In a highly ambiguous, complex and uncertain business environment, an agile strategic approach is the key to effective and efficient management.

An agile strategy is a “set of practices”, to incorporate in the way in which our company continuously adapts to a rapidly changing world, it is about continuously driving change.

The agile strategy concept describes the ability of an organization to remain flexible and fluid, continually changing and updating its operations through new innovations.

Technology and globalization have been elements of change, have made the internal value chain disaggregate, disintegrate.

Organizations need to move faster and independently.

The change disruptor is a continuum, it is a recursive framework, a living artifice and constantly redefining itself and change within the organization to adapt to the environment quickly.

“Transformation means that you are really” fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, “the way it responds, and the way it leads.”

Strategic agility isn’t about traditional reorganization, it’s about transformation.

For strategic agility to exist, it is necessary to commit to investments in the following elements, asking ourselves the following questions:

1. Centrality in the client.
   1. Are the objectives based on core needs?
2. Organic and autonomous approach.
   1. Is there collaboration between the organization’s collaborators to carry them out?
3. Build the foundation for meaningful and healthy interactions.
   1. Are teams empowered to execute decisions?
4. Fast learning and experimentation.
   1. Can decisions be tested quickly?

The organizational parameters defined by the traditional strategy have not changed much in an agile strategy, they are integrated as by: the vision, mission, values, accompanied by a set of financial objectives, an operational plan or road map, it is executed regularly with a 3-5 year perspective.

Figure 1: Spaceship that took us to the moon (* Moonshot Thinking).

* Moonshot Thinking is when we choose a big problem and propose to create a radical solution to the problem using disruptive technology. Also, a shot to the moon targets a 10 times greater impact on problems, not just a 10% improvement.

In a highly volatile market, which changes rapidly, the rhythm or metabolism of the company must be greater or equal in its speed, this realizes that a new norm is emerging. The objectives of the strategy may have remained the same, but your methods must now change.

The most notable differences of an agile strategy framework with a traditional one are delimited by the “how” it is done, based on Fernando, R (2019), are the following:

Approach: Developing the strategy becomes a framework, not a process. A framework is an entity between a model and a method. A framework is a structure, or system, for the realization of a defined result or objective.

Shifting priorities: strategic priorities shift from a set of goals to a dynamic horizon, the place where market opportunities meet organizational capabilities.

Iterative approach: Long-term strategies can never be taken for granted. Therefore, all domains of the strategic lifecycle must be iterative.

Pace and flexibility: given the dynamic nature of this horizon, the strategic pulse of the organization beats monthly and quarterly instead of annually or every two years, which generates a greater response capacity, this means that the metabolism of the organization.

Progress and results: The objective is to obtain a greater response capacity in highly dynamic markets. Instead of tracking lagging or traditional indicators, you need to create leading indicators.

Team: The agile strategy team is now a multidisciplinary team that crosses the organization, levels, functions and organizational limits, it is a team that executes agile with agile.

Thanks for reading this articule.

Miguel Martínez, 03/03/2021

Bibliographic references:

1. Ismail, I., Palao, F., y Michelle, L. (2019). Transformación Exponencial. México D.F.: Bubok Publishing SL.
2. Lyngso, S. (2014). Agile strategy management: Techniques for continuous alignment and improvement. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
3. Fernando, R. (2019). Agile strategy: How to create a strategy ready for anything. Harlow, England: Pearson.
4. Lambert, D. (2020). Practical Guide to Agile Strategy Execution: Design, Architect, Prioritize, and Deliver your Corporate Future Successfully. CA: Independently published.
5. Wiraeus, D., y Creelman, J. (2019). Agile strategy management in the digital age: How dynamic balanced scorecards transform decision making, speed and effectiveness. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
6. Porter, D. T., y Porter, M. E. (2015). Estrategia competitiva: Técnicas para el análisis de los sectores industriales y de la competencia. México D.F.: Grupo Editorial Patria.

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Para no generalizar, voy a presentar este tema en base a mi experiencia y las principales premisas del autor.

