Agile Consulting
Whoever says A for agility usually also says C for consulting. The professional support of agile change processes seems to be an integral part of every company. But what is commonly referred to as agile coaching has also changed. For a long time, it was mainly about imparting technical expertise (keyword certified training), new forms of collaboration (keyword cross-functionality), working methods (keyword Scrum) or establishing roles (keyword ScrumMaster). The focus was primarily on individuals and teams.
With the success of the agile approach, however, interest in larger solutions has also grown. At the latest with the adaptation of agile procedures by corporations such as Raiffeisen, Lufthansa or Swisscom, appropriate scaling procedures were in demand. Agilizing large companies naturally brings with it a veritable explosion of complexity - and with it, the VUKA world sends its regards, a high degree of uncertainty. The ongoing digitalization of all areas of life raises the question of what promising business models of the future might look like and what these models mean for organization and leadership.
Similarly popular are solution approaches that do not allow any great uncertainty to arise in the first place. Even their names suggest positive things: be it security, like the Scaled Agile Framework SAFe, simplification like the Large Scale Scrum approach LeSS or wholeness like Holacracy. In return, detailed concepts are presented as to how the organization, roles, and interactions will be designed - all the way to an explicit constitution to which one subscribes, so to speak, with one's skin and hair.
However, we wonder how much standardized change plans have to do with agile principles:
How much do they respect the respective actual situation with its specific problems?
How do they deal with the existing experience and ideas for improvement, when the solution is a foregone conclusion?
How keen are the respective scaling experts to align with the specific needs of their clients?
And speaking of co-creation, how involved will they be in developing a customized organizational model?
When business pressure and control uncertainty increase, ready-made solutions obviously sell well. In our experience, however, this buys into at least two problems: first, the problem of resistance -- after all, it is still true that people resist change much less than they resist being changed; and second, the problem of passivity -- after all, managers and employees are largely relieved of the responsibility of creating a tailor-made organizational design.
However, agilization can very well be designed according to agile principles. An undogmatic attitude that does not commit itself to a certain solution from the outset helps to achieve this. It follows the claim to take the uniqueness of the company as a starting point and the intelligence and commitment of the employees as a driver for the desired improvement. Although agile organizational design always depends on the specific context, some interventions have proven successful in practice:
a joint stocktaking, which is not only carried out by top management, but also by groups of key employees from all areas of the company across all disciplines and hierarchies (keyword: company-wide retrospective)
the visualization of current business processes in order to create the best possible overview of strategy, tactical coordination and operational implementation (keyword flight levels)
Concentration on value-generating processes that align all involved areas and specialists to concrete customer needs (keyword end-to-end value creation)
the creation of framework conditions that give the experts sufficient creative and decision-making authority (keyword: self-organisation)
The implementation of targeted change experiments in order to ensure a measurable improvement of the operative business with manageable actions (keyword Minimum Viable Changes)