“Sensing is becoming a competence in leadership development”
5 November 2019
Working together during Corona in your organization
6 May 2020
Who would have thought that “agility” got such a practical charge in such a short time?
This shows again: it is often the necessity that encourages change. We all turn out to be a lot more flexible than we thought (and have more skills than we thought!). I am very pleased to see that traditionally (top-down) managed organizations manage to adapt to a totally new circumstance in no time. And I find it fascinating to see that ‘agile’ designated organizations struggle with this.
There are two important things to deal effectively with ever-changing circumstances: the way of work and the basic principles on which they are based.
As for the way of working, successfully operating organizations have three things in common:
- Flow: people know and understand how work is done and how value is delivered.
- Collaboration: people see how work is performed and how it can be improved by working better together.
- Learning: people know and understand how organizations continuously learn and make use of it.
If you know how you deliver work, you will be able and willing to improve this (flow). If you adapt mutual cooperation to the desired improvement in flow, you will learn together. Because you learn together, new insights emerge that result in further improvement of cooperation and flow.
In this way you see a movement that continuously adapts to the circumstance; a dynamic that adapts – naturally – continuously. In this way, a new situation is not a plague, but a challenge to perfect agile working yet one step further. Even if the circumstance is that we suddenly have to work at home en masse with demanding children around us ?
Then about the basics.
Two things are critical to running agile organizations, namely transparency and trust. In order to be optimally agile, you have to anticipate reality, and not a false reality. It is therefore necessary to know what sentiments there are in the organization. Salient detail: these are often not on the surface. In order to retrieve this valuable information, it is necessary that people can tell their story in confidence and anonymous. After all, you only show the back of your tongue if you know that it is not being cut off.
There are several ways to do that:
- Through an external, ‘independent’ (agile) coach or
- By means of an anonymized form / tool such as: Agile Sensing.
If you can qualify the underlying sentiments, you can make optimal use of variations (or: playing with the standard normal distribution) and thereby influence the output.
To learn more about how to improve organizational agility, browse our website. If you cannot find what you are looking for or if you are still looking at all, please let us know. We are happy to help you.
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Greeting,
Arno