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

@ICAgile's Shane Hastie's podcast interview of me has been posted on @InfoQ http://bit.ly/2tZePa2 - we talk about The Agility Series, Cultural Agility, the NFPPC, Value Management, Organizational Sustainability and Resilience, and whole lot more. Check it out!

Key Takeaways:

• Value management is about doing the right thing, rather than doing lots of stuff, right
• The reason for doing something should always trace back to an organizational strategic goal, and if it doesn’t then we’re wasting the organizations money
• Introducing the ideas of cultural agility
• The ability to understand multiple local contexts and work within them to obtain business results
• A statement of strategic intent is not a statement of fact, it is a current direction which can change
• Sustainability and resilience are enhanced through agility
• Everything changes – the practices we are using now won’t be the ones we will use in the future, be adaptive to changing everything about how we do work