Frontline Experiences Leading the Adaptive Journey

Leading adaptive change can be daunting. What is the best approach? Do you “tear off the bandaid” with a big bang approach, or is it better to take a steady, iterative approach? What sorts of challenges might you face along the way and what sorts of ways might you solve these? How do you keep your executive team aligned when there are so many competing priorities? How do you obtain stakeholder buy-in and support for the change? Do you lead this yourself or do you partner?

Our October Adaptive Leadership Collective meeting featured Hannah Croft (Chorus) and Susan Parkes (Auckland Transport) who are leading this change in their organisations.

Our discussion spanned three key subject areas:

Leading the organisational change – key lessons
Managing the executive other stakeholders – what does and doesn’t work?
Miscellaneous other topics including maintaining your own energy levels over a long journey, key tips and and tricks learned through experience.

The talented Sujith Ramachandra produced a beautiful visual recording of the session:. For a high resolution version, please click on the image.

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Design an Adaptive Operating Model

How do you Design an Operating Model that brings a strategy to life and defines how value is created and delivered? At the June ALC meeting, we experimented with a workshop-based format, taking participants through a case study and collaborative group work to determine the pros and cons of different operating models. Photos from the event can be found below.

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The Great Resignation – Curse or Opportunity?

Is The Great Resignation a curse or an opportunity? For progressive, adaptive, and human-centred organisations, it could be the latter.

With record levels of people changing jobs in most markets, The Great Resignation is probably one of the largest movements of talent we have seen in living memory. There is little doubt it has arrived in New Zealand and will significantly impact business. No one knows how it is going to play out but what we do know is that

more than 50% of employees have high intentions to resign
two-thirds of employees believe they have solid job opportunities elsewhere.
90% of people surveyed in the Meaning and Purpose at Work Survey said they would sacrifice up to 23 percent of their future lifetime earnings for work that is more meaningful.

Clearly, adaptive organisations must plan to address the risk of losing critical talent.

On 5th April we brought the Auckland business community together to discuss whether The Great Resignation is a curse or opportunity, and share perspectives and experiences, along with expert insights from Helen Meade and Shaun Philp.

A full recording of the session is below.

As usual, Sujith Ramachandra produced a beautiful visual canvas. For a high-resolution version, click on the picture below.

Purpose is King

A topic we discussed in the breakout rooms was the work of human motivation guru Neel Doshi, author of the NY Times bestselling book Primed to Perform. Neel shows how there are three strongly positive motivators (Purpose, Play and Potential) that drive motivation and engagement, and three strongly negative ones that crush it (Emotional Pressure, Financial Pressure and Inertia).

The webinar we ran with Neel (below) shows that The Great Resignation has made his work even more relevant than ever.

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Building an Adaptive Organisation: an Executive Perspective

Given the last two years, it is no surprise that many firms are looking to become more adaptive. Many try to achieve this using agile techniques, however on its own, agile lacks some critical ingredients required for success. In the final ALC meeting of 2021 we asked two experienced executives their throughs on Building an Adaptive Organisation: an Executive Perspective.

The session contained three key sections, each concluded with a series of audience breakout rooms to discuss the topic.

The role of the Executive in building an adaptive organisation
Transitioning to an Adaptive Organisation – the culture and mindset required
Building Internal Capability – why it is critical to sustaining the change

Our panel was:

Nicola Richardson – Executive General Manager People & Culture. Nicola Richardson is responsible for the people and culture focus of Genesis, including recruitment, talent development, cultural change, Agile, property and procurement. Nicola’s leadership focuses on creating a high-performing and thriving culture that embraces empowerment, inclusion and wellbeing. Nicola has a passion for preparing for the future leading organisations to be adaptive to remain relevant.

Dawie Olivier – Chief Technology Officer at Jarden Group and former GM of Enterprise Transformation at Westpac. Dawie is well-known to many NZ audiences for leading the design and implementation of new agile-and lean-based working across Westpac. Dawie has global experience guiding firms through the critical elements required for success and will share his key insights learned to date.

