- Let's face it, some kids are just born agile.
They're inherently good at sports,
automatically moving to exactly the right place
on the court or on the field.
Or they can dance like a natural,
intuitively placing themselves
in the right place at the right time.
I was not that kid.
I was the kid in the schoolyard
with coke bottle bottom thick glasses.
The one who was relentlessly uncoordinated
in pretty much every sport I tried.
So I wasn't just the last kid picked for a team,
I often wasn't on the team at all.
But hey, that just meant I had to work harder.
Being relentlessly uncoordinated taught me
to observe those who were more naturally agile
and to practice over and over again,
emulating what seemed to come so easily for them.
Some organizations are naturally agile too.
With seeming effortlessness, they continually move
and weave to where they can deliver
the most value to their customers.
Sure they make mistakes, but they're agile
processes allow them to rapidly learn
from those mistakes and to respond by taking
their performance up a notch.
Many organizations, I might say most organizations,
are a little more like me when I was a kid.
Less coordinated, less able to automatically know
where to deliver the best value.
They often move in fits and starts
rather than in fluid adjustments to changing conditions.
Now in slow moving markets, it's usually okay
to be a little less coordinated.
But when the pace of change picks up
and when unbundled industries allow new entrance
to rapidly enter the market, that's when agility
becomes the new critical skillset for organizations.
So what do those naturally agile organizations do?
First, goals are established based on the needs
of one or more constituents such as customers and partners.
An agile organization never loses sight
of those core constituents' needs.
Second, agile decision making is treated
as a team sport.
Collaboration has to be as effective
as it can possibly be during periods of rapid change.
Third, decision making processes empower
people in the organization as deeply as possible.
If the only people who are empowered to make
decisions are at the top, agility is impossible.
You need to ensure that the people closest
to the problem to be solved are given
the power to solve the problem.
And fourth, decisions have to be tested
as quickly as possible.
Agile decision makers ask themselves,
"If we're right, how will we know?"
Then they work toward seeing how quickly
they can increase the certainty
that they're heading in the right direction.
Now if you're in an arena that doesn't seem
to be changing very rapidly, perhaps the idea
of being strategically agile doesn't seem
that important to you.
But I've got news for you.
If your field hasn't already been affected by disruption,
it's only a matter of time and the pace of change is going
to catch up very quickly.
So now it's a good time to start incorporating
these practices into your organization.
Here's an exercise for you.
Take your organizations most recent strategy definition.
Assess it against these four points.
Did strategy clearly articulate the needs
of the organization's core constituents?
Are key groups defined that have to collaborate
to make the strategy successful?
Does the strategy state how various parts
of the organization are empowered to implement it?
And finally, does it incorporate any sense
of how the organization will know on an ongoing basis
if it's strategy is effective?
If any of these pieces are missing,
that's an opportunity as you develop
your agile strategy.