Agility is basketball, not golf

The word ‘agile’ is familiar in most organisations, however few seem to know how to apply it well.

Gone are the days where leaders succeeded in running transformation with the skills of a professional golfer, taking time to make perfect decisions as if lining up the winning put on the final tee…creating perfect PowerPoint packs, tirelessly adjusted through peer-review prior to execution; refusing to move unless the conditions provided near-certainty of success.

Corporate agility instead is more like playing a close game of basketball, where leaders as coaches are constantly switching players and tactics, talking with their people and overlooking errors except to learn from mistakes in the post- match review. Where a players’ tenacity, grit and ability to shoot under pressure is rewarded over their perfect ball-handling style, and the team is recognised equally for winning alongside it’s coach.

In order to create better business benefits from transformation, organisations must start doing three key things:

1. Play basketball, not golf. Tear up bearaucratic decision making processes, constantly talk, reward employees for their ability to move quickly and take considered risks, and recognise people for playing well as a team, not individually. Most importantly, leaders must ‘swallow the ego’- coaches are nothing without teams that are winning.
2. Sponsor business implementation in business cases. There is not point in spending millions on buying new businesses or implementing digital tools if the associated changes don’t become quickly embedded as business as usual. New activities can only be successful in generating business benefits once culture, processes, systems, strategy and structure are realigned to create a new normal. Business cases must therefore reflect the true cost of implementing a program into an organisation, which means providing for adequate funding for change management.
3. Build an in-house change management function and capability. It’s not enough to fund business implementation or change management on a case-by-case basis, particularly when there are multiple changes impacting the same stakeholders over many years. Not only will the turnover of capability create long-term inefficiencies, but organisations are far more likely to suffer from change fatigue. Building an enterprise Change Management function and in-house capability will assist in delivering better business benefits on all programs, provide an integrated enterprise view of change impact risks and opportunities and generate better transformation capability over time.