We started out by discussing the role of the executive in building an adaptive organisation. Nicola shared how Genesis’decision to adopt agile ways of working was driven out of the desire to be more customer-centric by improving product development and online presence. From across the executive, they didn’t need to speak about the practices – they just spoke about the desired outcomes. The focus was on leadership and sponsorship on where they wanted to go. So to start with, Genesis didn’t discuss being adaptive, but the executive is talking about it now and strongly aligned around it.

Dawie shared how it isn’t about agile or lean – it is about the new place you want to go and how you want that to feel when you get there. It is all about having a clear purpose! Give me a mountain to climb and a great reason to climb it then I’ll be there all day long.

We then discussed the role of the CEO in building an adaptive organisation. Watch the recording below for all the details:

As usual, Sujith Ramachandra from Radically produced some beautiful visual notes. For a high-resolution version, please click on the image.

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Future Thinking:
the year ahead

2020 was a difficult year for most, to say the least. In the final Agile Leadership Collective meeting of 2020, we invited some of New Zealand’s most innovative speakers to discuss where they see their teams in the next year, major trends, and how to sustain momentum. The focus was on 2021 and future thinking: the year ahead.

Greg opened by reminding us all what a great opportunity it is to lead in times like this! LEadership is now more important than ever.

From the discussion, the key lessons gleaned were:

Put money aside to invest in agility. It is an important and valuable investment to make

Be realistic about whether it is the right time to make the shift. There is a lot of executive attention required to support it successfully.

Mistakes are an important part of the journey. Greg shared how Icebreaker set up a new agile governance model and realised 8 weeks in that it wasn’t working and was fundamentally flawed. So they simply dropped it and tried again.

Be careful of change fatigue. There is so much change going on, especially in a COVID world. Be careful how much change you put people through.

Be pragmatic and stay curious! There are no “solutions “here – only the agile mindset of inspecting and adapting. Avoid the “purist” agile trap.

There was also a lot of discussion around how everyone’s COVID experience has been different, and it is important we make space for discussing this.

The panel then discussed a number of changes that forced their organisations to rapidly adapt – working from home, online shopping and the risk of people suffering degraded mental health from trying to juggle many competing demands, both personal and work-based.

But also – opportunity. Change is the catalyst for future opportunities and if we remain positive then the opportunity arises.

Sujith Ramachandra from Radically took visual notes. A full-resolution version is available by clicking on the picture.

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Adaptive Ways of Working from the COVID-19 Crisis — Agile Leadership Collective

Crisis is the mother of invention, or as Plato’s Republic said “our need will be the real creator”.

During the COVID crisis, most organisations found themselves scrambling. We had to throw the rule book out the window and figure out how to best work together, iterating day by day, week by week. We worked adaptively, across silos, to achieve the most important things for our customers.

Adaptibility & Leadership – lessons learned

While we worked remotely and collaborated digitally, many of us had to manage multiple competing priorities across our home and work lives. Not only did we get out work done, but in many cases we were more innovative and creative, resulting in better outcomes.

Many firms are now wondering how they can leverage this experience, now that the worst of COVID seems to be over.

Our September Agile Leadership Collective meeting brought the community together to share what we have collectively learned and how we might apply this to improve our organisations.

In this blog post, we’ve captured our own lessons:
6 Critical Lessons in Organisational Agility from the COVID-19 crisis

Video Recording from the event

Video recording from the event. Unfortunately, video recording didn’t captured beginning, but started just after introduction of the first panelist. Fortunatelly, the main content and key insights are captured.

About our Panelists

Wendy Paul

Wendy is currently the Director of Purpose at Fonterra. Her personal purpose is to build organisational capabilities in anticipating and responding to challenges presented by a constantly changing and unpredictable world environment. She is an executive with a passion for tackling global organisational challenges and delivering improved performance outcomes through cultural change.

Wendy’s focus is on delivering pragmatic, effective and efficient solutions aligned to the desired long term results and outcomes. She believes that shifting leadership mindsets and behaviours are critical to transforming functions including governance, customer services, sales operations, supply chain and crisis/risk management.

