 I'm very happy to introduce to you my friend... friend? Yes. Okay, he's my friend. Evan Libon, the founder of the Business Agility Institute. And you will talk today about certain uncertainty. That sounds really interesting. Thank you. It's about the only thing that is certain these days. Good afternoon. Is everyone having a good conference? There we go. That's better. Okay, so for the next 45 minutes, I'm going to be outlining why uncertainty is the only certain thing you have other than, I think, death and taxes, as the saying goes. Over the next 45 minutes, I'm going to look very much at companies, the entire structure of a company. I'm not going to talk about agile at all. I'm not going to talk about frameworks or methods or systems because they're all rubbish. They can be useful, but none of them have an answer for you. To be fair, I don't have an answer for you either, but I'm going to give you ways in which you can discover your own answer. So, when I started the Business Agility Institute, people would always ask me, why? What is business agility? And I would talk very much about it's the ability for an organization to thrive in an ambiguous environment. But those words are platitudes. They don't mean anything. So, we went and we did a little bit of research. This is the Fortune 100 companies from 1983 through to 1993 through to 2003 through to 2013. So, it's about five years ago. In 30 years, 57% of those companies no longer exist. Six went completely bankrupt and never came back. 20-something went through an acquisition and no longer exist. Half a dozen went through mergers. Many more went through divestments and sold half the business and so are a fraction of what they are today. And if Dave's comment about an organization's success is about the continuity... Oh, no, it's fine. It's actually... Yeah, it does that. Is the continuity of concept? Then these organizations, as they were conceived in the 1980s and before, are now dead. So, business agility in many ways, and for that matter, agile HR, is about survival. But survival is not enough. Survival is easy. You just don't... Survival means don't stuff up. I've got a six-year-old girl. She's exploring. She's doing everything. For me, I want her to survive. And for that means just don't kill yourself. You can do whatever the hell you want, just don't kill yourself. That's kind of my minimum bar of parenting. I like to go a bit further than that though. I do like to actually parent, but at a minimum, just don't die. My daughter has a very weird sense of humor now, so I suspect that might be an Australian thing. So, about a year and a half ago, people kept asking... So, if business agility is about survival and it's about thriving in an uncertain environment, in an uncertain economy, how do I do business agility? Is there a framework for business agility? No. Buntly? No, there's not. And no, there never can be. A framework by its very nature is generic. It is a simplified set of practices and processes. Frameworks work for a process. The software development lifecycle process. The recruitment process. I can give you frameworks for any process because they are, in many ways, repeatable and non-complex. And if Dave's in the room, I apologize, I am going to use these words wrong. So, about 18 months ago, I got sick of people asking me these questions. So, I wrote a blog article. It was about 500 words. And it was just, this is what I thought made up business agility. All the different components. Not a model, not a framework, but just some ideas. And I wrote that overnight, and I happen to be going into surgery the following day. So, I finish it up, I put it in a Google doc, and I put on LinkedIn and said, hey, I've just written an article about what I think business agility looks like. If you have some comments, feel free to look at this Google doc and make some comments. And yeah, I'll publish it tomorrow. What's the first thing you do when you get out of surgery? Check your email. So, I came out eight hours later, checked my email, and there were 60 people arguing in Google doc comments around what is business agility. So, what started as a 500 word blog post turned into a full on community consultation around what does business agility mean. And this model was created out of that. I call this the don't forget model. As in, if you're going to transform your business, don't forget these things. They're not a, it's not instructive, it's not prescriptive. Nowhere in here will tell you how to do something. It just tells you what not to forget. The next element then. So, I'm going to walk through this a little bit, but I just want you to remember that this exists. Because then we did something else. About six months ago, we ran a global survey of 166 companies all around the world, ranging from 10 people micro-consultancies through to 400,000 people, banks, insurance companies, and all that sort of stuff. Don't mind me. That's going to be important later. So, this, we asked questions around those domains. We wanted to know what the state of business agility was, what it looked like, who was doing it, who was doing it well, who was doing it badly, and what did good look like. I'm going to be blunt. The results were not good. But to be fair, that's also what we expected. On average, every question was rated out of 10. A simple spectrum, and seven, eight, nine, and 10 are good. Those are what we would consider to be agile organizations. One to six was either non-existence to pretty okay. The average was, well, average, 4.9. And we call this well within the walking phase. Now, noting these are companies who are self-described on an agile transformation. These are companies who have all made a minimum of sort of one-year investment in business agility, and they all sucked, mostly, more or less. There are some areas which came out well. The top areas, customer channels and pride, these were things where most companies agreed on. If we're an agile organization, our people have strong pride. If we are an agile organization, we engage with our customer through multiple channels. The lowest, market experimentation, funding models. These are the ones that had the biggest divergence between the best