The Path To Business Agility

Holistic Transformation in Uncertain Times

 To watch the full webinar visit:
The Path to Business Agility on Media Exchange
 Your Hosts
George Schlitz Evan Campbell

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Topics • Business Today
• A New Way Forward: The Path to Business Agility
• The Popular Answers are Insufficient
• What Business Agility Really Looks Like
• How To Get There
• Transformation – a Holistic View
• Q&A
 The World Has Changed…
“Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.”
~ James Boren

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 The Old Way Firms Organize and Work

Bureaucracy – the 150-year old mashup of military command structures and industrial
engineering that constitutes the operating system for virtually every large-scale organization on
the planet –
• disables our organizations
• makes them inertial, incremental and uninspiring
• costs the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion in lost economic output; about 17% of GDP

~ Gary Hamel in Forbes

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 Bureaucracies… Robust, yet Fragile

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 Robust Yet Fragile Organizations

• Have been built to optimize known processes – and only known processes
• Do not deal well with uncertainty or unexpected/unpredicted events
• Highly specialized to thrive in the known situations, with a distinct set of problems

Robustness has enabled scale and growth of our businesses…but now prevents change and stifles ability
to deal with the unexpected

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 Business in the Era of VUCA

Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA)

Coined by US DOD to characterize nature of modern conflict

Winning amid VUCA demands:

• strategic adaptability
• tactical resilience

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 Physical assets (plant, property, and equipment) made up
more than 80% of the market value of the S&P 500 in 1975.

Today, intangible assets make up over 80% of the S&P 500’s

market value.

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 Our Businesses Won’t Survive…
“Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of
despotism.”
~ Mary McCarthy

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 S&P 500 companies today have the shortest life span in the index’s history

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 Tales
Business Agility Is Required to Survive and Thrive
Of
Woe AOL Atari Magnavox
Kodak Sega Blackberry
Zenith Sun Xerox
Polaroid Silicon Graphics MySpace
Blockbuster Motorola Netscape
Borders Nokia Palm

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 A New Way Forward…
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for
bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”
~ Thomas Sowell

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 The State of Business Today

OUTPERFORM
YOUR
COMPETITION

OUTLEARN
YOUR
COMPETITION
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 And the Popular Answers are Not
Sufficient…
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
~ Churchill

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 Agile Delivery is not enough

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 is not enough
• Lean Startup
• Design Thinking
• Lean UX
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 Continuous Improvement is not enough
• Lean Thinking
• Six Sigma
• Continuous
Improvement

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 Executive
Development is
not enough

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 What Business Agility Really Looks
Like…
"To get the attention of a large animal, be it an elephant or a
bureaucracy, it helps to know what part of it feels pain. Be very sure,
though, that you want its full attention."
~ Kelvin Throop aka R.A.J. Philips

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 Accenture | SolutionsIQ Business Agility Capability Model

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 Delivery Agility
Delivering High Quality Fast and Responsively

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 What Does It Mean to Delight Customers in a Business Agility
Context?

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 deliver highest
value first
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 reduce batch size

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 single piece flow
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 Respond instantly

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 Product Innovation
Innovating Services and Products With the Potential to Disrupt Entire Markets
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 What Does Innovation Look Like in a Business Agility Context?

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 FAIL

FAST

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 Organizational Adaptability
Adapting the Business Organization and Culture

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 What Does an Agile Organizational and Culture Look Like in a
Business Agility Context?

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Management Innovation: Key Areas

• Realign Structures and Operating Models - Decentralize, Flatten

• Budgeting & Portfolio Management - Replace Annual Budgeting

• Focus Role Definitions / Realign Accountabilities

• Modernize Incentives and Measures - Teams over Individuals

• Modernize Performance Mgmt - OKRs Not Stack Rank, Fit to Curve, Cascading
Objectives, etc

• Break Dependencies - in Preference to Managing Them

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 Leadership Agility
Leading The Business Through Complexity

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 What Does Leadership Look Like in a Business Agility Context?

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 The job of knowledge workers shifts

FROM EXECUTING
TASKS

TO OWNING THE ASSETS &

PROCESSES
THAT DELIVER CUSTOMER
VALUE

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 The job of leadership shifts

FROM MANAGING
INDIVIDUALS & TEAMS

TO CONTINUOUSLY
IMPROVING
THE ORGANIZATIONAL
ENVIRONMENTS IN WHICH
INDIVIDUALS & TEAMS
OPERATE
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 Agile Is Above All, a Mindset

“A universal feature of all the site visits was a recognition that achieving these benefits [of
Agile values and practices] is dependent on the requisite leadership mindset.

Where the management practices and methodologies were implemented without the requisite
mindset, no benefits were observed....

What is new is the way that the new management goals, practices, and values constitute a
coherent and integrated system, driven by and lubricated with a common leadership mindset.”

Denning, Goldstein and Pacanowsky. 2015 Report of the Learning Consortium

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 Putting It Together…
trans·for·ma·tion
ˌtran(t)sfərˈmāSH(ə)n/
noun

a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance

synonyms: change, alteration, mutation, conversion, metamorphosis, transfiguration, transmutation, sea change;

• a metamorphosis during the life cycle of an animal

• the induced or spontaneous change of one element into another by a nuclear process

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 Transformation is Needed
For a solution to be transformational, it must
fundamentally alter the strategic capabilities of the
enterprise in a measurable and material manner.

Creating Organizational Capabilities that Didn't Exist Before

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 Holistic Transformation Produces Client Capability

Deliver Fast & Responsively Adapt Organization & Culture

Evolve Leadership
Innovate Products
Disrupt Markets

Our Business Agility Transformation Solution provides clients confidence they

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will realize powerful performance and competitive improvements
 Mapping
Capabilities
to Solution
Domains

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 Transformation Roadmap Swim-lanes (example)
• Change Management and Impediment Resolution • Governance and Compliance
• Org. Communications Plan • PMO Alignment
• Training Plan • Architecture
• Coaching Plan • Roles and Accountabilities
• HR Policies, Incentives, Performance
Management • ProdOps  DevOps

• Product / Program Scaling • Product Management / Marketing

• Portfolio Management • Innovation, Design, Lean Startup

• Budgeting Policy and Process • Hiring
• Software Craftsmanship and CD • Vendor Mgmt
• Operating Model • Tools
• QA Strategy • Facilities / Spaces
• Business Unit Enablement
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 Enabling versus Implementing Transformation

Transformation means change. Only you can change your organization.

The greatest capability we enable you to achieve is becoming a learning organization,

one that can sense and adapt for competitive advantage.

That means transformation isn’t something we can do FOR you, nor TO you.

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 The Ultimate Capability

When intangible assets (knowledge capital) drive enterprise value, competitive

advantage relies on:
• Becoming a learning organization
• The ability to sense and adapt, internally and externally
• Experimenting and validating theories for improvement constantly
• Evolving the enterprise continually to better compete in the ecosystem
• Understanding that your people and their engaged brains and passions are your
ultimate asset

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 SolutionsIQ's Business Agility Campaign, Going Forward

This webinar is the first of several webinars, blogs, white papers, and in person workshops
Subsequent topics will dive deeper into the critical areas of capability (Leadership, Organization and
Operations Management, Portfolio and Budgeting, Innovation, and Delivery)

• See Us at the Business Agility Conference – NYC March

• Subscribe to our announcements for future content and events
• Explore our extensive library of agile resources at www.solutionsiq.com

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 Thank you!
To learn more about SolutionsIQ visit our website

SolutionsIQ can help your clients on their path to Business Agility

Contact [email protected] for more information

Learn more at SolutionsIQ.com