El liderazgo visible es una superficie.

El liderazgo se basa en influir en el comportamiento de las personas para lograr metas, obtener resultados. No solo debe centrarse en el resultado, que se esta desarrollando en conjunto, sino también dar prioridad a las personas que construyen el resultado. Para tener un estilo de liderazgo más empático, es necesario ser servidor de las personas, significa influir en las personas a través del desarrollo de su potencial, para que primero crezcan y permitan alcanzar resultados de una manera más fluida, tomando ventaja del aprendizaje.

“La diversidad es un hecho, la inclusión es una decisión, es el primer paso para construir seguridad psicológica siendo parte de nuestra mentalidad y lógica de acción, si no tenemos esta forma empática de pensar va a ser muy difícil sentir y responder de manera efectiva hoy”.

Lo más visible, siempre recibe más felicitaciones, pero casi siempre resulta en lo menos significativo. Siendo las premisas básicas de las decisiones, las menos visibles, estas premisas residen entre los dos oídos de una persona. Residen en una lógica de acción, compuesta principalmente de cómo alguien interpreta su propio comportamiento y el de los demás, cómo se mantienen o se protegen contra las amenazas, cómo perciben el mundo que los rodea y cómo reaccionan ante ello.

El liderazgo completo es un iceberg.

El liderazgo visible es como una caja gris. Una lógica de acción comienza a pintar esta caja con colores que representan medidas cualitativas y cuantitativas de una forma de pensar para estar más despierto y consciente de ella. Ser consciente de un estilo de liderazgo y su relación interna es el inicio, parte de un sistema de causa y efecto, donde la causa está en la lógica de acción y el efecto en los resultados que se logran como líder.

Significa que si alguien quiere cambiar sus resultados, tiene que cambiar su lógica de acción.

Cambio de creencias y toma de decisiones.

Para cambiar una lógica de acción, el autor propone experimentar con nuevos comportamientos interpersonales, forjar nuevos tipos de relaciones y aprovechar las oportunidades laborales.

La transformación de una lógica de acción de individualista a estratégica, se basa en la mentoría mutua con personas que desafían los supuestos y prácticas, involucran en una relación persona a persona basada en el aprendizaje y el crecimiento.

“Hoy” la fórmula para ver todo el iceberg es concienciar. Significa ampliar la perspectiva y el compromiso para experimentar un siguiente paso:

1. Conocimiento focalizado, para crecer continuamente sabiendo cómo amplificar las habilidades, para ser más efectivo en el logro de metas.
2. Aprendizaje acelerado, recibir coaching y mentoring para acelerar la transformación de la lógica de acción.
3. Comunidad de práctica, donde las personas “desafían suposiciones y prácticas personales”, experimentan “nuevos comportamientos interpersonales” y “comprenden otras perspectivas”, it’s the value of a community.

Para liderar una transformación de manera efectiva, una persona debe dominar su auto-liderazgo, cambiar la lógica de acción y extender esto a su entorno interpersonal, para volverse significativamente más visionario e innovador, para adaptarse a un mercado turbulento y en crecimiento, un mercado global.

Miguel Martínez, Diciembre 2 del 2020.

Bibliografía:

1. Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine Books.
2. Hamman, M. (2019). Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out. 6550 Fisherman Bay Road, Lopez Island: Agile Leadership Institute.
3. Rooke and William R. Torbert, D. (2015, July 16). Seven Transformations of Leadership. Retrieved December 02, 2020, from https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership

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In order not to generalize, I will present this topic based on my experience and the main premises of the author.

Visible leadership is a surface.

Leadership is based on influencing the behavior of people to achieve goals, obtain results. You should not only focus on the result, which is developing together, but also give priority to the people who build the result. To have a more empathetic leadership style, it is necessary to be a servant of people, it means influencing people through the development of their potential, so that they first grow and allow to achieve results in a more fluid way, taking advantage of learning.

