Agile Know-How Magazine • Fall 2017
Really, the second most important point after the mission is
Agility. We need to create organizations that allow us to
organize and function in a way that enables us to invent the
path as we follow it.
Governance and management:
the necessary evolution
The manager’s role is to make sure that the mission emerges
and that it is shared by everyone. He must then ask the teams:
what do you need to do what you have to do? He must no
longer be a director of the “doing,” but a facilitator of human
relations, a facilitator of the “being together.” He needs to be at
the team’s service and give it the means to do what it has to do.
This means several things. It means that the manager is still as
essential, but that his role has fundamentally changed. It also
means that behind him, we will have teams that are self-
organized. If I am ascending a mountain and every member
of my team is free to do what they want, it can lead to anything
or nothing at all.
This is not what we want in an organization. What we want is
to give power to the team, to move toward a given objective.
So the mission must guide us toward the objective. We will give
power to the team that will organize itself and find the best
ways to proceed for itself, on that specific terrain. We need a
framework with defined constraints, a perimeter within which
the team is autonomous and within which it must stay. Or, it
must at least alert the manager if it needs to stray from it.
The manager is a facilitator at the service of the team, which is
guided by a mission and has power because it is self-organized.
But the team also feels secure, as a framework has been
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established. It is this type of organization that is able to
advance on all types of terrain despite uncertainty and the
unexpected.
Creativity and breakthrough innovation
The third most important element is the ability to step outside
the framework. In many organizations, I intervene with execu-
tive committees and top managers, and what is paradoxical is
that they are there to provide the framework, but also to help
people step out of it.
Stepping out of the framework means being innovative, being
creative. It is also part of the managers’ role to bring innova-
tion, and particularly breakthrough innovation. In other words,
there is not only one way of doing things, that is to say, inno-
vating by improving the existing parameters of a product or the
way of doing things. At one point we must actually step out of
the frame entirely.
And if I want radically different results, I have to accept to
question my beliefs or to work with experts who do. That is
how techniques of kayaks towed by a kite have been developed.
In fact, it is a kite that flies on its own. It is not steered and has
only one line. It takes five minutes to launch the kite, which will
then tow the kayak. By doing this, I move three, four, and even
five times faster than when I use a paddle. Would you rather
use a paddle or an oar for six hours a day to obtain a certain
result, or would you prefer stepping out of the framework for
a moment to stop and invent something that allows you to get
five times more results with ten times less effort?
In general, there is a consensus on the answer.