Tag Archive for: agility

agile42 Community Launch

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new agile42 Community! Our coaches Regina Martins and Rochelle Roos shared what this is about in a live webinar on the 29th April. 

We’ve trained and coached many people over the years that we’d like to continue supporting in their growth and development. One of them may have been you. Some of you have also been active in the PathToCSP Slack group and we’ve enjoyed interacting with you in that way. Many of you have also returned for more advanced training. But much more is needed to help you in your career as an agilist. 

In order to take learnings beyond the classroom, we’ve created 2 membership options.

Free membership

  • An exclusive safe forum with thousands of other agile professionals to discuss new developments and challenges
  • Monthly Lean Coffee
  • Discounted rate for exclusive webinars
  • Monthly newsletter with a “How-to” article to help you improve your effectiveness with your team

 

 

Premium membership

All the benefits of the Free Community Membership PLUS:

  • Access to self-learning content to help you be more confident, competent, and effective in your role
  • Access to exclusive webinars by the agile42 coaches on topics chosen by you, the community
  • 1 mentorship session monthly
  • Ready to use facilitation templates for the most common sessions faced by Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Agile Coaches

This is an inspiring new place where we want to continue supporting you in your growth and development as Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Agile Coaches. Each month we will have a theme around which we’ll create events and activities, and stimulate discussions. The idea is that you learn from the community as well as get support from our agile42 coaches and trainers. 

People who join communities, surrounded by other like-minded people, are more likely to get the results they want because they get the help they need when they need it. By learning more from other people in the community is a way to broaden your perspective. 

We want to make this a safe space for everyone to participate in and thrive. As such, we’ve created a Code of Conduct that everyone needs to agree to; and it will be a moderated space.

The theme for May is Product Ownership. So, join us, and let’s get the ball rolling on your growth and development. You can already sign up for the next webinar on this topic. 

If you missed out on the live session, don’t panic! We have the recording for you here to share around with your network, friends, and colleagues, so that everyone can benefit from the Communities. 

For any questions, you are always welcome to contact us!
Hope to see you again next month, for a new theme and new discussions! 

Manage Agile 2020 Conference

Andrea Tomasini & Dave Snowden host the keynote at the remote Manage Agile 2020.

agile42 co-founder, Andrea Tomasini, and founder Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge, Dave Snowden, will host a keynote at the Remote Manage Agile  on November 24th from 9.20am (CET). The topic is ’… the one most responsive to change’. This keynote will be held in English.

 

agile42 is the Gold Sponsor of the Manage Agile conference taking place from November 23rd to 26th, 2020. In order to ensure every participants safety, the conference will be taking place remotely this year. There is a great line up of speakers split across lectures, workshops and keynotes. It will be a great opportunity for our network to meet like-minded individuals.

As sponsors of this event, we would like to extend a discount to our valued network. Please use the discount code, MA_aha_20%, when signing up to receive a 20% discount off the standard ticket.

The program (only available in German) is attached here. We hope many of the topics will be of interest to you.

 

Also Simon Sablowski is keeping a workshop on November 24th at 10.50am (CET) covering the topic, "Wechselwirkungen zwischen Führungsverhalten, Kultur und Struktur einer Organisation". This workshop will be held in German.

 

We look forward to ‘e-meeting’ you at the conference, and to discuss how agile42 can be a partner in bringing Agile Leadership to your organisation.

Effective Large-Scale Learning

Last week we shared our Corporate Learning Program with our network in a webinar. It was a great pleasure to welcome Katrin Birrer from JTI (Japan Tobacco International) to the session who shared her insights and experience from collaborating with agile42 on JTI’s Agile Champion program, a learning experience which is being rolled out to 10,000 employees. From agile42’s side, our experts Simon Sablowski and Lothar Fischmann, presented the Corporate Learning Program.

More and more large corporates want and need to embrace agility. Becoming agile starts with achieving a shared understanding of the values, principles, and key practices. The challenge is to provide learning to thousands of employees. Agile is existing in many parts of organisations, but having every person attend a stand-alone training, probably with different providers, comes with some problems. The learning is different, in as many ways as there are providers. It takes time to coordinate the training, along with it potentially being a significant investment. 

We’re finding that corporations are seeking solutions that are more cost-effective than sending individuals to training here and there. The Corporate Learning Program, co-created with the client, is more effective, in many ways. 

In the webinar last week we got to take part in JTI’s story and their experience of working with us on their program. We both learnt a great deal through co-creating the program, and we're very pleased with the outcome. You can hear more about this from the recording. 

 

Picture: An example of JTI's program

 

Our Corporate Learning Program offers large-scale learning by:

  • allowing individuals to familiarise themselves with key concepts at their own pace
  • providing everyone with a coherent learning experience
  • customising the learning journey to your company’s needs
  • blending virtual self-learning (understanding key concepts) with experiential learning (putting things into practice)

 

If this sparks your interest, how should you start?

The first step is to get in touch with us, so that we can gain an understanding of your situation - how big of an organisation you are; what your needs are.

Once we understand the needs, we can start to co-create the Corporate Learning Program to ensure the program is tailor-made for your needs and context.

From the picture below, you can see the next steps that follow when we have a program that is ready for employees to start exploring.

 

 

 

Here you can find the slides from the presentation.

 

The recording is available online. You can watch it again or share it with your network as you see fit. It is also available on YouTube.

