So, what is business agility? Simply put, it is the ability for an organisation to thrive in an unpredictable and uncertain market. Yet a sentence like that is ultimately so generic as to be meaningless. Instead let's go deeper and look at what makes up business agility. What do organisations need to change about themselves to thrive?
There is a model called the Domains of Business Agility. I call this the “don’t forget” model. Why? Because rather than telling you how to do something (like a framework), this model tells you what not to forget when embarking on a business agility journey. This model consists of 9 interacting domains within 3 dimensions and all centred around the customer. Each domain describes one key characteristics of an agile, adaptive, and responsive organisation. No single domain is more important than any other and they are all equal, necessary, interrelated, and intertwined.
In fact, one of the biggest problems that organisations face when they begin a “transformation” is that they focus on one or two domains rather than treating their organisation as a complex adaptive system. While there are certainly benefits that can be achieved, overall there are clear diminishing returns from this approach. We've seen this in the Agile world for the last 20 years. Companies started by adopting Agile practices (like Scrum and XP) in their software teams but then completely forget that that is only one part of the whole system. Without building agility in finance, HR or marketing, they limit the benefits of the very transformation they have set out to run.
At the centre of this model is the customer. When we started designing this model there were a lot of arguments about whether shareholders, employees, or the customer should be at the heart. And there are good cases to be made for all of them. However, we decided that the customer should be at the centre because they are the purpose for your organisation. Shareholders may own the company, and employees may be the most important thing to making it work, but the customer is why you are in business. Unfortunately, many companies have forgotten this. Every KPI and entry in the corporate scorecard relates to financial health. There may be a token measure around customer satisfaction, but nobody gets fired for that - whereas if you do not meet your sales targets you're likely out by the end of next quarter.
There is a fantastic quote by Frederic Laloux; “Profit is like the air we breathe. We need air to live, but we don't live to breathe.”
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