“To be agile” is often a badge of honor.

It conveys your flexibility, nimbleness and your ability to be adaptive.

Agility is today going far beyond just being responsive,it goes into constantly adjusting and being versatile, modifying to meet rapidly changing conditions.

Yet this often seems the very opposite within many of our organizations and the very people employed within them. They seem rigid, inflexible and determined to stay ‘resolute’ to the established ways and routines built up over years.

They love stability, it is their bedrock but equally, they do need a greater fluidity to their performance and structures as well.
The challenge is to keep the stability but to build around it a more agile, dynamic set of capabilities. Today this stability is your platform, your backbone, the anchor points you need to return to but it also does mean the need of being far more ruthless on jettisoning the legacies and some of the hierarchies that have built up.

So why is that?
Many of our established organizations are often caught up in legacy systems and procedures, hierarchies, structures and process descriptions that can often trap them in rapidly changing market conditions unable to respond.

Also today our organizations are falling behind in their innovation, it lacks a level of boldness or degree of novelty. They have honed their incremental skill-set right down to keep the core intact, to allow the business to keep moving along to a steady, comforting beat.

Those that follow this incremental path are often rewarded the most, they never want to ‘rock the boat or challenge the status quo” as this provides them the expected financial rewards in the year-end bonus.

The organization is structured so the measurement and rewards cascade down so all are nicely aligned. Everything is controlled, it has rules yet when disruption suddenly arrives, it will watch out.

Stable worlds are brilliant but they never seem to stay that way

Now, this alignment is great in a stable world where the market is simply moving along at a steady pace but what happens when a sudden usurper suddenly appears on the horizon, determined to take away all that you felt was rightly fully yours. Suddenly the world changes, you become far more aware, tuned in to the changes that have been going on, for sometimes a long time, all around you.

Suddenly what you had become comfortable with is about to become a straight jacket. You feel constricted, trapped, and blame the bureaucracy for allowing this to happen. You crave some agility, some freedom to do things differently.

The problem often lies in the simple fact the muscles have ossified, frozen into the given routine that kept you happily moving along but not greatly stretched or extended, apart from meeting certain deadlines, responding to the constant stream of regular and predictable requests.

You become alert, you tune into lean management, having a start-up culture, and you seek to move beyond the boundaries, you are encouraged to think out of the box, you are asked to imagine the unpredictable. It is such a shock to the system. Organizations go into cardiac arrest; they are placed in the critical ward desperately hanging on through life support and self-dependency.

This then calls for some radical solutions that open up across broader communities as you are suddenly fighting for your very own survival, to stay attached and connected, to open up and engage, watching helplessly as the very life of all you have been part of is drifting constantly away until you radically embrace the changes required.

Life does not always need to be like this

The health of our organizations, of each of us, is judged far more by this ability to adapt, move quickly and seek out new ways of doing things. We all need to seek out that badge of “agility”

The power of agility has been suggested as quickly becoming what amplifies the power within today’s management practice. It is exercising those organizational ‘muscles’ that can distinguish those that are more agile and adaptive. So what are they for us to practice? Also, what is the associated outcome?

If we take a really useful guide produced by McKinsey, taken from their article “Why agility pays”  it does offer up many of the factors and associated outcomes that allows agility to flow within organizations. Ones to put in place to make us more agile and adaptive.

Some of these practices may already be in place but it is viewing these through the agile lens, it certainly does shift the dynamics of ‘being agile.
Adapting to agile is not easy; it is really painful for many

Many of our slow-moving organizations need to change their game. Here are some initial suggestions:

The quality of the interactions you are participating in, and the engagement practices being undertaken can change by spending considerably less time on one-way dialogues or presentations, this can make a huge difference, you spend the time actually listening to each other, and you are adapting within conversations.

We need to think more of providing an organizational backbone that we build upon as our stable part, that acknowledges both our continued need for stability but it needs increasingly is looking for ways to ‘add on’ more dynamic capabilities.

We need to think of dual designs in some ways that equally exploit and explore. We need to have greater confidence in the use of the cloud for processes that are kept up to date, responsive and crowdsourced for relevance to your needs.

We also need to take hold of all of the constant re-checking, re-working and clarifying all that is going on in many organizations and stop this time-delaying tactic that often hurts the business caught in this analysis paralysis.

This can be replaced by the lean principle of “good enough” often overcoming this sense of slow response. We need to develop these habits of simply testing it, experimenting with it, prototyping it, so it ‘tunes’ increasingly to the market needs for you to then rapidly scale this up. Being adaptive and quickly learning, then translating the value potential into real meaning.

The fourth one is acting quickly, the ability to move fast. The constant striving between keeping the organization on the one hand stable to manage all the ongoing activities yet increasingly making it more dynamic and responsive, exploratory, means certain parts need to be far looser, allowing a more free-flowing, nimble and quicker decision-making mechanism to prevail, pushing the “empowerment to act.”

