cus­tomers to pro­vide feed­back more fre­quent­ly.

“As the mar­ket changes and busi­ness prob­lems come and go, the com­pa­nies we have worked with have a built-in mech­a­nism to con­tin­u­al­ly inno­vate and change in a sus­tain­able and safe way,” Mr Pow­ers con­cludes.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it adventureswithagile.com or call 0203 369 1125