Agility is released
A primer to business agility and a thinking model to consider
Hi,
I hope you are doing safe and well. Things are, as usual, busy here. I just dropped a new video to the channel about Cornell Note Taking, am busy working on getting our house project going and am still trying to get motivated in the New Year. I'm excited about this year though - I hope you are too.
Welcome to the first of the "paid" newsletters. This edition is free but in two week's time, if you'd like to keep learning how to Release Business agility, straight from my very own consulting playbooks, there will be a small charge of around £6-8 a month - I’m still pondering the price point.
I’ll send a special one-off email with how to sign up and exact pricing, etc over the coming few weeks.
I'll also share a link in the next paid newsletter to my Personal Knowledge Management System - so paid subscribers can have a poke around in there also. There will also be the audio show, seminars, templates and more.
In a sense, the Releasing Agility membership newsletter (paid membership) is a masterclass in business agility, drip fed over the coming year in easy to digest newsletters, to help you in your work and career. I will still share behind the scenes stuff also and make it very digestable and fun.
As much as it will focus a lot on management, HR and leadership, it is also great for anyone trying to improve business results, retain good people, develop better communication skills and enhance their business potential and career.
The free edition will continue next week, and then every two weeks.
So, what the heck is Releasing Agility?
I never talk to clients (or all of you) about agile. Nor frameworks (unless I'm bashing them). Nor whether one approach is better than the other - hint, they all work in some contexts. Instead, I talk about Releasing Agility.
Releasing Agility continues forever. There is no magic moment when you're "agile" and all of your business problems go away. Problems will keep coming, and agility will therefore always need releasing. It's an on-going project, a never ending story, a relentless pursuit of getting better. It sounds daunting and enough to make your mind melt, but releasing agility is where the fun is.
Overcoming problems is the main focus of Releasing Agility - and problems will always keep coming in business.
For good businesses in growth and who are adding value, these problems are engaging, fun, challenging and demanding - and they open up so many opportunities to make the business better, add more value and grow in our careers.
Most problems are related to communication but we'll cover many of these throughout the year. Some problems are people related, some to do with markets and demand and some to do with systemic problems. But at the heart of those, you eventually get back to communication. So, a lot of the newsletters will be to do with communication. Developing good communication skills is a super power in the world of work.
The core principles behind Releasing Agility are based on three main activities (which we’ll dig deep into in the masterclass paid newsletter).
Obtaining business goals (think profit, EBITDA, retention etc)
Retaining good staff (think succession planning, career planning, workforce planning etc)
Fixing systemic problems (the heart of agility - but no point in doing this if a company, department or team has no clear direction and/or is full of the wrong people)
You already have agility
In many companies agility needs to be released, with the exception of companies who are just starting out. Many new companies have a tonne of agility; they can move quickly and smoothly (and yes, we'll talk about how to measure this in future editions) and they can adapt to the needs of their customers. People get stuck in, it can be messy and scary but they can move quickly towards business goals. I am clear to point out that young and fresh does not always mean small; there are plenty of small companies who can’t move smoothly and quickly.
The trick with new, fresh, young, startup-type companies is to keep hold of that agility as they scale, grow, mature, bloat and become driven by the needs of investors, shareholders, etc. I urge anyone in a fresh young company to keep hold of this agility and nurture the behaviours that help you, and avoid adding redtape and governance boards and bloated work forces.
It's much easier to scale and grow good behaviours and communication, than it is to retro fit and undo the problems hindering growth and delivery.
But retro fit we must for many organisations - and in the Releasing Agility newsletters, I'll show you how to do that.
Release means to set free from confinement.
In the simplest terms it means finding out why you're not moving smoothly and quickly and removing impediments, blockers and obstacles. In a nutshell, it's about solving problems (but not just any problem).
Agility means to move smoothly and quickly towards your goals.
Agility is about moving smoothly and quickly to your business goals - so it’s essential to know what those business results/goals are and create a painted picture of the future.
Once we know this, we can study and work out how to get better at achieving them whilst retaining good people - and working on the system of work.
And this is why the process never ends. With more ambitions and more goals = more problems. Solve one problem and you encounter another. A problem and an opportunity are often different sides of the same coin - so although this looks like a focus on problems, it’s actually a focus on opportunities - it’s just we may not see the opportunity until we resolve the problem.
Instead of overcoming the root problems on the path towards goals and business results, many people work around problems, solve the symptoms rather than the cause or even solve problems that have nothing to do with their business results.
They add more people, ask for more money, bring in giant consulting firms, bring in computer solutions to unqualified problems, or simply bury their heads in the sand - and this just makes it all worse. They are passing the burden rather than dealing with the problems.
And this is why Agility is released; we spot the problems, measure them, remove them and measure the improvements. And we repeat for the next problem worth solving. You'll see, as we go through this journey, that measures are very important indeed. I'll share the key ones I use and raise some critical questions about the ones many companies rely on. We'll cover lifetime customer value, employee engagement, flow efficiency, product measures and more.
