Building the critical foundation of an agile organization
The foundations of
organizational agility start with a stable backbone upon which to
build. Think of it as the hardware and operating system of a good smartphone.
You don’t need to predict all the “apps” you’ll eventually want on your phone,
you just need the right stable platform, so you can download the apps you want
later. Even apps no one had dreamed of can be invented and added, without
having to reinvent the phone itself.
If its basic stable
organizational platform isn’t built for agility, an organization may find that
its “apps” – sticking with the smartphone analogy – will prove very difficult
to sustain and scale over time. The wrong stable backbone leads to
frustratingly slow adaptation to change, yet a near-constant cycle of painful,
disruptive re-orgs to address these shortcomings.
McKinsey’s recent research identifies seven foundational practices that are
essential to support and sustain agile practices across an organization.
The first six practices
are stable ones. They include shared purpose and vision, actionable strategic
guidance, performance orientation, action-oriented decision architecture,
entrepreneurial drive, and shared and servant leadership.
The seventh –
information transparency – is dynamic. Information transparency requires that
employees have unfettered access to operational, financial and customer
information, and that they quickly share learnings, ideas and insights across
organizational boundaries. It can be a low-tech version of sharing information
very rapidly so that those working on related issues have a common set of facts
and information to work from.
Primarily, it’s simply
people having conversations and meetings and collaborating with each other,
aided by platforms for such dialogue as well as organization design and
organizational behavior.
Here are a few
guideposts:
Create a North Star
direction to guide, rather than control, your people. Deliver a strong shared
purpose across the organization, where people feel personally and emotionally
invested in their work and tapped into a sense of meaning. It also requires a
much more ongoing, collective effort to translate purpose into a strategic
direction.
Build a culture of
performance that goes across, not just top-down. This requires a customer-centered,
end-to-end view of performance, not the typical top-down approach. This means
constant feedback – from external input and customers, too – and adjustments as
the organization assesses, progress and recalibrates.
Fix your
decision-making. Complicated,
slow bureaucratic decision-making must go. This requires rethinking how
decisions get made, segmenting decisions and applying the appropriate best
practices based on decision type. The goal is ruthless
role clarity. When you delegate a decision, you really delegate.
Invert the
pyramid. This idea refers to the
shape of a typical hierarchical organization: the CEO sits at the top and, as
you go down the ladder, each management layer gets larger. As a result,
responsibility shifts from deciding, directing, thinking and making choices to
doing, supporting, enabling and executing the directives of those at the
bottom. It is the front line where the real work is done, so put the front line
at the top and the CEO is at the bottom.
This creates the
environment for success.
February
9, 2018 – by Aaron De Smet
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-organization-blog/building-the-critical-foundation-of-an-agile-organization?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1803&hlkid=a0e15aba0645474d8a80696564220a52&hctky=1627601&hdpid=69d4cb78-4c11-416c-b540-4ad2772a4b31
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