Hierarchy eats up agility
"Fear eats soul," is the name of one of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most famous films. A little panning out of the cinema and into companies shows us that hierarchy does something similar to agility. Thinking in terms of superiors and subordinates shapes a culture in which employees are latently disempowered. Highly qualified technical experts are patronized by a multitude of procedural rules, their will to shape things is curbed, their ability to make judgments is largely negated, and they are often kept personally dependent on a superior's word of power.
No wonder that not only the development of potential but also motivation falls by the wayside. Not to mention the customer benefit, which as we all know (often enough) is realized primarily through direct interaction with individual employees. And that's where Business Agility comes into its own on a small scale: the ability to perceive, but also to make decisions when it comes to responding to customer needs.
There is no doubt that agile has made a career for itself. What manifested itself almost 20 years ago in software development ,now seems to have become a business imperative: short development cycles, interdisciplinary collaboration, regular collection of customer feedback, rapid reaction to impulses for change. In the meantime, even the CxOs of various industry lions are enthusiastic about the new agility.
However, if one takes a closer look at corporate practice, the whole thing looks less enthusiastic:
Self-organization and agility take place primarily at team level: Bottom-up is the motto, the glass ceiling is pre-programmed. Self-organization is primarily located at the operational base; global changes take place only hesitantly, if at all. Those who immediately think of Gallic villages and Roman empires are wicked.
Agility is reduced to methods: The technical introduction of Scrum, Kanban, Design Thinking or Holacracy is the focus. Although the cultural dimension is often invoked, it is often neglected. Without a new understanding of leadership and an appropriate distribution of decision-making power, the agile promise of happiness cannot be fulfilled.
The means is confused with the end: In the blink of an eye, the introduction of agile approaches mutates into an end itself. The desired change is demanding, especially for traditional organizations: cross-functional teams must be formed, experts trained, role holders coached, new guidelines created. But under the operational pressure of day-to-day business, the big, longer-term development issues often get pushed into the background: flow-based management, customer-focused decisions, cross-team coordination or entrepreneurial improvement culture.
Necessary framework conditions are neglected: Self-organized work is neither promoted by incantatory rhetoric (à la "we need an agile mindset! ") nor by a laissez-faire attitude (à la "you'll do it! "). Instead, framework conditions must be designed in such a way that more freedom is created and dependencies are reduced at all levels: from the strategic coordination of requirements to the explicit distribution of decision-making powers and feedback loops. LINK
Psychological laws are ignored: Like any other change, the much-vaunted agilization triggers various fears. What does that mean for me in concrete terms? Why do I have to be agile at all? What do I possibly gain and what do I possibly lose? And what skills do I need to be successful under the new conditions? These are just a few classic question marks that need to be addressed in any agile transformation. Otherwise, you don't have to be surprised about resistance.
"Whoever says A for agility must also say B for participation! "I (Sigi) said recently when we were once again talking about sustainable companies. Whereupon my colleague (Sabine) added: "And Z for collaboration. "From A to Z, the loose game of letters could easily be continued: F for flow orientation, in the sense of cross-team work control from the first idea to the satisfied customer; L for lean as a guideline for the leanest possible, value- and waste-conscious processes; or S for systems thinking, so that we don't forget that we should design our organization from the outside in, i.e. from the customer.
These days, agility is seen as a panacea for overcoming the challenges of a volatile, unsettling, complex and ambiguous - in short, VUKA - world. Although the desire for a miracle cure is understandable, we must not make it too easy for ourselves. We need sufficient internal variability to cope with external dynamics - as William Ross Ashby wrote in his "Law of Requiste Variety". However, such diversity cannot be achieved without self-organization. It stands and falls with everyone acting as sensors of environmental events and replacing hierarchy with consistent networking at eye level.
