What is Cultural Agility and why does it matter?
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Now that the New Year is off and running, we will be getting started on the next book in The Agility Series which will be on Cultural Agility. So what exactly is Cultural Agility and why does it matter? Within the agile space much has been said and written about creating/enabling an agile culture or a culture of agility. Here's one definition I came across for an agile culture that pretty much sums it up: An "agile" culture (with a lower-case "a") is one that has adopted a style, approach, and community that is tolerant of failure, willing to test hypotheses, and able to adjust to changing market conditions as deemed necessary.(1) But is that the same thing as cultural agility? Apparently not. There are multiple definitions out there such as: Cultural agility is the mega-competency which enables professionals to perform successfully in cross-cultural situations. Culturally agile professionals succeed in contexts where the successful outcome of their jobs, roles, positions, or tasks depends on dealing with an unfamiliar set of cultural norms—or multiple sets of them (2) And this one: Cultural agility is the ability to understand multiple local contexts and work within them to obtain consistent business results. For today’s global organizations, cultural agility is the new competitive edge. While individual capacities are important, successful organizations build an institutional level of a global mindset and skills for effectively coordinating, negotiating and influencing across boundaries. (3) While there are many other definitions, all seem to be focused on the fact that organizations may operate in different locales and need to be culturally aware (3) or there are many different cultural groups that may exist inside of your local organization (2). Most organizations that I have dealt with in recent years have an incredibly rich set of international cultures resident within them. This trend is increasing. And to me, that's a good thing. I would take culture a step further and say that modern organizations need both an agile culture, and their people need to be culturally agile. My hypothesis is that the former provides focus for developing the shared values and principles that guide our collective actions, while the later helps us understand how we personally interpret and apply those shared values and principles, which will necessarily affect how we interact with those who are culturally different than we are. I feel both perspectives are crucial to success in modern organizations. I think it also fits with my humanist tendencies. Wikipedia defines humanism as: Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and affirms their ability to improve their lives through the use of reason and ingenuity as opposed to submitting blindly to tradition and authority or sinking into cruelty and brutality. For those who may be wondering, this definition is not, for me, an anti-religious stance. It's more focused on the idea that we really all do need to get along if we are to create vibrant and long-lived organizations. We also need to be able to draw on the collective wisdom of all rather than on the ideas of just the few people at the top. The two books in The Agility Series so far have been guided by the ideas provided by people from Australia, Great Britain, Canada, USA, Singapore, France and Belgium. As these two were by invitation-only to be a member of the Wisdom Council for each book, we are planning to open it up for the remaining seven books in the series so that we can have an even greater mix of countries and cultures represented. What better book to start doing that than with the next one we are tackling on Cultural Agility? Want to explore what cultural agility means to you and why it matters? To join in our next adventure in agility, look out for a post in a few weeks when we officially launch our first round of questions for the third book in The Agility Series on Cultural Agility. If you want to read the first two books in the series, go to www.mplaza.ca and download Organization Agility and Leadership Agility to get you into what we have explored so far. I have removed the pricing on Leadership Agility so it's now free to download! Want to have a say in the questions we'll be asking in Round one? Jen Hunter and I will be giving a presentation at PMIOVOC on January 25th at noon called Best decision yet: Aspiring together to co-create global wisdom! If you are in the Ottawa area, come join us as we let you in on how the Series came about. You'll also get a chance to provide input to the set of questions we will use in the first round of ideas gathering for Cultural Agility! Hope to see you there! PS: also come join the conversation on our LinkedIn Group (1) https://www.quora.com/What-is-Agile-Culture (2) http://www.culturalagility.com/ (3) http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=cultural-agility ********************************************************************************* How to contact me:
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We also offer classroom training for Scrum.org courses plus other agile and Scrum training (http://bssnexus.com/education/)
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Outcomes Focused-Agility: Experience Report
Categories:
agile,
Benefits Realization,
leadership,
Outcomes Management,
Scrum,
servant leadersip,
strategy
Categories: agile, Benefits Realization, leadership, Outcomes Management, Scrum, servant leadersip, strategy
| In my recent post What? You don't know why you are doing your project? I indicated that I would do a follow-up post on examples of where I have used the Outcomes approach successfully. As you recall, the post was subtitled "Outcomes Focused Agility - Story Mapping our Strategic Intent". In this post, I'll provide two examples of where I have applied it successfully as well as provide an example of where I am currently using it with good success so far. Procure and Implement a Learning Management System (LMS) My role: had overall portfolio responsibility for guiding both the technical and business teams. The Context Several years ago I was hired by the Learning and Development group of a local government agency to help them procure and implement an LMS. They used to have all of their employees in one building. The situation was that employees were now in different cities, in different countries, and on different continents. Most PMs would view this as an IT project and would proceed to begin developing the procurement documents, and then following the procurement, getting it installed and configured for use. And if they did that within the expected 18 month timeline and $2.5M budget we had, they would have considered the project a success. However, by the measures of value that really needed to be satisfied, they would have failed. When you take an outcomes-focused approach, you start by asking why are they feeling they need to do this particular project? Ask why (along with what and how) enough times and you uncover all manner of actual need, many of which are left hidden using most project approaches. Over a period of the first 2-3 months of the engagement I helped them discover/recognize the following :