Molly Workman

Head of People and Culture at RUSH digital. Molly is driven by the potential that a collective of people within an organisation has on our world, and is excited by how this potential can elevate humanity. Molly has a knack of bringing fresh and challenging perspectives to traditional organisational ways of working and mindsets. She has a wealth of knowledge and passion across agile, people experience and embracing the ever-changing future of work. Molly has worked across government, large corporate, high-growth tech startups and most things in between. She definitely understands that one size doesn’t fit all.

By work-day Molly is the Head of People and Culture at RUSH Digital, working towards the mission of designing technology to better serve humankind.

Antony Hall

Antony is currently the Head Of Organisational Effectiveness at Auckland Transport. Antony firmly believes that great employee experiences lead to great customer experiences which in turn lead to real business outcomes.

Antony has had extensive Human Resources, Talent, Employee Experience, Recruitment, Analytics and HRIS experience in both private and public sector organisations. He’s passionate about the future of work, and how organisations can set themselves up for the future. He combines his HR knowledge and system implementation background with Design Thinking mindset to bring new strategies of change into the organisation.

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Agile Operating
Models – beyond Spotify

Spotify created and published a model that worked for their engineering culture at the time. Since then, they have continually adapted it to meet their changing needs. Despite them specifically advising others not to copy their model, it has become the default model many companies adopt for scaling agile for the enterprise. This Agile Leadership Collective meeting “Agile Operating Models – beyond Spotify” focused on developing your own fit-for-purpose operating model.

Our panel consisted of

Matt Roberts, Group Manager – Agile at Genesis Energy

Dan Teo, CEO of Radically

Will Carey-Hill, Senior Manager Customer Experience Transformation at ASB

The panellists bought their experience with other models, including customisations and bespoke models they’ve applied. Matt shared how Genesis evolved their use of the Spotify model to make it a better fit for their situation. Will talked through his experiences at BankWest and ASB. Dan shared what it has been like developing a custom operating model based on Holacracy but again evolved to meet Radically’s specific needs.

The discussion from all three panellists also covered leadership, how to obtain executive buy-in and support, Holacracy, and avoiding “capital A” agile. there was also extensive discussion on operating models versus human behaviours, and how the end outcome we are aiming to achieve is a shift to more collaborative, team-based behaviours and that any operating model should be based on those principles. There was a lot of focus on pragmatism, and how we can apply the things learned in Spotify without having to directly copy everything they did. There was also discussion on the move to agile with executives, and how the increasingly changing business landscape is shifting the conversation to being more adaptive.

Sujith Ramachandra has again produced a beautiful visual canvas. For a high-resolution version, click on the picture below.

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The Role of HR in an Agile Organisation

As organisations move to more adaptive, agile models, many realise that agile is more of a mindset and culture than a set of practices and tools. Being successful with agile often requires a shift in culture to one that is more collaborative, transparent and supportive. But traditional HR practices are often inadequate, built of old fashioned models of compliance, process and order. When face with new demands, such a team-based behaviour over individual success, what needs to change for HR to support agile? This then begs the question: what is the role of HR in an agile organisation?

How might HR lead and influence an agile transformation? What role does HR play in supporting successful, long term change?

Our panel consisted of

Katie Williams, HR Director at Vodafone

Mike Sweet, Chief People Officer at EROAD

Penelope Barton, Chief People Officer at Crimson

A good HR organisation is trying to make itself redundant all the time by helping others develop the right mindset for success. This includes a growth mindset, self-awareness, team-based collaboration and an interest in self-management.

Michael shared how important it is to avoid predicting how individuals might perform in an agile model. “Don’t rule anybody out” was a phrase that struck many participants.

There was also discussion around the role of senior leaders in influencing change and how HR can help with this. The general sentiment was that it is vital to coach and mentor senior leaders in different approaches to how they lead. The phrase “the past is alluring “came up when discussing how easy it is to revert back to traditional, command and control behaviours when the pressure really comes on.

Sujith Ramachandra from Radically has again produced a beautiful visual canvas. For a high-resolution version, click on the picture below.