organization and the worst organization. Now, I share this with you, and I'm going to share some more insights around this as we go. But let me take a step back and talk a little bit about the domains. In that model that you saw, at the very heart of the model is the customer. This was one of those areas where we fought for weeks. What is at the heart of business agility? Is it the customer? Is it employees? Because employees, they're the ones who do the work. You make them happy, they'll make the customer happy, everyone does well. That's Virgin's motto. That's a whole bunch of agile organizations focused on the customer. Or is it shareholders? Shareholders own the company. They're the ones who have decision rights. Are they at the heart of an organization? We ended up coming to the customer as the heart of an agile organization for one very important reason. This might be a little controversial, but you are not in business to make money. What does that mean? That means that you are in business to do something, to create value for somebody. You still need to make money. We are a capitalist society. We still need to make a profit. There's a great quote by Frederick Lalu who wrote Reinventing Organizations. Profit is like the air. We do not live to breathe, but we do need to breathe in order to live. That's what's happening in organizations around the world today. We have this situation. Look at your corporate scorecard. I guarantee nine out of ten items, KPIs in your corporate scorecard, are focused on the financial health of your company. There's probably one item in there about customer satisfaction. I guarantee no one gets fired if that's low. If you don't meet your financial targets, people get fired. Think about what that does for the morale of the organization. I bring this up because this is an audience of people professionals, HR professionals. You control in many ways the measures of people. We're measuring what's easy, not what is right. We're measuring money. Why? Because it's easy. I can see the money flow through. Customer satisfaction is intangible. Achieving value for our organization is intangible. Let me give you a real-life example. There's a bank in Singapore called DBS Bank. They are the biggest bank in Singapore. They're the national bank. They went through a process improvement program or series of PEPs. In these, they looked at a process, lost credit card. For context, DBS had the lowest customer satisfaction ratings of any bank in Asia at the time. They're down there at the bottom. They said, let's improve our processes. They look at the lost credit card process. It took three to five days to get a credit card replaced. It was inhuman. What do you do? You lose your credit card. What's the first thing you do? Hi, bank. I've lost my credit card. What's the first thing the bank says? Name, rank, and serial number, please, or I can't talk to you. They treat you like a criminal. The bank took a little bit more human view. They said, okay, we'll be more empathetic. You've lost a credit card. That's okay. Have you reported it? Are there any... If you haven't, here's the number of the local police. Here's some help to get you through this slightly difficult period. And then they went through the normals of Lean Six Sigma, process improvement. They brought in design thinking. They brought in ethnographic researchers. And they did it all by the book. And it was good. The customers got their credit card now in 24 hours. That process went from three to five days to 24 hours. The help desk was more human. But then they did something that they'd never done before. They called the customer. They said, hey, I'm from DBS Bank. You've just been through our new lost credit card process. What do you think? And the lady at the end of the phone is like, well, that's good. Thank you very much. But where's my debit card? Because think a bit from the customer's perspective. The customer didn't lose a credit card. They lost a wallet. Think about it from the bank's perspective. The bank has a credit card line of business. The bank has a banking line of business. The bank has all these lines of business which are standard in any large organization. And the process is owned by a line of business. But the customer doesn't give a damn about your lines of business. The customer just lost a wallet. So they got their credit card in one days and a debit card in three to five. So DBS credit to them learned and they created a customer journey program where everything that they did was around customer journeys. You lost a wallet. That's a customer journey. We will make transparent to you our internal processes. It doesn't matter what lines of business. You've lost your wallet. We'll make it easy for you. Fantastic. And there are many more examples. But it's just one around putting the customer at the heart. So I'm going to ask you to do something now. I am going to ask you to do something now. Pull out your phones. So go to pole everywhere slash or poleev.com slash biz agility. I'm going to ask you to actually rate yourself based on one of the questions from that survey. And we're doing a self assessment. So be a little bit honest. We're asking you about measures and KPIs. Why? Because let's face it. That's your responsibility in HR. So rank yourself one or two. If your measures are simple, qualitative, sorry, quantitative measures, revenue, basic stuff, rank yourself as crawling three to four. If you've removed the vanity measures, if those measures that you have left are real. And that means if you change that measure, it makes a difference. Rank yourself four to five. If you give your soft measures the same focus and attention as your hard measures. So staff satisfaction, employee retention. Seven or eight. If you start to measure a transformational, if you start to measure, if you're incentivizing people and measuring people to change and improve and to learn. And you're flying. You are a market leader around business agility. If your measures are aligned 100% to your customer. And this is something that we tried to do in a consultancy organization that I used to work for. Where we tried to change the sales people's measures. So instead of having sales