Start talking about it - new ways of working

If agility is on your company's agenda, then start talking about it.

→ What does agile mean to you?

→ Why is it important to you?

→ What are your customers expecting?

→ What things can you begin to shift and adjust as you move towards newer ways of working?

→ What older ways of working might need to go?

Too many organisations impose change that disrupts employees and leaves them wondering ‘why’. So much so that no amount of town hall meetings or ‘ask me anything’ sessions will resolve or temper the uncertainty.

When agile or agility is on the horizon, or is underway, start talking about it - at all levels across the organisation and with all sorts of people.

Secretly configuring a change or transformation in the background that will be ‘rolled out’ across the organisation as of x date isn’t agility. It’s prescription and control - sorry, that’s still an old way of working.

Develop, discuss and explore the need for agility in your business and engage with people on it, talk about it. You might need to be willing to hear some uncomfortable questions and uncertain objections.

Action: Put agility on the agenda of your next meeting. Kick off with a conversation about it. Find out what people think. 

Don’t outsource your culture change

Adopting new more agile ways of working is on the agenda for businesses - large, small, corporate, not for profit, government - responding to the needs of customers and the changing ways of the world. If a business needs to change how it is working, the culture will need to shift too.

You can't hope to make changes to the way work is done without looking at what the culture might need to be like. Yet many organisations engage or outsource to a company to 'come in and do it for us'. It's ‘let’s get someone in, they’ll make it happen and we won’t have to do it'.

Yes it can get messy and complex and tough, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

Any cultural shift in your organisation will take time. It’s not a mandate; it’s a conversation, a demonstration, and a commitment to try on whatever new ways of working appeal.

New cultures are created, meeting by meeting, conversation by conversation, task by task, person by person. They don't switch over like summer time or flick on like a light.

So start now. It doesn’t need to be perfect and you don’t need to have it all ‘worked out’ first.

Action: Get your people together and start a conversation on the culture they'd like to work in.

Value sooner is the goal.

I'm posting about newer ways of working this week and getting value into the hands of customers, users, clients, patients, students - whoever those people are that you're there for - this is the goal.

The goal isn't to complicate, grandstand, waffle on, time waste or keep busy. Nor is the goal to over-consult, keep working on something until its perfect, bring even more people into a meeting or add still more people into the cc field of an email.

It's the reverse.

With new ways of working, you're looking at how to get to value, sooner. That often means reducing waste, doing the minimum to get something up and going, staying focused on the work elements that best deliver value ... and then delivering that value, testing it out.

When I work with teams and organisations helping them understand and introduce new-er ways of working than what they're currently using, I'll work through these four topics with them:

1️⃣ Involve

2️⃣ Ideate

3️⃣ Implement

4️⃣ Iterate

Let's look at them in more detail over the next few days. Are you with me?

You don’t have to be the perfect leader

In fact you don't need to be the 'perfect' anything: friend, parent, partner, colleague, companion. Setting yourself an expectation to be perfect at anything is a journey to disappointment.

And that's what disappointment is : it's the gap between what happens and what your expectation is.

Ease off.

You don't need to try so hard, work so hard or work so long. This drive for perfect anything or everything is making us way too hard on ourselves.

Where might you benefit from easing off on an expectation you have of yourself?

The thing about experience is: it’s different for everyone.

The thing about experience is: it’s different for everyone. Even the same event is experienced differently by people. How do you make the most of experience in an organisation or team?  I’ve shared some advice and suggestions like:

🗺 Use experience maps

🕘 Schedule an experience share meeting

📌 Put experience on the agenda of regular meetings

❣️ Protect people while they’re presenting their experience maps.

And it’s helpful to remember the power of ideas. Any two ideas can be connected, creating an incredible third idea. Their experience plus your experience, plus the situation you’re all in now, it can be combined to solve what you're working on.

Bringing the experience of your team together, to be used together, tapped together and understood together is better than information sitting in a spreadsheet cell or filed away in an enterprise people system. Make experience something of the ’now’, talked about and acknowledged in the now, not just of the past - when it happened - and you’ll bring your team into a strong position able to cope with the future.

>>What experience do you have that you just know will set you up for the future?