 

We hope that you get in touch with us so that we can start to explore your needs!

 

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

Cultural Awareness and Coherence (ORGANIC agility Principle #1)

On October 14, I held a webinar about the first principle of ORGANIC agility. Together with 50+ participants, we explored the importance of culture and various ways of making the culture visible both in theory and practice.

Culture is, briefly, “the way we do things around here”. It is the context of all activities within an organization and sets the norms for what behaviour is acceptable and what is not acceptable. It has a very strong influence on how people behave. And companies that are unaware of their culture, uninterested in what it means, or lacking the right tools, risk ending up with a culture that does not fit their strategy.

Culture also plays a very important role in determining how people react to change. If the culture is incoherent, people will find it difficult to agree on which way to go. They may also react to changes in wildly different ways.

What to do about it? It’s clear that culture is complex and can't be designed. We simply can't draw up an “ideal culture” and then deploy it. What we can do instead is measure what we have, and influence it to create more of a certain type of behaviour, and less of another. By running small safe-to-fail experiments, we can try out different approaches and see what works.

When measuring culture, we can choose from a large number of dimensions, including proactivity/reactivity, subordination, risk appetite, emotionality, masculinity/femininity, conflict resolution, power distance, etc. etc. As it turns out, the two most important dimensions — the ones with the strongest explanatory power — are outwards vs. inwards focus, and flexibility vs. control. They form the basis of the Competing Values Framework.

 

If you want to measure your culture in your organization, you can have a look at our Organizational Scan here.

A company would start by taking a baseline. A month or two of continuous sampling is typical, in order to even out temporary fluctuations. We then run the survey continuously, following the organisational culture in general but also tracking our pilot/experiment teams specifically. What happens over time? If the experiments are giving positive results, we should see the experiment teams migrate slowly in the desired direction.

Leadership styles are going to be particularly relevant to the change process. Subordinates slowly change their behavior to conform to the leadership style that is visible. Having a conscious approach to storytelling and an awareness of ritualized behavior can also support the change and provide some coherence.

 

Below you can find the slides from my presentation.

The recording is available online. You can watch it again or share it with your network as you see fit. It is also available on YouTube.

During the webinar, I referenced an article on organisational culture. I’ve found it valuable because it gives a decent overview of cultural dimensions.

  • Kim S. Cameron and Deborah R. Ettington. The conceptual foundation of organizational culture. Working Paper #544, The University of Michigan, School of Business Administration, Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 1988.

We also mentioned the Cynefin framework by Dave Snowden which underpins the whole ORGANIC agility framework. 

 

On November 16 @ 16:00 CET, my colleague Giuseppe will be continuing the webinar series with Principle #2 on decision making in context. Here is the link to that webinar, and we hope to see you there.

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

agile42 meets Swedbank – in a webinar

As many of you might have seen, agile42, along with our long-standing client, Swedbank, wrote a Success Story about our journey together. Ever since we've been keen to host a webinar on this, to tell the story! We had the honour of inviting Cecilia Kåhrström to join the webinar with us, where she, together with agile42Sweden's, Giuseppe De Simone, walked the audience through the work we did together. 

The journey has been long: some parts of the work with Swedbank began back in 2014. This webinar and the Success Story, specifically focused on the work with Group IT, which started in 2018. A lot has been done together since then, and we are happy to say that we today can call Cecilia and all Group IT leaders and employees, not clients, but friends. 

In the picture below, Cecilia summarized all the activities that supported the achievement of their current level of agility and we are particularly proud of the bubbles on the right. In fact they show the things which Swedbank continued on their own after we left, witnessing the accomplishment of our mission: grow our clients’ capabilities so that they are able to persevere on their path to agility sustainably after we leave.

The discussion between Cecilia and Giuseppe opened up these topics. 

A particular focus was given to one of the most important factors in this Success Story: how the leaders understood early on that agility could not be achieved just by buying and deploying a predefined process. It was amazing to observe how fast they got this clear understanding compared to other leaders we've met that are just looking for a pre-packaged solution. Every organization that is interested in becoming sustainably agile needs to make this journey on their own: you should not worry about reinventing the wheel, because the journey is more important than the goal.

The slides from the webinar can be found here. You are welcome to have a look at them, and for any questions you have, you can turn to us.

This webinar broke our record with questions from the audience. We had more questions than we could answer. From the recording you can hear the answers that we managed to get to live.

If you missed the live webinar, the recording is available here! It is also available on YouTube. Please have a look at it and feel free to share it around with friends and colleagues.

We hope that you enjoyed this Success Story. For any questions, feel free to reach out to us!

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

Oh you agile Augustin! Business agility in the age of COVID-19

I first met leadership and agile consultant, Dr Siegfried Kaltenecker, in 2009 and immediately adopted Sigi as my mentor.

During the past ten years, we have shared many experiences, notably designing and delivering a novel training programme named Leading Self-Organising Teams.

Fast forward to 2020. Sigi recently published an article based on conversations with clients and colleagues during this period of uncertainty and ambiguity since the arrival of COVID-19 in our lives.

I read the original in German and immediately called him and suggested he publish an English version. This idea grew to not only translating the article, which you can read here, but also to take the opportunity of lockdown to record a Zoom conversation about our respective experiences during this time. This is now published in the agile42 YouTube channel below.

Enjoy!