The Agility Series

This is a bit of a different post for me.

My partner and I have crafted a set of Guiding Principles for an Adaptive Organization which I invite you to comment on in this thread.

The final version will be posted for download at www.AdaptiveOrg.com under a Creative Commons license.

All contributions whose comments are used in some way (meaning either directly or caused us to think about something differently) will be recognized in the final release.

So what would you change, drop or add?

Here are the principles (we thought ten was a nice round number): 

1. Act with intent through clearly defined and transparent strategic priorities that are reviewed and adjusted based on the evidence and through collaboration inside and outside of the organization

2. Recognize that becoming and remaining an adaptive organization is not a project, it's hands-on, with live experiments and adjustments until it becomes the way of organizational life

3. Have fully engaged and clear-the-path leadership

4. Recognize shared values and principles are the necessary ingredients for people to create and sustain aligned personal and organizational purpose and adaptability

5. Recognize true organizational sustainability and resilience can only be achieved by becoming adaptive in action and in thought – we do (act) so we can train the adaptive muscle in our brain

6. Have a strong focus on clients/customers and engage them directly to establish overall strategic priorities, and to achieve specific initiative goals

7. Hire and promote the creative and productive power of gender-balanced, intellectually, and culturally diverse teams at all levels

8. Create and support a fail-forward safe environment

9. Provide collaborative workspaces that can adjust to the needs of people and the organization over time

10. Recognize that organizational policies exist to support the achievement of organizational and client/customer desired outcomes. When there is a conflict, the outcome wins

These principles support one another equally in achieving mastery as an adaptive organization

Defining and delivering on a vision and strategy has been a hit and miss proposition for most traditional organizations for many decades. The reason for this is twofold.

First, traditional Industrial Era management thinking, and its accompanying models rely on the notion that we can use the past to predict the future.

The industrial era approach, often manifested itself in the 3 to 5-year strategic plan. The focus of this era was standardization (limited change), and mass production.

Secondly, this is not the reality of the Digital Era in which all organizations now operate. The current reality is constant and accelerating change from an ever increasing variety of vectors.

Yet, some still insist on trying to create the perfect plan to satisfy the perfectly indescribable problem.

This failure to adapt is creating strategic debt. Strategic debt, when left to accumulate, leads to the collapse of once vibrant enterprises in the private sector, and to the increasing irrelevance of organizations in the public sector.

Strategic debt is the deficit between the planned strategic goals and objectives that are set out at a point-in-time in strategic plans, versus the ones that emerge and evolve during execution. Such goals and objectives are both stated, and rightfully perceived, as hard targets. But what if the goal or objective statement is malformed, is the wrong one, or is no longer relevant?

Strategic debt accumulation is directly correlated to the time-gap between the point-in-time goals and objectives setting exercise and the time at which the organization begins to take a more adaptive and iterative approach to strategy execution.

Failing to accommodate changing realities while continuing to execute to the goals and objectives of a rigid strategic plan creates strategic debt, and since strategy sets the tone for the organization as a whole — the cost and associated risks are very high as the debt continues to accumulate.

To resolve this dilemma we need to iterate strategy in the same way we iterate product development that use frameworks such as Scrum. In this way, strategy undergoes a number of course corrections over time in an effort to achieve corporate value, similar to a sailor using tacking to make most efficient use of the wind.

Instead of casting our goals and objectives in stone in the form of specific strategic goals and objectives, we instead need to formulate them as statements of strategic intent.

A statement of intent is a statement that indicates what we are likely to do in the near future. Statements of intent are positive statements of the future you are trying to create, that are also intended to garner your personal commitment to their achievement.

Statement of strategic intent, which are statements of intent applied to a strategic context, can have any combination of near-term, medium-term, and longer-term components. They are expressions of the means by which we expect to achieve our organization’s vision. They are designed to provide context to the expected results that would be achieved if the vision were realized — without the how. How to achieve strategic intent is rightfully left up to the people who have to do the work.

As they are statements of intent, it also means we can both evaluate what we are about to do as well as the results from what we have just completed, against that stated intent; That is, it provides the opportunity to evaluate the intent itself, and to make needed adjustments based on new insights and experience. It also allows us to run experiments to validate portions of our intent before we make large people, time or financial commitments.

By using statements of intent, we are acknowledging that we might not have gotten it right the first time, or the second, or the third…It’s the relief valve that helps us to avoid creating strategic debt. It assumes strategy is indicative rather than fact.

To illustrate, consider the graphic below:

· Intended strategy is based on our statements of strategic intent.

· The deliberate things we do to achieve a given strategic intent become realized strategy (top line).

· There will also be statements of intent that we lay down that can remain unrealized for myriad reasons (poorly stated, not achievable, no longer relevant, etc.).

· And finally there will be that which emerges or evolves along the way that also get realized through deliberate action.

· So realized strategy is a combination of both deliberate and emergent strategy.

My partner Dan Murphy provides an example of using a statement of short, medium, and long-term strategic intent from his Cisco days; Larry Carter, then CFO of Cisco circa 1995 tasked his organization with closing the books world wide in two weeks instead of four weeks so that Cisco would have the financial data required to make better decisions. It took the team a few years to pull it off, but they did, by working in small tight iterations with small teams. However this was not a project at Cisco — it was a process. They kept going to continually refine and better the process providing continual improvement and delivery of value. Today, Cisco closes its books worldwide daily (effectively in real time). The intent was defined by Mr. Carter — not the how!

The Cultural Agility Questions are now live!

I am excited to kick off the first round of questions on Cultural Agility which you can start to answer immediately by clicking on https://lnkd.in/d259Ny8

We will be closing the first round on March 31st with the second round to follow shortly thereafter. We hope to have both rounds concluded by mid-April so we can prepare to speak on the this topic at Spark the Change Montreal being held on May 11-12.

The questions can be answered by anyone so please share as widely as possible in your own networks - the more insights we get the richer our collective wisdom will be! Thank you so much for helping us spread agility!

Kindest regards - Larry