2022 Year End Message

Dec 18

With holidays approaching, our thoughts turn gratefully to those who have made our success possible. This is a short update on things that are happening.

It has been an amazing year in so many ways. Energy-positive controlled fusion was finally achieved. Biochemical proteins can now be designed from scratch and made to order — the ramifications of that will be immense. In astrophysics, we now know without a doubt that we don’t understand the Universe. And we saw the release of the first machine learning system that is able to answer hard questions credibly. And! — cancer immunotherapy has started to work, indicating that while the road ahead to vanquishing worry about cancer is still long and windy, there seems to be an end.

But let’s go back to the things that we focus on: organizational agility.

The Path to True Agility

This year we announced Constructive Agility, which is a path to actualagility. Agile 2 is the set of desired behaviors; Constructive Agility is how you get there: Just follow the path. What you will learn is that it really is mostly about leadership style.

The Agile community at large is realizing this. This came into our email today from an Agile consulting firm:

Join us for "Leading Yourself First: Implementing Effective Agile Leadership."

Word is getting out – agility is the result of having the right leadership culture throughout your organization. But there are many kinds of leadership – Agile 2 Academy has studied what styles and aspects of leadership are important for agility.

Agility is not a process: it is behavioral. Yes, you need for people to know Lean and Flow patterns, but you still will not attain agility unless you change behavior – how people act when the flow needs to change, or when something does not go as expected: and for today’s complex products in today’s fast-changing world, “not going as expected” is the new normal. So you need to have a culture that knows how to pivot rapidly and effectively – so that people know how to change the flow on short notice.

An Announcement Is Coming

Expect to hear about a significant offering in the first half of 2023! – something that will be unique in the industry, and that will reinforce your Constructive Agility journey.

We also will be announcing a leadership seminar offering, being developed in collaboration with organizational psychologist and MBA Dr. Marcelle Bastianello, to help people to improve the leadership style of people who have leadership roles throughout their organization – in ways that enhance actual agility.

And don’t forget about our Agile 2 Foundations course, which provides the intellectual foundation for agility: an understanding of well established leadership models, and what we know from behavioral psychology and cognitive science about how people think, create, communicate, and behave in groups; plus key patterns from Lean, Flow, and Operations Research.

Being Generative – Not Dictatorial

Changing behavior requires being generative – you can’t dictate things like, “Stop competing with each other”, or “start voicing ideas without fear of being an outlier”.

Leaders need to include people in the ideation. Constructive Agility is a pathway that introduces that generative leadership style along the way, to help you to adjust everything, including expected behavior, aka “culture”, in the course of developing your own processes.

Crucially, being generative does not mean that leaders don’t make decisions. In fact, good judgment about when to make a decision and when to let others decide is one of the most important aspects of leadership – even generative leadership.

Case Study: Designing a New Research Institute

One of our most interesting clients is a major university that is launching a new research institute. Their challenge is that they want to combine groups who are not accustomed to working together: scientists who focus on infectious diseases, and other scientists who focus on cancer. Recent discoveries have caused these fields to overlap, and so the wish is that the new institute will perform groundbreaking interdisciplinary research, and move quickly and effectively. We have been asked to help them to,

Define their Mission and Vision.
Define core Strategies – including a strategy for creating a collaborative culture.
Establish the above as ongoing – not “one and done” – in a way that is inclusive and generative, yet also decisive.

We have been using a generative approach, meeting with scientists one-on-one and also in groups, to ideate and plan. A key objective of ours is to create a sense of ownership among the scientists.