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Embrace the feedback loop
Organizations need to become more operationally responsive to adapt to the new and changing paradigms.
Responsiveness in that sense means: embracing change, learning quick and responding to its business environment.
This all requires some agility: new evolved approaches to work, evolved leadership, proper resource management.
The 21 century breaths unpredictability and uncertainty. Things have become complex, even to the point of unknowable. Complexity increases because things have to go faster, while at the same time things become more interconnected. It requires us to move from efficiency towards responsiveness. Responsiveness can be framed as: adaptability to respond to changing conditions organically.
A recommendation to shift towards responsiveness is to decrease the cost of failure and increase the cost of experimentation:
fail to learn mentality: smaller bets, smaller fails, more learning
bring in purpose and engagament: while people can bring their whole self, fully energized, they also buy into the cause.
The intent is to empower people at the lowest level in the organisation: empowerment happens when information is available.
In order to boost cultural change and leverage information better, it requires people to develop new skills: curiosity, functional expertise, risk taking. But even more, it also requires them to develop their social intelligence (compassion, empathy, trust building), in order to increase team collaboration and become more resilience.
Responsive organisations put leaders in transition:
being able to build trust (be generous, emphatize similarities)
creating transparency
having a shared consciousness (everybody needs to know, contextual understanding, constant updates)
be vulnerable enough.
When moving from efficiency to responsiveness:
interaction is essential
high value collaboration is needed
leadership goes into transition.
Start with value delivery first
From survival to thriving
As explored earlier, efficiency can be seen as a tool. When you use the tool you become better at what you do. In the case of doing the wrong thing, it means that you are doing the wrong thing faster, burning money faster, etcetera. But the same things is true when you do the right think more efficient: gain marketshare, grow your business faster, etcetera.
The thing is that is starts first with knowing what the right thing is. It's by continuous improvement, iterating, incrementing, running experiments and poking reality, that you discover what the right thing is. It's by trying out different ways that you learn what efficiency looks like. And today, we all need to learn to do this faster than before.
efficient x ineffective: this is burning money.
What happens? You focus on the wrong thing.
What you need to do? Crash your projects asap.
inefficient x effective: this is delivering what the customer want but costly.
What happens? You focus on the right thing but it comes some inefficiencies
What you need to do? Focus on continuous improvement.
efficient x effective: this is delivering what the customer wants, sooner and safer.
What you need to do? Continue what you're doing.
Embrace the Innovation Mindset
Business like stability and continuity. When business as usual activities generate enough revenue, we like to keep that system as stable a posible. That is what is expected of 95% of your people in your organisation: contribute to a stable system.
But with disruption lurking around the corner, we have to start thinking more in novel practices and business. For that we need to embrace a different kind of thinking, more closely related to innovative thinking.
Learning divergent and convergent thinking
J.P. Guilford (psychologist), introduced the concepts of divergent and convergent thinkin in 1956 as part of his work on the structure of human intellect. The two modes of thinking are foundational in understanding creativity and problem-solving.
Divergent thinking is the process of generating multiple, unique solutions to a problem. The goal is to explore as many possible options or ideas. It's not about the correct answer but about as many answers as possible. Given that we are looking for options, in triggers creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, imagination.
Convergent thinking is the process of narrowing down multiple ideas or options into a single, best solution. The goals is definitely to find the most accurate or effective answer. You need to use your logical and analytical brain since you are looking for the correct answer or the optimal solution.
Divergent and Convergent thinking in reality for Agile teams:
Divergent thinking is key during sprint planning, retrospectives or innovation workshops, where creativity and idea generation are needed.
Convergent thinking helps during Backlog Refinement or Prioritization, where the team must decide on the most valuable items to deliver.
Focus on value delivery and take emerging requirements into account.
from 'I want a car'
to 'I want to go from a to be b faster than walking
and I like to enjoy the nice weather if possible'.
Flow Efficiency
Looking at outcome, not output.
The resource utilization trap
It's flow over resource utilization
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