Extreme Agil
Imagine you are working on an area of about two hectares with breathtakingly dense air traffic. On one side, 3.5 ton fighter jets with 2 million horsepower catapults are accelerated to 250 kilometers per hour in 3 seconds, after you have refueled them with the engine running and loaded them with live weapons. On the other side, jets of the same type land on an extremely short runway equipped with arrestor cables to slow the aircraft down again in time. Imagine, furthermore, that in all your activities you are constantly exposed to a hellish noise and the burning hot air currents from the engines, while your workplace itself is in motion, from gently rocking to clearly swaying. And finally, imagine that your action space is not only extremely limited, but to make matters worse, covered with a slippery mixture of water and oil, so that you have to constantly struggle to find a firm grip.
Do you have a picture to go with it? If so, then thanks to your pure imagination you have done it: you have landed on an aircraft carrier! You may wonder why we invited you to this little imagination exercise. What does an aircraft carrier have to do with agility? And why does self-organization once again play a central role?
The first question is quickly answered. We conjure up this image because we have just re-read Managing the Unexpected and were once again very impressed by it. For those who have not yet had the pleasure or, like us, have already forgotten much of it: in the book, American management experts Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe examine organizations that constantly deal with high risk and uncertainty. It is about so-called High Reliability Organisations (HROs) such as nuclear power plants, emergency ambulances, fire brigades or even aircraft carriers. And, as the book's programmatic subtitle proclaims, it is about how such organizations safeguard high performance even in the age of complexity.
Reliable and operationally safe, according to the basic definition, these organizations become so primarily through their ability to perceive. On the one hand, through the attentive observation of environmental events in order to recognize possible dangers at an early stage; on the other hand, through the efficient handling of unexpected events and errors so that they do not develop into catastrophes.
What does that have to do with agility? Good question, because the term does not even appear in the book. Which could also be due to the fact that it was published in 2001, the same year as the agile manifesto, as all historians among us know. This might be dismissed as a coincidence, as might the similarity of the examples used: Aircraft carriers and fighter jets on the one hand, flu planes and speedboats on the other. However, the thematic affinity appears to us to be anything but coincidental. After all, the same challenge is at stake here as there, namely the productive confrontation with constantly changing conditions.
In the much-cited VUKA world, it is anything but new news that a company's relevant environments always have new surprises in store - be they idiosyncratic customers, aggressive competitors, tighter regulations or demanding subject matter experts. What is new, however, is the variety and scale of the surprises we are dealing with these days. Yes, we dare say that the requirements Sutcliffe and Weick described nearly 20 years ago apply today not just to HROs, but to all businesses. The ability to perceive unexpected events at an early stage and to react quickly to them when they occur has long since become a core competence.
Accordingly, it was valuable for us to view this management approach through agile glasses, so to speak. Above all, the recommendations for dealing with the unexpected seem to us to be of an almost prophetic nature. Basically, Sutcliffe and Weick distinguish between two goals: firstly, the goal of anticipating the unexpected, i.e. predicting as well as possible what is coming; and secondly, the goal of acting as efficiently as possible when the unexpected actually occurs. To achieve these goals, a total of five strategies are described, each with a set of concrete practices. The following is a brief overview.
1. focus on mistakes
discover sources of error
Uncensored reporting of irregularities
Adapt quickly to new situations
2. avoid simplistic interpretations
Regularly review your own expectations
Pay attention to relevant environments
Refining one's own perceptual categories
3. keep an eye on operational processes
Delegate authority towards the knowledge holders
Putting hierarchical orders into perspective
Continuously update information
4. strive for flexibility
Putting short-term solutions before comprehensive problem diagnosis
Mobilising different repair skills
Preventing the problem from spreading like wildfire
5. respect professional knowledge and skills
Prioritize know-how and experience over hierarchical rank
Shift the leadership role to the person who has the greatest problem-solving competence in the given situation.
Allow decision-making power to migrate, depending on the area of expertise involved
On rereading it, we were more than once amazed at how close Sutcliffe & Weick's descriptions are to what is currently being discussed under the buzzword Business Agility. From our point of view, the recommendations formulated can easily be applied to all relevant levels: strategic, operational and personal.
Strategic agility can be targeted with the central concept of mindfulness, which runs like the proverbial thread through the book. The special attentiveness to relevant environments (see "Avoiding simplistic interpretations"), the quick adjustment to new situations ("Focusing on mistakes") or the early perception of possible mistakes and risks, but also opportunities (ibid.) are good examples of this.
In our experience, this attentiveness is one of the basic prerequisites for the agility, speed and innovative power that many companies are currently dreaming of. Because without a corresponding sensorium for what is going on all around, agility is over in a flash. It threatens to degenerate into mere change actionism if it is not clear what a company should react to in the first place and why this is currently important.