Defining Agile as your Organization Optimization Goal!
Last week, I gave a webinar for the IESE Business School, where I explored what Agile is and how it impacts the way Business and Organizations are run and structures. You can find the link to the video here bellow.
Too long; didn’t watch:
Each organization has a purpose and a strategy to achieve it. If we take the example of retail shops, by opposing a discount supermarket (such as Lidl), with a luxury or specialized shop (such as Louis Vuitton or a BIO supermarket). It is then clear that even if their ultimate goal could appear to be the same, selling items to generate revenue, every aspect of how they are designed and ran is different.
Discounters will be optimized to reduce the price of the items it sells whereas a luxury brand will be optimized for exclusivity. It will lead these two retails shop to change how their shop is designed, how they deal with their personnel, their management, their inventory and so on. We can extrapolate from these two examples that once you have defined your goal, you will have to adapt every aspect of your organization in order to reach this goal.
As the world is getting more globalized, more volatile and more unpredictable, a new goal that promotes a quick and cheap answer to this volatility is arising. This goal for adaptiveness is called Agile.
Once an organization decides to optimize toward adaptiveness, it has to tickle down every aspect of them. It impacts Engineering, Leadership, HR policies, Management, and much more. Changing the structure of an organization will lead to a change in its Culture.
Simply put, each of us will optimize ourselves to achieve the best result possible within a defined scope. Each player wants to win. If you want to change the way players are behaving, the most efficient is to change the rules of the game or its end goal. Changing the culture of an organization is then only a matter of adapting its policies and structure.
This is why Agile is not only impacting the way engineering works, but also our employees are rewarded, for which behavior, how failure is considered and what the main goal is for them.
Too long; didn’t read:
- In a changing world, you need to adapt to survive
- Optimizing your organization toward adaptiveness is called Agile
- To be Agile, adapt your culture and mindset
- Culture follows Structure
- Change the rules of the game, not the players.
Baptiste.
