Organizing for Adaptability
Understand the typical problems and pitfalls that organizations face when adopting agility at scale and learn to build a successful organization comprised of self-managing cross-functional teams that create customer value.
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Agility is the ability of an organization to adapt to new conditions and to change its direction while creating maximum value and customer experience.
—Mike Beedle
The basic building blocks of an Agile organization are self-managing cross-functional teams that can create customer value. When you combine many such teams, you can create larger groups that self-organize effectively around the ever-changing market needs. To make that possible, you need to understand the typical problems and pitfalls that organizations face when adopting agility at scale, and what to change so that your organization can be successful.
Hello, VUCA World!
We live in exponential times—that is, a time when the speed of change is increasing exponentially. VUCA is an acronym used to describe or reflect on the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of general conditions and situations.
Here are just a few facts to get us started:
A business cycle that was 75 years long 50 years ago was only 7 years in 2017.
As many as 93% of U.S. multinational enterprises are changing their business models.1
A higher “percentage of profit and Revenue [have come] from NEW products and services in the last five years”—50% on average, and 70% in more competitive industries.2
Half of the companies in the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000 (according to Pierre Nanteme, CEO of Accenture).
To cope with this fast-changing environment, it is not a surprise that organizations are striving for agility these days. Indeed, many organizations are now asking this question: How can we become sufficiently Agile to reach our goals? Although agility might help the organization to achieve some of those goals, it is not a silver bullet, and “responding to change” is not enough. The Agile approach is to work in customer-driven iterations that frequently deliver value to the end user or customer. Adopting Agile at scale requires a supporting organization design.