Agility Shift

Creating Agile and Effective Leaders, Teams, and Organizations

Pamela Meyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351862400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

As contrary as it sounds, "planning" -- as we traditionally understand the term--can be the worst thing a company can do. Consider that volatile weather events disrupt trusted supply chains, markets, and promised delivery schedules. Ever-shifting geo-political tensions, as well as internal political upheaval within U.S. and global governments, derail long-planned new ventures. Technology failures block opportunities. Competitors suddenly change their product or release date; your team cannot meet the pace of innovations in your market niche, leaving you sidelined. There are myriad ways in the current business environment for a company's well-considered business plans to go awry. Most business schools continue to prepare managers to be effective in stable and predictable environments, conditions that, if they ever existed at all, are long gone. The Agility Shift shows business leaders exactly how to make the radical mindset and strategy shift necessary to create an agile, entrepreneurial organization that can innovate and thrive in complex, ever-changing contexts. As author Pamela Meyer explains, there is much more involved than a reconfiguration of the org chart and job descriptions. It requires relinquishing the illusion of control at the very foundation of most management training and business practice. Despite most leaders' approaches, "Agility is not simply accelerated planning." Unlike many agility books on the market, The Agility Shift provides specific, actionable strategies and tactics for leaders at all levels of the organization to put into practice immediately to improve agility and achieve results.

Introduction

As the team members filed into the workshop I was about to lead, it was clear that they were still digesting what they had just heard. No one knew any details about the just-announced job cuts or about her individual fate, let alone the implications for the team. Months earlier I had been invited to lead this team in what was intended to be a somewhat playful team-building session that left the group (and the organization as a whole) feeling better about their capacity to improvise.

On the day of the session I arrived at the corporate campus early, and as I waiting in the lobby I scanned the business news on my smartphone. My heart started racing as I read a headline announcing that the company that I was about to work with had just that morning reported record losses and announced it would be laying off thousands of workers across the global organization. I then realized that the building I was in seemed like a ghost town. After seemingly endless minutes passed, the human resources director who had engaged me appeared in the lobby. As he walked me back to our session room he let me know that the offices were so quiet because the entire company was in a hastily called town hall meeting with the CEO about the layoffs. But not to worry, he assured me, the team I would be working with had been asked to leave the meeting early and would arrive on time for our long-scheduled learning experience.

I admit my first impulse on the fight, freeze, or flight continuum was flight. Perhaps I could arrange for an urgent call from my nonexistent child's school or be overcome with a mysterious illness. Rather than give in to my flash of panic, I took a few breaths as we walked the long corridor. I couldn't help but recognize the irony and opportunity. After all, responding effectively to the unexpected and unplanned was the very focus of my work and was one of the main reasons I had been asked to design a workshop for this team. However, my original plan for helping them develop these capacities no longer made sense. That morning, the company's leaders, their countless teams and departments, and the entire global organization found themselves smack in the middle of the unpredictable and unplanned—and, with no notice, I found myself there too. The organization was confronting VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), a term now widely used to describe today's business reality. Regardless of the degree to which members of the organization were aware of the gathering storm, it was clear that no one was prepared for its timing or intensity.

As I arrived in the workshop room, I quickly abandoned my original plan and began to regroup and reframe the session objectives and approach. What was originally designed as a lighthearted team-building session quickly became an opportunity for the shell-shocked participants to rediscover their own individual and team capacities to be agile in a very stressful situation.

After acknowledging the current reality and the uncertainty the team members were experiencing—and perhaps, partly due to their state of disequilibrium—we were able to quickly co-create a space for mutual support and discovery Through a series of competence and capacity-building activities, team members soon began to share philosophical insights and reflect on the opportunities this change presented. They became more confident as they reaffirmed their shared human capacity to embrace rather than deny the unexpected.

I was humbled when, after years of helping organizations become more agile and innovative, I realized that the session—conducted in the very midst of the unexpected—had been one of the most rewarding and ultimately impactful I have had the honor to facilitate. In the months and years that followed that session, many of the participants did, in fact, move on to other opportunities as the company drastically downsized and reconfigured. One such participant is now a valued advisory board member at the Center I oversee at DePaul University's School for New Learning and a leader at an innovative and agile company. The enduring relationships I saw and participated in that day exemplify the power of interpersonal dynamics at the heart of this book. Something else happened in the workshop room that day, too, I realized one of the most important aspects of agility—the ability to make an intentional shift in order to be effective in changing contexts.

While you may not have had this particular opportunity to be agile, every person in every organization will experience the need to respond to the unexpected and unplanned in big and small ways, and will have a choice whether or not to make their own agility shift. Among the possibilities:

• Your key supplier is suddenly out of business
• Your CEO or another key leader leaves the organization
• Your phone system goes down for a few crucial hours
• A new social trend holds a significant business opportunity for the first responder
• You are asked to cut your product development cycle by 50 percent
• Your company headquarters is moving out of state or out of the country
• A new competitor enters the market
• A work stoppage takes place at your central distribution hub in Asia
• You go through a major restructuring, but you need your people to continue to collaborate effectively

Each of these examples happened to organizations I work with. While none of the organizations expected events to unfold as they did, each company was able to turn a challenge into an opportunity

The shift from challenge to opportunity does not happen by accident, as I have seen in my years leading countless workshops with leaders, teams, and organizations that wanted to become more agile and innovative. The shift begins when one or more leaders recognizes a need and takes action (my definition of leadership in this book). Some wanted to feel more confident thinking on their feet; others needed to improve their ability to collaborate in their teams or departments while building a more responsive organizational culture. You may be surprised to learn that as I work with these organizations, in addition to the latest management research and best practices, just as often I find myself drawing on the strategies I learned in my first career as a theater director, producer, and stage manager. In regional and smaller urban nonprofit theaters I learned some of my most valuable lessons in agility—how to make optimal use of available resources, be creative under pressure, and always, always be prepared to respond to the unexpected and unplanned.