“Diversity is a fact, inclusion is a decision, it is the first step to build psychological security being part of our mentality and logic of action, if we do not have this empathic way of thinking it will be very difficult to feel and respond effectively today”.

The most visible always receives the most compliments, but almost always results in the least significant. Being the basic premises of the decisions, the least visible, these premises reside between the two ears of a person. They reside in a logic of action, composed mainly of how someone interprets their own behavior and that of others, how they maintain or protect themselves against threats, how they perceive the world around them and how they react to it.

Complete leadership is an iceberg.

Visible leadership is like a gray box. An action logic begins to paint this box with colors that represent qualitative and quantitative measures of a way of thinking to be more awake and aware of it. Being aware of a leadership style and its internal relationship is the beginning, part of a cause and effect system, where the cause is in the action logic and the effect in the results that are achieved as a leader.

It means that if someone wants to change their results, they have to change their action logic.

Change of beliefs and decision making.

To change a logic of action, the author proposes to experiment with new interpersonal behaviors, forge new types of relationships and take advantage of job opportunities.

The transformation of an action logic from individualistic to strategic is based on mutual mentoring with people who challenge assumptions and practices, and involve a person-to-person relationship based on learning and growth.

“Today” the formula to see the entire iceberg is to raise awareness. It means broadening perspective and engagement to experience a next step:

1. Focused knowledge, to continually grow knowing how to amplify skills, to be more effective in achieving goals.
2. Accelerated learning, receive coaching and mentoring to accelerate the transformation of the action logic.
3. Community of practice, where people “challenge personal assumptions and practices,” experience “new interpersonal behaviors,” and “understand other perspectives,” it’s the value of a community.

To lead a transformation effectively, a person must master his self-leadership, change the logic of action and extend this to his interpersonal environment, to become significantly more visionary and innovative, to adapt to a turbulent and growing market, a global market/environment.

Miguel Martínez, December 2th of 2020.

Bibliography:

1. Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine Books.
2. Hamman, M. (2019). Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out. 6550 Fisherman Bay Road, Lopez Island: Agile Leadership Institute.
3. Rooke and William R. Torbert, D. (2015, July 16). Seven Transformations of Leadership. Retrieved December 02, 2020, from https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership

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Today, we will go to the nineth step of our path: “Portfolio and Strategic Themes”.

Institutional alignment includes organizational leadership, knowledge of the vision, strategy and tactics of the business, and the alignment of each program, vision, strategy and product tactics as a value stream.

The stakeholder’s commitment is very important in the process to maintain flexibility and stability of the strategy, a practice that helps us to keep an environment aligned and prepare it to scale is agile product management, since the artifacts that it generates will allow us to integrate the value of each of the initiatives at the time of executing the corresponding value flows.

A portfolio is a set of programs or products managed as a group to achieve strategic objectives, portfolio management basically consists of deciding which initiatives to implement and in what order of priority.

Each business unit within a company will have a portfolio of income-generating products and services. Each portfolio is guided by a strategy, or a set of strategic themes, and supported by the people and processes necessary to carry out that strategy.

Lean portfolio management provides us with a high-level planning perspective in an agile framework and refers to the definition, refinement, prioritization, and financing of business initiatives for implementation by delivery teams and schedules. These initiatives are often referred to as epic and, once approved at the portfolio level, translate into actionable features, which must be realized by the execution program teams. A program is a collection of linked products, involving several teams of collaborators.

When we work on creating an agile work environment, it is very important that business leaders know the value of agility and know how to take advantage of it to obtain solid results, “culture should not eat strategy at breakfast, company leaders they are the ones in charge of it, they will set the example in the co-creation of capacities ”.

That’s all for now, in the next capsule we will go to the tenth and last step of our path: “Business and Cultural Transformation”.

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Now, we will go to the seventh step of our path: the “Creation of value centers”.

The mapping of value flows with other business units  has to do with all those areas with which we interact to enable the delivery of value, at the beginning in some cases hey will see it as an exception in the treatment of their traditional processes (if it is that there are processes of course), in my experience I listened to say several times to the representatives of other business units: “Let’s do it quickly, they are agile teams that are sponsored by the CEO, we quickly respond to their request and continue with our times and traditional procedure”.