Today it is all about managing the tensions, adjusting to the dynamics and being responsive at increasing speeds and flexibility. Yet it is also ensuring you have a stable framework that (in)forms your backbone, or compliments it.

One that allows you to quickly learn and see those increasing points of value as they happen, adjust to them and be responsive in today’s far more dynamic and responsive world in new agile and adaptive ways.

The post Making Agility Compatible For You first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I am presently reading an early release draft of a book written by Mike Docherty of Venture2, on innovation, and I would certainly recommend the read when it comes out.

The book Collective Disruption will be available as of February 2015.

The book as Mike wrote to me, is aimed at corporate leaders, both in large and small companies, charged with new sources of transformative growth and makes the case for co-creating new businesses with entrepreneurial partners.

It builds on a foundation of open innovation, but is focused specifically on new business creation (vs core business support).

I know that Mike is passionate about the intersection of corporate innovation and entrepreneurship for co-creating new businesses and business models. As CEO of Venture2, a consulting and new ventures firm, he works with leading brand companies and start-ups to commercialize breakthrough new products and businesses.

Mike has experienced disruption many times.

This crisis is personal one to Mike, as he has seen and been involved in numerous points of innovation disruption.

As he states in his book: “I have been on both sides of the conference table as it (disruption) has unfolded. In my work inside and outside of big brands, I have come to know, respect, and work alongside the managers who have to make innovation work for both the company and the customer. Theirs is a serious challenge. I know because it has been and continues to be, mine as well”.

Mike was part of the turnaround team at Sunbeam Corporation some years back, who combined became really creative thinkers and they become well respected in pioneering many of the aspects of open innovation. They achieved an impressive delivery of 150 product launches in the second year by leveraging partnerships and the internal creative forces, going from the previous 10 new products in the first year.

This experience took Mike into a new direction and helped form his business evolution in his work with his venture business and boutique consulting practice, Venture2.

In his book, he clearly stated open innovation is not enough.

The core of his book is firstly arguing the old definitions of innovation are dead (this I totally agree with) and as he states new ideas are coming from everywhere, emerging competitors are disrupting established companies every day. Companies need to increasingly focus on new business creation for step-change growth.

Yet as he states, and I totally agree, this is a scary place to go for big companies, as this is transformative innovation and most are simply not good at undertaking this.

His book sets out to address that ‘soft spot’ in the big-company skill set. It is all about understanding, learning ad playing the collaborative disruption game. This he believes comes through a collective disruption model where you engage more with the entrepreneurial ecosystem to create market-disrupting businesses.

That means collaborating earlier and more deeply with partners and that’s the roadmap he’s trying to share with this book.

Mike lays out some practical approaches in each phase of corporate/start-up co-creation: discovery, definition, incubation and integration. And he supports his case with interviews and examples from some leading exponents of innovation

He offers a book for the insider of big organizations but also for the partners found outside, as well as for the many entrepreneurs that will find they are dealing with big organizations.

They need faster scale up and preparation for a successful exit, early engagement of the bigger company into the new value proposition, either threatening them or enabling them to enter into a new area of their innovation.

So this is a book that goes beyond transactional approaches and focuses on the need for relationship-based networks and a solid understanding of the innovating ecosystem, one of collective disruption for future growth.

So we are at the end of the old era of innovation?

That era did have self-imposed walls and traditional (old-fashioned) design. Today we need to build our ecosystems, seeking out partners and entrepreneurs alike. This does call for being far more disruptive, as Mike suggests in his book “Collective Disruption,” we need a new order, where you can navigate, always with some risk, into new growth opportunities by constantly learning and collaborating with others.

I would argue once you become familiar with managing in disruptive times, in working with partners all dependent on each other, in mutual and ever-increasingly ecosystems, you learn to look well beyond your old self-imposed borders.

You will suddenly see this new innovation expanse where you can begin to roam to explore increased innovation opportunities. You recognize that migration of constantly moving and change becomes essential, a necessity that gives you a greater chance to not just survive but feed off of those new innovation opportunities.

A place Mike suggests: “where you’re living the unique challenge of creating transformational and step-change growth”.

Finding that set of collaborating capabilities and competencies that can be successfully unleashed as our new innovation activities, ones that can be radically different- they create real growth. One’s where agility, lean and risk-taking become more of the norm, they are dynamic, ever evolving and changing, and so those innovation activities are richer in eventual outcomes.

A place to keep you healthy and sustaining and growing by traversing constantly across a very different, ever-changing (and challenging) landscape, than the one you left behind that also needs renewal.

