Good is the enemy of great.
—Jim Collins
This chapter helps you to get a grip on the contents of this book. It provides you with an introduction to the phenomenon of agility and makes it clear why this is relevant to your organization. It tells you what agile management is and is not, and what kind of problems agile management can solve for you. Furthermore, it offers you a brief overview of the content of the following chapters, so that you can navigate quickly and easily through the book.
1.1 The Organization as a Top Athlete
If you look at professional sports, what do you think is the difference between a rower and a wild-water kayaker? Between a speed skater and an ice-hockey player? A road-cyclist and a mountain biker? Or between a Formula 1 driver and a rally driver?
Maybe, in general, you see a lot of similarities. All the athletes in these comparisons should be disciplined, train a lot, eat healthily, be mentally and physically in top shape, have good equipment, and so on. Yet, there is an important difference. The first of each pair focuses on a predictable and known course. The one who performs as efficiently and quickly as possible is the winner. A prior strategy can be formulated. The second, however, has a very different challenge. He has to deal with unexpected events and changing circumstances. This requires anticipation and improvisation. The person who responds the quickest and is the most flexible is the winner.
Also, something else interesting is going on. The first of the two would fail completely if he went onto the course of the second. A rowing scull would sink immediately on a white-water river. A specialist 5,000-meter speed skater couldn’t keep up in a hockey game. A road bike is unusable on bumpy mountain trails or loose sand. And Max Verstappen’s Formula 1 car would be useless in the Paris-Dakar. Conversely, though, the second athlete is often very capable at the sport of the first, and can deliver acceptable performance. He can adjust; he is more of an all-rounder than the first.
Now, if you take a look at your own organization, can you see it as an elite athlete? And if so, which of the two types of athletes? How well does it adapt to unexpected events and changing circumstances? How fast, flexible, and agile is it? How smart and nimble? How well does the organization anticipate and improvise? Is it a survivor?
These questions concern us, and, therefore, are central to this book. Here is a guide to how the book approaches these issues.
1.2 Accelerate
Changes in market conditions, in the approach of competitors, in the needs of customers, and within your own organization are going ever faster and deeper. And for many organizations, this is an enormous struggle. Most are unable to adapt, fully or quickly enough, to the circumstances. They lack resilience. It is a regular complaint of many executives that their organization simply cannot maintain such a breakneck pace.
They are under a tremendous risk, because it is their actual existence that is endangered. They either adapt or they die. Darwin demonstrated this for flora and fauna, but this does not only apply to organisms, but also to organizations. As you will read later in this book, there are massive dynamics in the creation, growth, shrinking, and disappearing of organizations. There are more and more start-ups, but, as a rule-of-thumb, 90 percent are gone again within five years. The number of bankruptcies and liquidations has been rising for a long time, well before the financial crisis. This doesn’t only apply to small businesses, but also global icons like Nokia, Saab, and Kodak. To use a travel metaphor, these organizations were on a train to a fixed destination, when they really needed to be out exploring.
At the same time, there are many examples of companies reinventing themselves, such as Apple, LEGO, and Mini. And examples of companies that emerged from nowhere and through searching found their raison d’être: companies like Amazon, TomTom, and easyJet.
The question is how you can ensure that your organization will be a winner in tomorrow’s market. It turns out that agility plays a crucial role. As you’ll soon see, agility embraces flexibility and maneuverability. Adaptability is key. Literally translated, agility means the ability to move quickly and easily. Within the context of this book, it encompasses terms like lightness, speed, sharpness, strength, focus, and precision. The aim of agility is adaptivity, the responsive capacity of the organization to adapt flexibly to new requirements. There is an unmistakable need for speed. Everything revolves around minimizing time-to-market.
It might help to compare it with driving. Firstly, looking at traffic flows, you can see a big difference in the agility and responsiveness of lorries and buses compared with cars and motorcycles. Secondly, driving a car is a dynamic process; it is impossible to prepare for everything. Also, it makes no sense to learn all the roads and their traffic rules by heart. Because traffic is just like a flock of birds, a complex chaos of interacting road users sometimes do very unexpected things. Moreover, there are road works, countless new roads, and diversions, and so on. So, you get your driving license on the basis of standard, existing criteria. Driving lessons begin with the theory. By studying traffic rules, you get insight into how road users should interact with each other, how you should behave, and how you can recognize certain traffic situations. Then you go on to practice these, until whatever the traffic throws at you, you are able to apply insight and agility, so you can always respond quickly and appropriately. You do this, of course, by continually looking around you, choosing the right direction, monitoring your dashboard, and, where possible, anticipating. And on you go in this continuous process. You accelerate, change gear, brake, use the lights, horn, and turn signals, so you can drive smoothly in any traffic situation. In one word, you are improvising. In the beginning, it is a bit rough (the insurance companies know all about that), but once you’ve got enough miles under your belt, you get faster and better. Eventually, it becomes second nature; you do it intuitively and, perhaps worryingly, realize that sometimes you’ve been on “autopilot.”
And this is how you want it to be in your organization. This is the essence of agile management.
