In a previous blog, we showed what Business Agility is and how it’s the way out if your organisation is stalled and innovation is too slow. In this blog, we’ll go a little deeper into how to take your first steps toward Business Agility. And what obstacles you will encounter along the way.

Moving with society, market and technology nowadays requires a completely different kind of organisation than the classic, hierarchical set-up that many companies, governments and institutions still follow. We also still see a rather hard division between IT and business. A gap that, despite a decade full of transformations, has hardly narrowed. Most companies and organisations do see the problem, but try to solve it by implementing improvements within the existing organisational structure, often by introducing agile work processes at the operational level. Experience shows that doesn’t work.

Starting with Business Agility

In our vision, working towards an agile organisation consists of 3 major components: an adaptive strategy, customer-focused products and organisation design. Here, it is crucial not to focus only, as in agile, on methods and processes. It is about designing the entire organisation to be agile in dealing with change. That’s different from process improvement and can only be done with a fundamentally different view of how your organization is designed, bringing the entire business into the change and not limiting yourself to the IT teams.

But it’s not just about how your ultimate organisation works, it’s also about how you achieve it. We believe that a transformation that belongs to the organisation itself – for which broad ownership is thus felt – has a very high success rate. That is why we work with Org Topologies, they have developed a visual mapping tool, which we use to work with the organisation to map the current ecosystem and determine the path of the transformation.

Want to learn how to use Org Topologies’ tools? Then you can download the “Org Topologies Primer” on their site.

The main advantage of working with a visual model is that it makes conversations easier. You are no longer talking about abstract concepts, but you have images to go with them. Moreover, this approach has its roots in reality and not in a theoretical framework that you borrow from the market (and in which you therefore feel little commitment or ownership). So you’re not stopping yourself from putting your existing organisation into a model, like SAFe or the Spotify model, but moving it to actually move your own organisation from A to B. And then to C, because organisation design is not a project. It is a long-term commitment, where you don’t always know in advance what your next step should be.

Engaging people in change

Redesigning your organisation naturally involves changing the mindset of your people. ‘Big bang’ transformations don’t work because they always forget this very aspect.

You get people to go along with a change by not outsourcing the responsibility, but keeping it with yourself. By exploring the route to more business agility together and changing step by step, you also test each step against reality together and you can quickly make adjustments. It also ensures much more support, so that you anchor the change firmly in your organisation from the start.

This approach gives your transformation support, but also makes it much less complex. How many companies and organisations don’t we see that try to do everything at once and as a result move forward agonisingly slowly? A situation in which it is all too easy for IT to (again) get ahead of the troops and want to implement the technical transformation, without the business support. Thinking in business agility and not in projects ensures that everyone moves forward at the same pace, in manageable steps.

A new kind of consultancy, a different kind of partner

The current times require a different approach to transformations, but also to consultancy. It sometimes seems as if there are only two forms of consultancy possible: on the one hand, the large, strategic consultants who work with fixed models and thick reports. On the other, the more pragmatic approach of companies with a focus on ‘solution selling’: selling ready-made solutions. We have long belonged to the latter category, but that model often does not fit well with organisations with unique problems. Because before you start working with solutions, you need to be clear what problem you are actually solving. On top of that, challenges and problems are also changing, faster than ever.

In an iterative process like making an organisation more agile, in which client and consultant must continuously think together about what the next step is, it makes no sense to blindly push through a standard framework and then send an invoice. Because then you end up with what you already had: an organization stuck in a structure that doesn’t fit the mission. Organisation design is not a project, but a mindset and a long-term commitment. That commitment must come from both sides. That requires consultants who implement change with you and focus on shared impact in a long-term partnership. We want to be that kind of consultant.

Make transformation everyone’s business

But no matter how you organise it, change always hurts. Saying goodbye to old structures and existing ways of working irrevocably evokes resistance. The journey toward greater agility as an organisation also changes responsibilities and roles and sometimes blurs boundaries between departments. For the organisation’s leadership, there is an important responsibility here. Because the mindset of an organisation will never change if the top does not lead the change and get people excited to join in.

The power of visual management

How you manage also has a lot of influence. A pitfall, for example, is to be concerned only with technical changes and forget to actively work on awareness of the higher goals and strategy. Steering on all kinds of, sometimes contradictory, KPIs is also counterproductive. Instead, steer on the right attitude and mindset and reward those who show they are taking the lead in change and improvement. A form of visual management, “Obeya” (Japanese for big room), is often seen as “the brain” and brings all the important information together in one place, visually on the wall. This ensures unified management with clear priorities, and therefore higher productivity.

Next steps

Now that you have your organisation mapped out, you know where you stand. Now you can see which parts of your organisation are fit for purpose and which are not. If you find that products, services and processes no longer match your market, you can now pinpoint why. And, of course, work together to find the solution. This is the stage where a lot of forward energy is generated. The Obeya is also important here. Because the Obeya shows not only data and progress, but also the transformation roadmap.