For some reason reading this book triggered thoughts of the mass migration of Wildebeests in East Africa

As I was reading through the opening chapters, for some reason, it triggered a thought of the mass migration of the Wildebeest in East Africa. The old-established practices of innovation are exhausted; we do need to change our approaches and mindsets to find those new ‘feeding grounds’ of innovation.

Why this book triggered this is that disruption is becoming part of our business life, or it should be. To stay alive today or to remain healthy, you have to leverage and extract from the whole innovation ecosystem to create the different conditions; equally, you need to take increasing risks to transform and improve your chances of survival.

Watching the frantic herds of the wildebeest migration crossing the Mara River can be very spectacular; there are often scenes of great panic and confusion as the massive predator crocodiles in the river wait to pounce. Utter disruption yet necessary to survive and prosper for all involved.

For business, are these predators the consultants advising a business with often conflicting messages adding even more panic, or the entrepreneurs, who seize the ‘feeding opportunity’ to fatten up by creating the frenzy that goes with this crossing point?

When you make a significant move away from your established ‘feeding grounds’ you suddenly have such an expanse of new opportunity but it is not without risk, the risk of crossing over, recognizing the other side is essential to be the place for new, real growth.

I could not get this thinking out of my head of migrations as I continued into the book. Strange isn’t it on what sometimes does get triggered as connections as you read a book?

Are we about to witness this mass movement to find new innovation opportunities?

Mike’s book Collective Disruption certainly nudges us along, it does lay out a case for change, a contributing part of the processes and understandings that needs to ‘stir the forces’ we do need to bring about for real innovation change.

Mike, in his book, partly catches that sense of the wind of change, that is blowing and needed for innovation. Mike offers some highly practical solutions and thinking, based on his depth of knowledge and experiences within his work of approaching your need to change, with an imaginative framework to help you navigate the terrain, so as to make the necessary transition for yourself and your organization.

Innovation, certainly is for me, in real need of changing; the global forces and those competing are making the mass within our companies restless for change.

We are on the road to migration; finding new solutions built far more based on collective and disruptive approaches, that will offer far better innovation outcomes for sustaining our futures and opportunities for achieving better levels of growth we need.

The post Where are the new feeding grounds of innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I named my company Agility Innovation Specialists and at its core, we state that the value of this focus can offer a real “intensity in innovation” that we believe reflects today’s world of need.

We encourage you to disrupt the accepted, to constantly challenge the current ways and push into uncomfortable territory. We suggest you seek out customers’ unmet needs, and unexplored opportunities to give a new diversity to any thinking, and then we set about accelerating these ideas to fruition. Those all need abundant and constant agility.

Many of our business organizations continue to struggle with innovation and how to make it repeatable, sustaining and transformational. Often, it seems, the more large organizations attempt to become ‘agile’ the more they seem to achieve the very opposite, of rigidity.

Finding solutions to building agility is part of the necessary answer to achieving greater innovation solutions.

Our aim is to strengthen the core by building in increasing ‘waves’ of agility within your business and enabling a stronger set of sustaining innovation outcomes.

This comes over time, from this need to have agility, flexibility, and an open enquiring mind that looks to experiment and explore, making for an agile innovator this needs diffusion across the entire organization and that does take time.

I’m always looking to explore agility and recently came across the concept of “collective agility”

Then we have collective agility

I have been reading a good academic paper recently, one that I came across in my Big Data and Cloud research I have been undertaking. The paper is called “Collective Agility, Paradox and Organisational Improvisation” by Yingqin Zheng, Will Venters and Tony Cornford found on the London School of Economics site, under the department of Management.

Their point gained from studying GridPP and its part in the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LHC) where they observed a collective, agile and distributed performance rather than seeing ‘agility’ as small-group and deliberate systems development practices often associated with ‘agile’.

It got me curious. Here is my summary of their paper.

It certainly offers some pointers to managing in more agile ways in a complex and often disparate organization.

Collective agility is focused on the same objective: shared.
In terms of business, it means the mission is shared by all and this mobilizes each person in ways that I feel are trying agility to innovation in new ways, well for me anyway.

It is providing an environment where “unintended consequences” emerge, many positive, others less so, where random thoughts and ideas collide and through these exchanges within the community they form a “collective mindfulness” to solve these complex challenges.

Collective agility seems to require a loose coupling, not heavy structures or rules, encouraging a culture of improvisation and constant ‘tinkering’ that comes from not just intelligence, trust and pragmatism but from the knowledge that lies within the community.

Collective agility needs to have minimal structure, flexible planning, extensive communication and social bonding, all working towards this coherent, facilitated and growing feeling of making good sense (sense-making) through this coordinated but distributed network.

