Employees who have been trained for years to adhere to rules and avoid mistakes should now become innovative and creative. Processes that have been trimmed for efficiency should now support diversity. And managers who have been kept "in line" should now act and make decisions in an entrepreneurial manner.
How can the balancing act between the different requirements of efficiency and flexibility be achieved, how can new things be tried out without jeopardizing everything that is tried and tested? And what will happen to the much-vaunted corporate culture, in whose development and maintenance so much time, money, sweat and tears have been invested?
Of course there is no simple answer. Or rather: there are many simple answers, all of which are wrong. Influencing the complex organizational system can only consist of interventions, each of which is a risk in itself. It is not possible to predict what will happen, nor is it possible to repeat what has happened. After all, it is the nature of a complex system to be unpredictable. However, this should not lead to the conclusion that nothing can be planned or that intervention is arbitrary. Quite the opposite: those who act in a complex environment think carefully about what they do, when, why and how. However, they remain in an exploratory attitude while perceiving the effect. You can form hypotheses about what might happen. And compare this with the desired goals.
However, the system then shows a reaction to the intervention and the actors are surprised or not and take the reaction as a starting point for the next intervention, and not as misbehavior of the system, just because something happened differently than expected.
Yes, that does sound lofty and theoretical. And it is a clear departure from the recommendations that are otherwise often given along the lines of: first do A and then B and then C happens. We are arguing here for a fundamentally different approach to the topic of change, namely one based on systems theory. Changing the way people work in an organization is a process that does not follow technical rules and therefore defies the linear order of cause and effect (A, then B, then C).
Anyone who wants to achieve a lasting effect and institutionalize new behaviour in this mixed situation from a management or change agent perspective needs a view trained in systems theory, a range of options for action from a "steady hand" to spontaneous intervention and solid knowledge of agile methods and their implementation.
In this way, we create the image of a role: the role of the agile coach, who is both an agile expert and a facilitator and adds an understanding of leadership and coaching elements to their bandwidth. You become such a person through experience and deployment in corresponding projects and through accompanying training, which, in addition to imparting knowledge elements, primarily promotes individual reflection and broadens the foundation of options for action through the exchange of experience with other people in the same role.
Based on these thoughts, we at wibas have developed the Certified Agile Coach Program in which we want to take interested parties on an agile journey across all sectors and functions. It contains our best knowledge, years of experience from many transformations and the firm conviction that together we can come up with the relevant implementation ideas that the sending companies need to be successful in their markets.
The details of the program are available here.
(Photos: Dylan Gillis, Brooke Cagle and Headway, all on unsplash.com)
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