1.3 Agile Management: In Theory and Practice
Agile management trusts that the process will deliver the desired agility and through this, the necessary adaptability. Increasingly, executives want to make their organizations agile, but do not know how to. Or they have already taken their first steps and are wondering how they can roll out the approach or make it more professional; these are the people for whom this book is especially intended.
It is understandable that for many people, agile carries the connotation of software development, because they know that is the origin of agile-development approaches such as Scrum. For some time now, however, this approach has had a much wider application: in engineering, product development, research, marketing, and project management of all kinds. The approach, in principle with a little customization where appropriate, can be applied in most parts of the organization, and not just in commercial enterprises. It fits well within nearly any kind of organization, including (semi)governmental and nonprofit, internal and external customers, services, products, channels, processes, and so on.
But agility goes further than that: it pertains to factors such as customers, strategy, business models and propositions, leadership, culture, staffing, systems, processes, information, collaboration, experimenting, metrics, and more. And that’s what this book is all about. It examines the full breadth of agility and does so from two perspectives. Part one offers theoretical insights to understand the relevance of agility to your organization. It uses real examples to explain why change is happening so frequently and increasingly at fundamental levels. It also tells you how to anticipate change and how agility thinking started. You will see that it is applicable in the majority of situations you might encounter. You will learn why experimentation and failure are important and what are the other principles upon which agile management is based.
Are you more a hands-on person, interested less in theory and more in practice? Then you can go directly to part two, where you’ll find how to translate agile principles specifically for use in your daily work or practice. To begin with, you can determine precisely how agile your organization currently is. Then you can read how to structure your organization and processes to maximize agility. What continuously repeating steps constitute these processes? What tools help in completing those steps and in what ways? This approach and the associated tools have been developed by combining experimental practice with existing methods and supplementing it with new solutions.
The individual chapters are explained below; a kind of navigation system when reading this book.
Topics per Chapter
In Chapter 2, you learn about Darwinism. You see that every organization has to adapt to changing circumstances, otherwise it runs the very great risk of becoming extinct. Also, you will see that agile organizations are the most successful in adapting to these changes, and so perform better.
Chapter 3 looks more deeply into changing circumstances, both externally and internally. You see that more is changing, more rapidly and more deeply, and agility is required in order to create and maintain the necessary adaptability. Unfortunately, many organizations come up short due to resistance, lack of internal cooperation, and fear of failure.
The idea that it is vital for agility that trying and failing are allowed and accepted is central to Chapter 4. You learn why it is essential, as early as possible in the process, to try and fail as often as you can. You can find inspiration in wonderful examples of valuable inventions that were discovered accidentally.
In Chapter 5, you will discover that agility also makes the decisive difference in situations where winning is crucial, like warfare and elite sports, and Chapter 6 gives you the opportunity to delve deeper into the history of agile management. You will see that the approach is not a flash in the pan, but more than a hundred years in development. You can also read about the benefits and efficiency of agile management.
Chapter 7 discusses the agile-management approach in detail, examining the eight principles on which the approach is based, such as value creation, alignment, and empowerment. It also describes how agile management can be used for both internal and external customers. The chapter ends by looking at the importance of IT.
The practical part of this book (Part 2) begins at Chapter 8. First of all, you can do a quick self-assessment to determine how agile your own organization really is. Then it discusses where your organization should focus and what this means for leadership. Finally, there is an extensive case study of ING Bank.
The process central to agile management is explained in Chapter 9. There you will see that this includes three continuously repeating steps: Think–Do–Learn. These steps are further explored in subsequent chapters.
Chapters 10 and 11 cover the first step: Think. They go into how to best monitor changes in circumstances and how to quickly adapt your business model, both internally and externally. You learn how to make your organization more customer-focused. How to become smarter at prioritization and planning your improvements and to make use of hypotheses and metrics.
In Chapter 12, you go on to the next step: Do. An answer to the question of how to design and build value propositions and customer experiences in a quick and practical way, in which you learn how a so-called minimum viable product works and how you can test this.
The final step, Learn, is the subject of Chapter 13. Here you learn how to analyze your efforts and the results they have delivered. You’ll become familiar with the different sources of information that you need for your analysis, what I call the voice of the customer. You also learn how to evaluate and pivot.
The last part of the book, from Chapter 14 onwards, addresses the question of how you become future-proof. It contains a summary of everything you have learned, how it all fits together, and discusses how to make real the transformation from your current situation to an agile organization. In addition, you will find answers to frequently asked questions arising from real-world practice and references to inspiring resources for supportive background information.
By reading this chapter, you’ll have discovered the following:
• You can look at organizations in different ways. One is to assess the level of agility. Agility is required for adaptivity: the extent to which organizations can adapt to changes in internal or external conditions.
• Agile management is an approach that facilitates this for the entire organization. The approach is not just limited to IT, but also includes many more aspects than just product development, for example. Agile management applies to both internal and external customers and is applicable in almost any kind of organization.
• The book teaches you two ways to apply agile management within your organization: first, by introducing you to the theoretical background and then letting you discover how you can make it a concrete part of your organization’s business practice.