Digital Transformation Should Include Agile 2
Coming out of the pandemic and sea changes that we have seen across the business landscape in 2021, managers are trying to figure out what their go-forward strategies are.
One thing is clear: agility is more important than ever. Those who prospered during the pandemic were those who were able to pivot rapidly. Online retailers scaled up. Companies adjusted their supply chains. Remote work became the norm.
One thing is clear—agility is more important than ever.
This is the new normal. There will be more pandemics. Indeed, the entire world seems a little less stable than it was a decade ago. The geopolitical landscape is actually somewhat scary. But that aside, the potential for business disruption abounds: blockchain-based business and NFTs, machine learning that continues to improve, the rise of electric transportation—these alone could change so much that we take for granted, and when these changes come they often creep up on us: something is nascent but then suddenly it really works and takes over. Not to mention more esoteric possibilities that are on the horizon such as new forms of transportation and a renewed interest in aerospace. These are exciting times.
Real-time 3D displays are coming
The whole point of digital transformation is that business now takes place on digitally-driven platforms. Manufacturing is now digitally-driven. Commerce and advertising are digital. Even collaboration is going digital. Skeptics would do well to look at what is coming: real-time holographic displays that can let you see someone in crisp 3D. Collaboration is going entirely digital and global.
This is where Agile 2 comes in. Unlike original Agile, which was a very narrow programmer-centric view of things from 20 years ago, Agile 2 is how organizations can achieve true agility at scale. It’s the real deal, and is informed by behavioral psychology, leadership theory, cognitive science, operations research, organizational culture theory, modern product design approaches, big data and machine learning, and many other disciplines. It is business savvy and realistic.
Unlike original Agile, which was a very narrow programmer-centric view of things from 20 years ago, Agile 2 is how organizations can achieve true agility at scale. It’s the real deal, and is informed by behavioral psychology, leadership theory, cognitive science, operations research…
Agile 2 is not a process rollout however. You can’t point to it and say “do that” like you can with purportedly agile development frameworks like the Scaled Agile Framework (“SAFe”). But Agile 2 is real. It is not one person’s idea of what everyone should do. It is what actually works, to lead to agility.
Agile 2 is about product conceptualization and development. There is more to agility though. Agile 2 does not cover financial agility: the liquidity of your assets and the longevity of your commitments. It also does not cover organization design. And it won’t give you guidance on market agility, such as brand versatility. But with regard to conceiving, designing, building and supporting digital products within a modern complex organization, Agile 2 is a fantastic model—far better than the Agile that was advocated by programmers in what we refer to as “legacy Agile.”
You need agility. There is no choice about it, if you want to prosper today. Frameworks will not give it to you. Frameworks help you to stand up a digital production mill, but that is—frankly—so 20th century, and that production mill won’t have agility. Agility is the ability to change your product design rapidly the way that Tesla rapidly rewrote their software to use chips that were available and thereby prospering while other auto makers foundered, or change from brick-and-mortar retail to online, or pivot to a different market segment when consumer needs suddenly change through forces beyond their control.
A big and complex production mill with twelve week product increments won’t give you that flexibility. Framework advocates say it will, but it won’t. It won’t because we have seen how people implement that: they do it the way they did everything before, filling up the backlog with a year’s worth of commitments, removing all their agility: because they are still not doing things in an agile way. The framework does not change anything really—it just is a new structure within which people do what they do in essentially the same way.
To achieve agility, people need to change how they think and work, as well as the patterns that they rely on to solve problems. Changing these things sounds hard, but it is a fairly well understood problem. You just have to get help from people who have done it and who have a practical but holistic and realistic approach. And a bit of warning: impressive-sounding companies that dazzle you with marketing claims but then give you junior analysts will not get you where you want to go, but companies who actually give you access to their best people will.