The Portfolio There were many other things we uncovered by asking why, but the above gives you a good idea of the real problems we had to tackle, which far exceeded just procuring and implementing an LMS. Using outcomes-focused agility, we were able to define the real work we had to do to make the implementation of the LMS a success for them:
We used a Services Canvas I designed based off of the Business Model Canvas to help them figure what services they offered to the rest of the organization and how they would be measured. Once we had the initial versions of the outcomes map and the Service canvas, wee would place the latest iterations of each on our wall and leave stickies and pens on a table beneath them. Most every day stakeholders and team members would walk by and spend a few minutes looking at the canvas and map and use the stickies to leave questions, comments, and ideas. This enabled serendipity across the team and stakeholders - while one person was adding stickies someone else would invariably walk by and they would then have a conversation about the map and canvas and the content of the stickies. Every few days we would collect everything and update the map and canvas and then hold additional brainstorming sessions with everyone. Both the serendipitous and brainstorming events enabled us to create a shared understanding of the why, what, how, who, when and where of our portfolio and it's various programs and initiatives with all of the required players as all of them contributed at different times and to different degrees to their creation. No one felt left out. We used Scrum on each of the initiatives including the procurement process, for doing business process design and development, and for systems integration. We also introduced the idea of using an agile approach to learning content development for the new content that would need be created for the new LMS to deliver. Without suitable content there was no need for an LMS! Having taken an outcomes-focused approach we also created the basis for value-based decisions across the entire portfolio for each of the products that would be created to satisfy each outcome. While Scrum assumes that someone else has already decided which products should be developed, outcomes-focused agility helps us determine which products have to be developed ( in this case learning content, business processes, an RFP, systems integration, etc.). It also helped us to establish the basis for value prioritization within each initiative and product so product owners knew the higher-level strategic goals that were to be satisfied. Remember products themselves are just outputs. They are not outcomes, nor do they measure the benefits of what you have done, and hence they also do not help you understand why you are creating them. They do contribute to outcomes, but they are not themselves actual outcomes. The Results Here is a summary of some of the project metrics (sufficient time has passed that I can share these):
The Learning and development group also restructured based on the new services they were now offering and the processes that supported them. The new processes and the restructuring ideas came from the people who were most affected by it - there was no need for organizational change management as it was change by engagement and with the design being done by the entire team. We managed to achieve far more real value delivery in the 18 months than was expected and for the same money, hence, we were able to deliver what they actually needed, rather than what they had originally intended of simply procuring and implementing an LMS. Build and Implement a Professional Licensure Management System My role: had overall portfolio responsibility for guiding both the technical and business teams. The Context A national professional association wanted to build a professional licensure management system. Again, this sounds like an IT project to most - after all we would be building a software product but in reality it was more complex actual scenario:
The Portfolio Using outcomes-focused agility helped us to identify:
This was way more than simply building a software product. The Results A coordinated delivery was established across multiple years covering facilities, infrastructure, hiring, product development, as well as an organizational restructuring that would enable them to stand-up and support a national professional licensure management system. Mature People, Process and Technology Capabilities My role: portfolio leadership and agility mentoring The Context The last one I'll report on is one that I am currently engaged in to mature people, process, and technology capabilities. The particular team in this case is a technical team that connects business line capabilities to one another. They have been in existence for 4 years and started out as part of a larger project. They split off into a separate team to carry on the operational side for their original development efforts as well as to do similar development work for other business lines. With the prospect of doing work for many business lines instead of just the original two, we felt that we needed to put more formality into what the team does and how it does it. We have identified four value streams to answer the four main outcomes questions as listed below:
The team sits inside of a very large IT organization, inside of a very large government department, so the work they do has a high degree of sophistication as well as being of significant consequence to the business. The team currently owns the entire development and operational support of what they build including at the platform level so we have to address topics such as:
