A Key Step Toward Business Agility is a Mindset Makeover

Achieving agility
Agile Everywhere
Given that the goal of agile is to achieve business agility (the ability to adapt quickly to market changes, respond rapidly and flexibly to fast- changing consumer demands, and maintain a continuous competitive advantage), its no wonder that so many organizations have become eager converts.
In a 2017 survey of more than 500 senior executives conducted by Forbes insights and the project management institute, a whopping 92% of executives said that organizational agility is critical to business success, and 82% believe that proficiency in agile approaches is important for the implementation of strategic initiatives.
But for Many Companies, Agility Remains out of Reach
Even as agile practices spread across the globe, and agile buzzwords (scrum, lean development, sprints and daily stand ups) cascade from the mouths of the newly evangelized, the promised benefits of agile in the form of agility remain beyond the reach of many organizations. Nearly half of agile transformation efforts end in failure. Of these, 67% are terminal failures. Additionally, a staggering 73% of digital transformations fail to provide any business value to the organization, according to a 2018 study by the Everest group.
What's behind the high failure rate, and what can be done to improve the odds for success? In our experience, there are an infinite number of ways to succeed, but the routes to failure are finite. The #1 factor driving agile transformation failure starts in the C-suite, where confusion reigns about the difference between agility, which is an end, versus agile, which is a set of means to that end. In sum, many executives don't know what agile is and what it isn't.
They don't understand: how agile really works. Where, when (or whether) agile methods and practices are appropriate for a particular function, unit, division, or the organization as a whole. How to promote and benefit from agile. How to quickly and effectively learn all of the above. As a result, some executives return to their offices after a one- or two-day training session (live or delivered via Zoom) without a clear understanding of tangible next steps.
Regardless of how much they may have bought into the theories and concepts, they have not been equipped with the mindset, skills and roadmaps necessary to actively participate in the business transformation. Hence, some leaders assume that agile is merely a passing fad, just another flavor of the month that they can safely ignore until the enthusiasm has dissipated. Others pay lip service to agile while defaulting back to traditional command and control management practices (this runs directly counter to agile principles and practices, which were developed as a radical alternative to command-and-control- style management).
Some seem to associate agile with anarchy (everybody does what he or she wants to), whereas others take it to mean, doing what i say, only faster... When we ask executives what they know about agile, noted the authors of the the Harvard Business Review article embracing agile, the response is usually an uneasy smile and a quip such as just enough to be dangerous.
What agility Is and Isn't
Although agility comprises a variety of team-level practices, agility is not:
- shiny new ways of project management
- cross-functional teams
- a series of pilots
- disrupting the stable backbone of the organization
Agility is a destination one that requires a new mindset to help executives move away from the mentality of fiefdom ruler (my department, my goals, my resources, etc.) toward a more holistic view of the organization. It's a mission-oriented mindset in which a never-ending search for new value nodes takes precedence. This new mission-oriented mindset becomes a competitive advantage and enables more dynamic structures, providing faster and more adaptive resource allocation. It also encourages management to incentivize change to the parts of the organization (at the team level, unit level and function level) that will help achieve the mission.
Understanding agility
What agility Is and Isn't
Although agility comprises a variety of team-level practices, agility is not:
- shiny new ways of project management
- cross-functional teams
- a series of pilots
- disrupting the stable backbone of the organization
Agility is a destination one that requires a new mindset to help executives move away from the mentality of fiefdom ruler (my department, my goals, my resources, etc.) toward a more holistic view of the organization. It's a mission-oriented mindset in which a never-ending search for new value nodes takes precedence. This new mission-oriented mindset becomes a competitive advantage and enables more dynamic structures, providing faster and more adaptive resource allocation. It also encourages management to incentivize change to the parts of the organization (at the team level, unit level and function level) that will help achieve the mission.