Without potentially all employees putting out their feelers, so to speak, it will be damn difficult to perceive problem areas and quickly develop appropriate solution ideas. For this to succeed, however, organizations must be consistently decentralized and streamlined in all areas. And at the same time, management must change from a hierarchical privilege to a service. Otherwise, this management will remain trapped in the dead end of business administration - and the subject matter experts will remain entangled in a web of home-grown dependencies that stokes fears and prevents true agility.
In the discussion about self-organized work, the so-called sensor model was brought into play. This involves as many employees as possible putting out their feelers, so to speak, in order to scan current potential opportunities and threats. This fits perfectly with Sutcliffe & Weick's description: "You need diversity to master diversity. If you work in a diverse, complex environment, you also need diverse, complex sensors to detect the complexities of your environment. (...) If the sensorium is poorly developed, one misses clues to the unexpected as well as to a wider range of possibilities for action. " p.62
Of course, the decisive factor in the game is not the mere perception, but its communication. What is striking? Which phenomena appear again and again? How does the market react to this? It is an essential management task to ensure an open exchange about such perceptions. This requires suitable communication formats, a sensible meeting rhythm and professional moderation.
Strategy development is thus transformed from a bureaucratic act (keyword: annual planning) into an ongoing learning process (keyword: iterations). And at the same time, it is transformed from a purely managerial matter (keyword: supreme discipline) into a forum in which many employees can participate in a meaningful way (keyword: team sport). As Fig. 2 suggests, it is about networking instead of hierarchy, about autonomy instead of dependency, about feedback loops instead of issuing orders.
Operational agility follows on directly from this. The attentive perception of the environment and the condensation of these perceptions into strategic initiatives is at best half the battle. It is also important to pay attention to one's own ability to actually take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves in the market. Do our processes allow us to react quickly to new challenges? Are our structures designed in such a way that they promote agile working? And do we regularly check what we can change in our day-to-day work in order to be able to react better to unexpected events?
This form of operational mindfulness is in turn promoted by many of the principles described by Weick & Sutcliffe: for example, by focusing on work flows and value streams (see "Keeping an eye on operational processes"), by mobilizing a wide variety of solution competencies ("Strive for flexibility"), or by distributing decision-making authority according to expertise rather than hierarchical position ("Respect professional knowledge and skills"). Visual work management systems (keyword: Enterprise Kanban) provideüthis.
Finally, personal agility takes center stage wherever specific basic attitudes are involved - for example, the courage to pass on even unpleasant news quickly and uncensored ("Focus on mistakes"), the ability to self-critically question one's own patterns of perception and evaluation ("Avoid simplistic interpretations"), or the willingness to assume leadership responsibility when the situation demands it ("Respect professional knowledge and skills").
The last strategy in particular underlines once again the role of self-organisation, which is a second thread running through the book. Indeed, respect for professional knowledge and skill is far more than a polite gesture. Rather, it functions as a catalyst for a fundamentally changed understanding of leadership that consciously ties in with the Enlightenment tradition of the responsible individual. Why is it that employees are not trusted to manage their area of responsibility independently? Why do well-trained professionals constantly need someone to tell them what to do? And why do they make their actions or inactions dependent on decisions that may be made without sufficient knowledge of the situation, perhaps even without the necessary expertise? In any case, if the forest is on fire, the firefighters are not going to ask the captain if they can put it out now. If a person is about to die, even the nursing assistant will do everything to save his life. And if the newbie on the aircraft carrier is the first to discover a loose screw on the runway, he will stop all flight operations to prevent a possible disaster.
Conclusion
Certainly, the daily work routine in most companies looks far less dramatic than in HROs. Nevertheless, we can learn a lot from extreme organizational cases such as nuclear power plants, emergency rooms or aircraft carriers. For such organizations, many of the agile principles and practices that are currently riding high for good reason are in fact part of the foundation. Yes, these principles and practices are literally essential for survival - and far beyond organizational boundaries, as nuclear accidents have just demonstrated in a frightening way.
If you want to know more about what we can learn about business agility from extreme situations, you might want to read or re-read Managing the Unexpected.