As there are multiple very sophisticated technologies in play, it is not just enough to know what you must do, but you also need to figure out which technology is the right one to use in each circumstance. As a result, in order to determine what we must do (the initiatives) to satisfy a given outcome, we have had to create and execute initiatives whose goal it is to help us sort out our strategy for the actual initiatives to support the identified outcomes. The Portfolio By asking the four key questions above we have so far identified 40 initiatives that we need to undertake. The ones that are developing strategies for their focus areas will lead to the addition of more initiatives once they are completed. This is another of the hidden benefits of outcomes-focused agility as noted above - we can use strategy-development initiatives to both identify and define the initiatives we need to undertake to achieve a given set of outcomes on the map, even after we have already started on the portfolio - now that is the ultimate in outcomes-focused agility! We have also had to tweak some of outcomes statements as based on what we have learned in some of initiatives we have delivered on so far. When faced with such a high degree of uncertainty and ambiguity as this one presents for the team, outcomes-focused agility is proving invaluable in enabling us to do the things we need to do, rather than what we may have intended to do at the outset, across a very complex landscape. The Results - so far The fact that the goal of our work is to mature people, process and technology is not lost on us - maturing our people means constant inspection and adaptation to what we learn along the way. We are also able to adapt to new circumstances as they have emerged as we continue to do other work for the business lines. We are also advantaged by constantly iterating our overall strategy, based both on the strategy initiatives we have identified, as well as the ones that are implementing those strategies, that in some cases, we have yet to define. Another aspect of outcomes-focused agility is that it enables the portfolio team to more quickly assess the consequences of delays and changes in organizational priorities. Due to some external factors for example, we have had to revamp our outcomes delivery timelines within the portfolio. In one example, we were able to assess the consequences of deferring some initiatives to a later FY on the basis of getting less money this FY. We were able to do this assessment in less than 30 minutes! All we were given was the dollar amount that had to be deferred. Our map enabled us to make a value-centric decision as we already knew the relationships between initiatives, products, and outcomes (or results), and hence we could quickly determine which initiatives, products, and outcomes could be deferred while having the least detrimental impact on our overall strategic intent both in the short and long term. Without these maps and their details, this would have taken days if not weeks for something this large, and even worse could have led us to defer the wrong things. I have always ensured wherever possible that each of the initiatives within an outcomes map can be done within 3 months or less and that we use Scrum throughout. This incremental approach allows us to tackle complex situations in manageable pieces. It also allows us to re-vector our remaining work based on what we learn along the way. We are very definitely seeing the value of allowing emergence to guide us by tackling things in small enough chunks, that even if something turns out to not be what we expected, our investment in each one is not that great, so our risk exposure is significantly reduced. The Role of Emergence in Outcomes-Focused Agility Emergence, as I discussed in Chapter 7 of Agile Value Delivery: Beyond the Numbers, is more than just about our architectures and design as described in the principles of The Manifesto for Agile Software Development. It also applies to our understanding of the holistic messes we are solving that often contain many different problems as the examples above clearly demonstrated. In all of the above examples, it was never a single problem to be solved, nor a single project to be executed. I would suggest that this describes 99% of what we encounter in the real world, versus what is often attempted through single monolithic projects. Outcomes-focused agility directly supports this form of emergence, and also provides the context in which to story-map your strategic intent - even when you have yet to fully describe your strategic intent, as was demonstrated in the last example. Understanding emergence, and how to leverage the opportunities it uncovers, helps us to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. Outcomes-focused agility helps deal with emergence in a rational manner which then allows us to use and adapt multiple frameworks, practices, methods and techniques to achieve value-delivery. We use what is most appropriate to the context of each single problem we are solving, rather than trying a one-size fits-all approach, or even believing that we are solving a single problem, as we rarely are. One of the areas of outcomes-focused agility I have not yet attempted is to take the same focus towards the team itself - what outcomes matter to them? I hope to do some experiments with that over the coming months within my current portfolio. Benefits Realization Rather than address benefits realization under each of the above examples, I though I'd deal with it as a separate topic. For those of us familiar with outcomes-driven approaches, we know that the measure we use to determine the presence of our expected outcomes is to identify the benefits we would need to see in order to determine that the outcome was present. This is as I described it in Chapter 2 of Agile Value Delivery: Beyond the Numbers. Outcomes cannot be directly observed. They are only observable through measurable benefits. Much has recently been written about benefits realization, which is enjoying a noticeable resurgence of interest. However, without the context of outcomes-focused agility, we may end up focusing on the wrong things, and we still don't have a framework that facilitates our emergent and shared understanding in the face of ever-increasing uncertainty and ambiguity. Benefits