Seeing so many individuals, teams, and organizations transform as they implemented these practices led me to conduct more in-depth research. I was curious to know more about what happens for people as they are learning to improvise and be more agile. My most interesting discovery was that, rather that attribute their increased agility to new skills and knowledge, most attributed it to the context or space they co-created with their colleagues. I soon came to call this context playspace, and I wrote about these transformations in my book From Workplace to Playspace. This is not the funny hats and games kind of play, but space for:

• The play of new ideas
• People to play new roles
• More play in the system
• Improvised play

When we have the intention to create such playspace, we naturally expand our individual and collective capacity for agility Some especially good news grew out of this research: when there is a shared intention to create playspace, it takes very little time for it to come to life. It is not dependent on long-term relationships but on the shared intention of participants to support one another's success. This is why improvisers can jump in at a moment's notice, joining a group of players with whom they have never performed, and create a delightful performance. In this case, connecting happens through the implicit shared experience and intention, and building happens in the moment on stage, as new worlds are co-created and explored.

Helping leaders, teams, and organizations create this playspace has been incredibly rewarding. However, it wasn't until I had the opportunity that I just described to support the team at the very moment they encountered life-changing unexpected news that I discovered a missing piece, one that helped bring into focus the essential dynamics of what I have come to call the agility shift.

Regardless of your role, you need the capacity to make the agility shift. The good news is that we all have this capacity, and we actually improvise in response to countless unplanned situations each day The challenge is to tap into this capacity for organizational success. When a leader, team, or entire organization has this capacity, we characterize that person or group as agile. We tend to assign superhuman qualities to those who possess superior agility. In awe, we tell the tales of heroes who display agility in the direst circumstances. This book removes the mystery to reveal the mind-set, strategy, and practice shift everyday organizational heroes make and sustain for organizational success.

What’s Stopping You?

Everyone agrees that there is real, tangible value in being more agile. Agile individuals are happier, healthier, and more creative and engaged; agile teams are more productive, collaborative, and innovative; and agile organizations are more profitable. In fact, there is so much value in heightened agility that many organizational leaders regularly talk about it and even write it into their strategic plans and mission statements. A McKinsey survey found that nine out of ten executives ranked agility "both as critical to business success and as growing in importance over time." With all of this talk, it is surprising we don't see more organizations making significant shifts toward greater agility. This is actually the root of the problem: (1) most of the talk remains at the leadership level and (2) when there is action, it is initiated and executed using the same models and methods that inhibited agility in the first place.

To become truly agile, leaders (by whom I mean anyone who takes responsibility for responding to and discovering emerging opportunities and challenges), teams, and entire organizations need to make a fundamental shift—one that begins with a mind-set change and extends to a shift in models and methods followed at all levels of the organization.

In this book, through the stories of four very different types of organizations, you will discover the nature of this agility shift and how to make it happen for yourself, team and organization. Regardless of your role in your organization—or your position as an external consultant—this book will show you how to reach business goals by improving agile performance.

These case stories are not the stuff of corporate fairy tales, in which all of the real-life struggles and setbacks have been edited out. In fact, I chose each example to illustrate the conditions and strategies that led specific leaders, teams, and organizations to realize the urgent need to make the agility shift. All of these organizations are success stories, not because their results are pristine on any given day, news cycle, or quarterly report. They are success stories because they have made a commitment to strategies and practices that enable them to learn from each challenge, quickly find opportunities in the unexpected, and succeed over the long haul.

The Triple Bottom Line

In my years working across industries with organizations ranging from Fortune 50 companies to fifty-employee start-ups, I have been most inspired by those that measure success in terms of the "triple bottom line": people, profits, and planet. Whether they do so explicitly or implicitly, the companies I profile put people first and recognize that their success is dependent on the individual and collective strength of what I call their Relational Web. This web is a personal and system-wide network for mutual support, coordination, resources, and idea sharing. The employees who received such life- and organization-changing news just before my workshop that day, were able to be agile and effective in large part because of the strength of their Relational Web. By putting the Relational Web and the dynamic human ability to connect and build relationships and resource networks at the center of this book, I take an intentionally more humanistic approach to agility than most management experts.

In reading The Agility Shift, you will discover or have reaffirmed important business practices that enhance agility at every level of the system, including that of individual leaders, teams, the organization, and the entire business ecosystem. While shining a light on these aspects of the organization is not new, placing the human system at the center is a rare, and long overdue, approach. Each of the mind-set shifts, strategies, and specific practic...