In this blog, you'll learn how to use both Heart of Agile and VUCA Prime core values and principles to enable Business Agility. I'll begin by explaining the basics of Business Agility. Next, we'll look at how simple and powerful Heart of Agile is. Then, I'll talk about the VUCA Prime framework and its importance in our current way of life. Finally, you'll see how these three concepts are deeply connected when it comes to behaviors, practices, and tools.
Before we start, a disclaimer: I write based on what I've learned and lived; therefore, it's my point of view. Feel free to disagree, and we can have a great discussion.
Both Scrum.org and AgileBusiness.org define Business Agility as the ability of an organization to adapt itself quickly. This adaptation may mean transforming traditional, functional, internal silos with too much power at the top of the pyramid into internal end-to-end value delivery teams with a flat hierarchy and high level of collaboration. It also may encompass responding rapidly to market changes and customer needs without compromising the quality of a product or service. Hence, whether internal or external, Agility enables a business to survive and thrive.
Another exciting and critical approach comes from Dr. Klaus Leopold, a respected computer scientist and Kanban pioneer. He states that "Business Agility is not about having many agile teams, but about having agile interactions connecting them." This approach warns us to pay more attention to the means instead of only transforming the parts.
Why Agile Teams Have Nothing to Do with Business Agility. Image courtesy of InfoQ.
Why is it necessary to enable Agility in businesses?
Why have we talked so much about transformation in recent years? Why do we need to change, to innovate, to disrupt? Why are we continually seeking these things? The answer is simple: changing and adapting is a matter of organizational, professional, and personal survival. If we are not trying to find a way to "kill" our current way of thinking, working, and solving problems, we can be sure that there is someone else doing it for us.
The challenge is all about delivering more value to our customers and being able to do this in a fast, flexible, collaborative, viable, profitable, friendly way. Acting this way should grant a company good outcomes, satisfied customers, and happy employees!
So, now that we know the basics of Business Agility and why it's crucial to practice in our teams and companies, we can begin exploring how to practice it.
Dr. Alistair Cockburn, one of the signatories of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (a.k.a. the Agile Manifesto), came up with what he called a reminder of what's essential. This is called Heart of Agile. Heart of Agile is a group of four words around a heart, and this image represents a radically simpler approach to achieving outstanding outcomes, not only in the software development process, but in every area.
Master the Basics
If you do only these four things (Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve) over and over, you should see a positive evolution in your work and your deliveries because you're doing the essential, practicing, and mastering the basics of Agility.
However, despite having only four words that are as simple and direct as they seem, Heart of Agile also gives you the freedom to expand on these concepts. From this starting point, there are many powerful ways to implement Business Agility.
Have you heard of General Stanley McChrystal? He is a retired military general and author/co-author of several books, including Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. While fighting in a war, General McChrystal realized that his troops could not compete against a network of small cells that attacked quickly and unexpectedly and then hid. Although his troops were more massive, they operated under an extremely vertical structure that did not allow them to act as flexibly or as fast.
The General then broke a big paradigm and began to transform the structure of the troops under his command into a team network that combined:
The silos were torn down. Team best practices were analyzed and quickly disseminated to the rest of the teams. The change in the organizational model - from vertical, inflexible, and decision-making in the hands of a few - to a "team of teams" was the key to their success. The image below gives us a good idea of what they did:
General McChrystal had to do what he did because he was in a VUCA scenario. VUCA is an acronym first used more than 30 years ago to describe the world's new behavior at the time. In the late 1990s, it began to be more discussed, mainly in relation to military education. VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Let's examine each of these in depth:
Volatility
The amount and speed of changes nowadays make it very difficult to predict scenarios as we did before. However, these occurrences are not necessarily hard to understand (knowledge about it is often available). The main problem here is the lack of stability and the sudden turn of events.
Uncertainty
Low understanding of issues and events due to insufficient information; this results in a lack of predictability.
Complexity
The issue or event has many interconnected pieces (e.g., high coupling in software engineering). Information is partially available or predictable, but the volume or nature of it can be overwhelming to process.
Ambiguity
Uncertainty connotes a lack of predictability because there's not enough information. With Ambiguity, on the other hand, you can have enough information, but the causal relationships connecting information are entirely unclear. There's a lack of understanding of precisely what the situation is.
Despite the fact that VUCA has been around a long time, this is still our reality. We try to keep up with scenarios and problems that change all the time; we find multiple causes for our problems, instead of one single root cause; and we make decisions that always come with some level of trade-off, which often leaves us to choose the one with the least impact on our projects or businesses. It is almost as if we are sailing in rough seas without clear directions and with minimum help from navigational devices. We always want to get to a safe port or beach (a.k.a. solving problems), but we also want to do this in the best way possible.
With that in mind, Bob Johansen, former president of the Institute For The Future (IFTF), released a new concept about this turbulent world. He called it the VUCA Prime Framework . These are the skills/attributes we must develop, incorporate, encourage, and spread to our teams, peers, and leaders so that we can reduce the paralyzing effects of VUCA.
Vision can fight Volatility
When we have a clear purpose and well-defined goals, we know why we are doing something and what are the main criteria for success. Hence, the conditions do not affect us much. We'll probably recover faster and incur less damage than we would if we were clueless about the vision.
Understanding can fight Uncertainty
Everyone should understand the business vision, their role in the team, and their particular contribution to the vision's success. Values, strategies, and metrics should flow dynamically across teams. It is vital to promote constant communication and active listening to give and receive understanding.
Clarity can fight Complexity
We usually get Clarity by making things simple without being simplistic. This involves bringing matters to the surface, understanding them, and prioritizing them. For example, this might mean identifying all the actors involved in a complex situation, their problems and goals, their causal relationships (if any), and so forth.
Agility can fight Ambiguity
We fight Ambiguity by identifying our assumptions and hypotheses and then validating them. This requires processes that allow us to experiment, fail, learn quickly, build, test, measure, learn again, and improve. So, it's about Agility.
So, let's wrap everything up! Here is a list of behaviors, practices, and tools that I consider of great relevance:
As we saw, there are many possibilities and variations for enabling Business Agility. This blog's purpose is to highlight a few of these. Key takeaways: it's crucial to remember that you must seek to master the basics of Agility (Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve) and always fight VUCA effects (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) with VUCA Prime (Vision, Understanding, Clarity, Agility).