It is totally reliant on the interactions and attention to coordination to achieve this ‘collective mindfulness’

The big “ah-huh” for me

Collective agility is about accepting what is unpredictable and uncontrollable yet working within given boundaries, actively working upon seeking out improving performance and capability, to still perform in these circumstances of uncertainty.

Now for me, many organizations are grappling with uncertainty, volatility and unpredictable situations and resort to trying to master them in rigorous, highly disciplined ways.

This collective agility is suggesting we go the other way, we let go, hang loose but stay collectively focused by just reacting in agile ways. Does that raise some different thinking for you, it does for me.

We are seeking out improved performance but in really agile ways across a distributed community or network. Large organizations today are regretfully still tackling thorny problems in ‘given silo’s’ and this ‘collective agility’ thinking might open up our ideas about collaborating and co-creating in different ways.

It is in the combining of performances, that tackle issues in improvised ways but within a trusted and pragmatic way. It creative productive tensions, dynamics and motivating challenges and the group feel that ‘capacity for action’, motivated to combine, share and explore together to solve the problem.

Rules, structures and organized events often inhibit and feel contrived, the idea behind ‘collective agility’ is it is more natural even within the organization with established routines and strong cultures as they can bind, provide collective strength, as well as inhibit. It is seeking out the minimal structures, releasing the flexibility and bonding that can come from these routines and stronger cultures.

The when what, who, where and how collective agility is performed

According to the authors, agility can be learnt through ‘learned improvisation’ where some established tools are dropped or removed and some ‘surprise, risk and wonder’ are allowed into the exchanges.

The atmosphere of experimentation, trust, shared goals and emotional bonds provide for confidence to grow, in sharing and learning from made mistakes, as it contributes to the ‘higher’ cause of what the community is tackling within these tough problems.

The group grows in its ‘sense of pride in working and searching for a higher cause and is even willing to undertake unpopular tasks to move exchanges along. The motivation grows through this collective agility.

We often recognize improvisation and agility are more easily performed in small groups, jazz improvisation is often used to relate to this agility. The key is often the ambience and this can equally come from building out bigger communities to perform and exchange (notes)

The final thought is agility requires a mental attitude “to let go of control” to interact, to improvise but to seek to keep that sense of cohesiveness of constantly wanting to work things out, working consciously to keep moving forward towards the higher task.

Art and science fuse.

The authors suggest science becomes more like an art- visionary, experiential, passionate, agile and emergent. I’ve written about art and science before, see here “Renaissance comes from combining art and science for innovation“, so I can relate to this need to bring these two often separate practices into one again.

As I was working through this paper, replaying the conceptualization of ‘collective agility’, I liked the comment within the paper “agility for us is an expression of what people do or achieve, rather than what they might do or capabilities they hold”

Then another important part of this paper is managing the Paradoxes
They also bring out Paradoxes and provide a helpful table of these seemingly conflicting ideas or paradoxes to build ‘collective agility’ in understanding. These are based on:

1) The paradoxes of learning: “as we struggle between the comfort of the past and the uncertainty of the future which are fundamental to the process of innovation, transformation and sense-making”. Learned improvisation and reflective spontaneity.

2) The paradoxes of organising: “reflecting tensions between control and flexibility, formal and informal, integrated and differentiation denoting an ongoing process of striving for an equilibrium of often opposing forces”. Planned agility and structured chaos.

3) The paradoxes of belonging: “we strive for both self-expression and collective affiliation”…but also being “self-driven, intelligent and creative people, yet they also have an acute appreciation that success relies on collaborative effort”. Collective individuality and anxious confidence.

They finish the paper by offering useful tables highlighting some key organizational practices that help to make this collective agility work through these paradoxes.

We are constantly searching for agility to perform innovation

Agility is linked to change. Change is constantly throwing obstacles in our way. We are urged to be nimble, to react quickly, and to tackle challenges in new ways. Developing agility allows us to be in a constant ‘state’ of recognizing nothing is seemingly staying the same.

If we are feeling those around us, are all working towards the same goals, then we feel less inhibited, we may not like change but we gradually accept it. If others are reinforcing the necessary change through this ‘collective agility’ it can become a source of new hope, new discoveries, and a place for opportunity, with real excitement, full of possibilities

Gaining that critical sense of collective identity missing from many in our organizations.

By knowing “we” are collectively all working towards the same purpose, constantly having the progress mutually reinforced, allowing for clear debate but being pushed and moving forward, being allowed to freely exchange within a common purpose in ‘collective’ ways, then we are certainly are moving towards a more fluid, organizational agility.

This collective agility might alter the ways we can tackle tough problems and work in volatile environments, which then can yield in collaborative ways, solutions that are more radical and breakthroughs in innovation, something we should all be striving to achieve.

Certainly, this does offer some interesting thoughts to take collaboration and co-creation further through this collective agility concept of greater improvising.
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The post Building Collective Agility for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.