realization by itself not enough. Conclusion Outcomes-focused Agility enables portfolio, program, and project teams to gain insights into both the magnitude,and the specifics, of what has to be done. It also provides executive levels with a high degree of confidence that we have thought things through enough at the front-end, without locking into solutions too soon, so that we can more fully create a shared-understanding of why we are doing things, and use that shared understanding to drive decision-making throughout and at all levels. An incremental delivery approach through value-streams, and their associated programs within a portfolio framework, also significantly reduces financial, schedule, and delivery risks. So we really don't have to plan or describe everything up-front. Recognizing this simple reality enables us to help the business and its customers/clients end up where they need to be, which may not be where they originally intended to be. And after all, isn't that what we all hope for? ******************************************************************************************** How to contact me:
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Leaders Inspire through Stories
| Excerpt from my upcoming book Leadership Agility: Enabling Sustainable Organizations Stephen Denning’s book The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling is a field guide on how leaders can use stories to motivate, build trust, transmit organizational values, get teams working together, share knowledge, tame the grapevine, and create a shared vision. Leaders who rely on charts and graphs to communicate fail to recognize that organizations are made up of people and that leadership is first and foremost about people. No great achievement was ever realized because a leader gave an amazing PowerPoint presentation. Great leaders inspire people to action. They do so by the way they communicate the story that describes their vision. Leadership is not about technical things. A leader’s ability to create a shared purpose is the requisite step for their organization to create a shared future. Creating a shared future needs a good story. In The importance of storytelling for social change, Simon Hodges argues that Stories engage people at every level – not just in their minds The role of a leader therefore, is to inspire their people to action towards a shared purpose so they can create a shared future together. This is not an exercise that is routine, meaningless, or void of emotion. It is values-based. It relies on the most basic of human characteristics to want to contribute to something meaningful that is bigger than ourselves. The stories that leaders tell helps to frame the collective understanding of the organizations they lead, the vision they have, and the future they want to create. ******************************************************************************************** How to contact me:
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A question for leaders: can you coddiwomple?
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(originally posted on LinkedIn) It's Sunday morning, and as I am apt to do on weekends while drinking my morning coffee, I spend the first hour or so wandering through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter seeing what my connections have been up to over the past few days. This morning I saw a post on Facebook by a old friend of mine on the definition of coddiwomple. Ever had that moment where you see a description of something or you a come across a word that succinctly summarizes something for you? Coddiwomple is one of those words for me. For those who have read my recent book on Organizational Agility or my Adaptive Strategy Framework Guide or my first book Agile Value Delivery: Beyond the Numbers, attended any of our webinars, read any of my previous posts, or is an member of my LinkedIn group know that I write a lot about uncertainty and the fact we live in a VUCA world. Living in a VUCA world means that we cannot use the past to predict the future which is a basic assumption behind most strategic planning exercises that try to lay out a vision for the next 3-5 years. Couple this with the fact that our window of opportunity is now often measured in months not years and that is by windows of stability that are measured in weeks instead of months, leaders of every organizational size and in every sector are challenged more that ever to learn how to be adaptive. They need to learn to base their decision-making on what they and their people do next based on what know today they did not know last month or even last week. Does that mean that strategy execution is now a crap-shoot? No. What it does mean is that we can no longer assume that we can simply make a plan and work the plan. It means leaders and their teams need to do strategic iteration as opposed to strategic planning as I describe in my Adaptive Strategy Framework Guide. Being able to prioritize what you and your teams do next means you need to have some sort of destination in mind, a vision of the future. This enables you to move towards that destination, however vague it may be, in a purposeful manner. By taking an adaptive approach to how you realize strategic goals and objectives also means that you may in fact end up at a slightly different destination that what you originally envisioned. And that's ok as it will be where you need to be, which is not necessarily where you intended to be. Being where you intended to be as opposed to where you need to be is failure - it means you executed to a strategic goal where all the signs along the way meant you were going in the wrong direction, yet you and your teams chose to ignore the signs anyway. So, as a leader, can you coddiwomple? ****************************************************************************************** How to contact me:
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Reward principles not pocketbooks!
Categories:
leadership
Categories: leadership
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Image source: http://www.jasonstapleton.com/the-power-of-principle/ (originally published on LinkedIn) People are, well people. We do like recognition. It's a human sort of thing. We all stand a little straighter and sound a little more confident when we are recognized for the good work we do. It's a natural reaction. The only question is the form that the rewards will take. |