Later, we had to experiment that these teams became a ring of impediments and obstacles to enable the release of the product.

One of the basic premises that we obtained as a reflection is that a traditional team will never better serve an agile team doing it in a traditional way, we already know the answer, that environment will grow poorly to a level as great as the capability of the business unit owner to get a budget, but it will do so without achieving sustained capability, which will eventually cause a financial sustainability crisis (scope corruption and bottlenecks are examples), which will imply seeing the work approach differently, in an agile way (either Kanban or Scrum).

Something similar happens when adding technical areas, in such a way that the delivery is transparent and a single flow of value to the customer is visualized.

When we establish the value of operational excellence, all our collaborators have seen the difference between working in a traditional way to working in an agile way, they have seen it based on product increments, improved local motivation and user satisfaction, operational excellence is related to at least 3 elements, the first is personal excellence, the second is excellence in teamwork.

The third is the creation of an environment that really fosters the first and second characteristics there are various frameworks that help us to work and integrate each of these areas, the impact that we must observe is the positive experience of our clients, which must be followed by financial impact.

In many places we have observed that business owners and product owners are more focused on the financial impact on the business, if we think about it, the coverage and the positive impact on the client will be proportional to the business prosperity we generate.

In the next capsule we will go to the eight step of our path: “Agile at Scale.”.

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In our last capsule we have reviewed the fifth step of our path: “Inspection and adaptation of the environment”.

Now, in this capsule, we will go to the sixth step of our path: the “Extension to other business units”,

When we talk about extensibility to other business units, we must think about all those capabilities that we have built internallym and how we can replicate them, based on the reflection of the context, is it the same? and if they work on it. Our experience here is related to an extensive dictionary of practices that teams master and that have built internally in the organization, in one of the places where we implement a complete transformation, we took on the task of managing these learning domains, both as organizational assets and team competencies, in such a way that at the end of 6 months we had about 50 unique practices that the teams had created, different from the initial ones, of the chosen frameworks, initially based on a maturity approach and mastery (Deyfrus) in the implementation of solutions.

Replicating the essence of the practice is a concrete gift, obtained from a previous experiment to reduce something to the relevant and significant, without losing the original value.”

To extend this agility to other business units, it is important that we carry out a strategic alignment, similar to that carried out in the first step, in order to define the value of this extension and transformation, we will implement everything we have learned and has worked, mapping the value flows of this business units, making a tactical and strategic alignment in order to know the implementation approach from which we can obtain an initial “implementation backlog”, which consists of our “quick wins” as a reference.

That’s all for now, in the next capsule we will go to the sixth step of our path: “Creation of value centers”.

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In this capsule, we will go to the fifth step of our path: the “Inspection and adaptation of the environment”,

This is a relevant process for continuous improvement emerged from a reflection exercise, the more frequent we have it, and we carry out the reflections in a disciplined way, the more learning, we will achieve, remember that the objective of learning is adaptability, adapting the mediums to the environments.

The experts who inspect the real products don’t come from outside, they are the individuals who are in the same environment and teams, one of the objectives is to enable early return of investment, which in this case is the progress of the transformation, seen from the perspective of increasing the value delivery or capabilities that are built as we move forward.

A basic way of asking ourselves to improve is: What did we do well? What are the opportunity areas that we face? and of course, the improvement actions to be carried out, all this triggers to decision-making, enables effectiveness, efficiency, in addition to continuing or deliberately pivoting with a product.

I particularly dedicated myself from my beginnings with agile to team coaching, with scrum and Kanban, this also applies to integration teams that can be centers of excellence and prioritization teams that are born in the strategic level, yes, they are also agile teams, but with a different type of value delivery that must be synchronized with the transformation cycles.

That’s all for now, in the next capsule we will go to the sixth step of our path: “Extension to other business units”.

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