The thinking model I deploy when Releasing Business Agility is pretty straightforward. It's not going to win awards because it doesn't "tell" you what to do, instead I use it to study where the real problems are and to frame where to start looking.
I have all of this and more in a Trello board I use with clients. You can access the Trello board here and we will be using this as a guide as we go through the steps to release business agility in the paid masterclass membership.
Step 1 is to know what your business results are.
What are you trying to achieve and why? Without these clear business goals, or results, we could spend our lifetime studying problems that may have no impact on our business results at all - other than divert our attention away from keeping the business alive.
A company always has more problems that people can solve, so it's important to solve the right ones.
I call this step the Painted Picture. It could be called a vision or mission or True North or Waypoint. It's something to head towards and we'll cover this in depth in the future. And yes, it's essential to weave in the 11 principles of effective communication as you build this.
Step 2 is to then ask a salient question; "if this bright future is so compelling, then why are we not already there yet?".
What's stopping us from achieving this? What do we need to change? What do we need to stop doing? What’s our current reality?
All powerful questions to build a plan. And once you have a plan based on your current reality, and the delta between it and the painted picture, then you have a strategy. And many strategies are lacking one of these three aspects; a current reality, a future bright picture and/or a plan. (Rumelt, 2011) We'll cover strategies in depth.
Step 3 is then to ask another salient, and much harder to answer, question; "Is this the team to get it done?".
This is always a tricky step but essential. If managers and leaders have done step 2 correctly, they will have already identified people and capability as a blocker in step 2 (think performance, roles and responsibilities, clarity, future skills, weak management etc).
The joy of management and HR is that we get to work with people. But, people are messy. They bring complexity to an already sometimes complicated business (which is why I encourage clarity in communication - after all, a business will get complicated in its own time - no point in adding to that through poor communication and confusion).
People have emotions. They have ambitions. They have opinions. And they also want to do great work and reach their potential.
We'll cover A LOT of this as people are the engine of success for a business...if only more leaders understood this. After all, if it was possible to achieve our business goals by ourselves, we would have no need to hire people. But hire people we must - and therefore we must treat people like people (Hawken, 1988) and help them get what they want, as we go through our business journey.
In this step it's also important to understand what behaviours are, why they are the culture of the organisation and how to nudge them for better. I'll introduce the behaviour matrix and explain why skills and competency matrices are indicative, but ultimately useless when building a strong culture.
Step 4 is then to study and optimise routines and processes, and bring about the discipline to follow processes that work.
Process improvement, studying, stapling and a lot more in this step. Good old fashioned business improvement here - with plenty of measures. We'll do lots here too as there is a whole world to unpack and some seriously critical questions to ask about ourselves and the business.
Step 5 is kind of like an ongoing step - it's all about learning.
A mistake is a chance to make ourselves and the business better but only if we reflect, study and make changes.
We should therefore guard against making huge mistakes that can bring down a company or a career. We can test carefully. We can mitigate most mistakes. We can learn from others. We can apply some critical thinking upfront, but ultimately mistakes WILL happen. And when they do, we must learn from it.
People will make mistakes - and we should help them make the business better as part of this - no reprimand needed here.
Learning is also about capability and workforce management/planning, on-the-job training, a learning culture and more. All of this will be structured around the two main learning approaches; information acquisition (from books and resources) and task acquisition (from doing the work). LOADS to unpack here as you'll see from the Trello board.
And that is the model.
It's simplistic to start with (as our first masterclass email) but it sets the scene and it hides plenty of work below it. We'll unpack this through the paid membership.
But in it's simplicity lies the trick of Releasing Business Agility - simple analogies, metaphors, language and framing — communication 101. If you want to move people into action, which we want when releasing agility, we must be able to explain things clearly - and help them to feel a connection to it.
Releasing Business agility is not complicated but it's also not easy. Relationships, politics, clarity and more will come into play - hence developing the super power of effective communication is key to making change happen.
I'm here to help you develop this super power whilst also knowing which levers to pull in a business. I'm excited about this. I will bring my experience of VP level work, plus my usual winning charm (don’t laugh) and my years of agility experience to help you grow in your career and unleash agility in your organisations (and life - as many of the lessons apply there too).
I do hope you will join me and let me be your trusted and friendly, but sometimes challenging (in a nice way), guide as you embark on a journey to deliver better business outcomes, retain good people, fix systemic issues and develop your communication super power.
I hope this has been helpful for you this week. Look out on Friday for a “Here's an idea worth playing with” audio show.
Please note : This is the first of over 130 newsletters on my masterclass masterplan!!
Please note : For the paid membership there is NO “articles worth reading” section - instead I include relevant reading inline in the newsletter and in the reference list.
Have a great day
Rob..
Reference list
Hawken, P. (1988). Growing a business. New York: Simon And Schuster.
Rumelt, R.P. (2011). Good strategy, bad strategy : the difference and why it matters. London: Profile.
(Some of these books are listed on my recommended reading list)