targets, which actually they still had sales targets because we couldn't get rid of them, but we also said that here is your client's corporate scorecard. If you are going to be measured against their success on their corporate scorecard. So if you can sell something that will help them move their number, that's win-win. That's an agile organization. It didn't work, by the way. They rolled it back after a quarter. So take that with a grain of salt. There we go. That's about right. It's interesting to see how many people are in that middle there. But this is an agile conference. That's not too surprising, I suppose. So let's think about the customer for a second. Why? Why is the customer so important? And it all comes down to trust. This is what we call a trust pyramid or a trust ladder. At the bottom we have reference-based trust. Let's say you need a carpenter to redo your bathroom. You're going to renovate. You're not a carpenter. You don't know any carpenters. So what do you do? You go to Google or you ask a friend, damn, can you recommend a carpenter? Thank you very much. And I now have a carpenter. But I don't trust that carpenter. I trust Darm or I trust Google. Then we go to the next level. The carpenter I meet, we sign a contract. We agree for $10,000 you're going to do this for me. And I still don't trust you. I trust the contract. And here's the problem in most business, because we get to this level and we never go any further. So if you can only trust your customer as far as the contract with them or their contract with you, then, well, we have a problem. We can never actually truly have an agile relationship, have that engagement. This, by the way, could also be an employee contract from a HR perspective. If I'm interviewing someone, I have referenced, I don't trust the candidate. I trust the references that they have or I trust the interviewers on the panel. When you join, I trust the employee contract, not the employee. And this is part of the issues we have in many of these organizations because employees feel that. They feel untrusted. But then we go to identification-based trust and this is I trust you as a person. This is the only point where we can actually have agility. If I can trust an employee or if my customer can trust me as a vendor, then we can actually have this conversation. You did a great job of the bathroom chain. I need you to now come and do my kitchen. Now, let's forget the contract. I have a contract, but the contract's now an enabler. I can ask the following question. You know what? I got about $5,000. What can you do for me? I can't ask that question if I don't trust the person because they're not going to rip me off. I don't know what the work is. There's a lot of things I don't know. So I can only have that agile, adaptable, dynamic conversation once I have a level of trust. Now, partnership level trust goes another level. You're not going to enter a joint venture with a carpenter. That's kind of ridiculous. But look at someone like Rolls-Royce. Rolls-Royce make aircraft engines. When you lease one of their aircraft engines, you don't pay for the engine. You pay for every minute that engine is in the sky. If the engine is on the ground, you don't pay a cent. Now, think about that. That is win-win. If the plane is in the sky, you're making money. Rolls-Royce is making money. If the plane is on the ground, nobody's making any money. So that is a partnership level trust. Now, it takes a long time for organizations to get to that point. So let's go back very quickly to these domains. We break this model into three dimensions, work, connections, and mindset. The work dimension consists of the ways of working, technical agility, process agility, and enterprise agility. Technical agility is the way of doing your work. Now, if this was a software organization, I would say something like this is DevOps or XP. But in HR, this is about how do you do your work on a day-to-day basis that enables ambiguity, that helps you deal with uncertainty, that allows you to continuously plan. Going up, process agility. This is the entire value stream. In HR, how agile is your recruitment process? How agile is your onboarding process? Process agility is that entire value stream that exists in that context. And the agility in that can, in many cases, be measured. We then have enterprise agility. Now, this is where I'm going to introduce you with a different idea. So there's a book called The Goal by Eli Goldratt. In this book, he talks about, it's mostly around lean and manufacturing, but he brings up this concept called the theory of constraints. Now, in the theory of constraints, we have a, if I'm building a car, the slowest part in that production line is the slowest part, is how fast I can build cars. And if the slowest part is attaching doors, I can only build cars as quickly as I can attach doors. Make sense? So, I'll be arrogant for a moment. Evan's theory of agile constraints. An organization can only be as agile as least agile division. 30 years ago, it was probably software, it would take three to five years to bring a product to market. Thank you, software crisis. Thank you, software engineering for giving us all those practices. So we, as a counterpoint, there's the pushback, saying we need more agility in this process, not agile, agility. And so, simplistically, agile is born. 1986, you've got Scrum and so on and so forth. So, in that software domain, there is still a new constraint, because we are now able to create change every two weeks. But in software, you then have to deploy change. And 10 years ago, that became the constraining factor. We could make change every two weeks, but we still had to wait three months for a deployment window. So, we invent DevOps, fantastic. But where is it today? Amazon's statistic is I can deploy change every 11. something seconds. I'm using Scrum. I can make change every two weeks. But I have an 18-month budget process. I have a three-month recruitment process. How agile can I be? And the answer is 18-month agile, three-month agile, not 11-second agile. So, this is enterprise agility, that concept of an organization as a complex adaptive system, as an ecosystem, an organic, growing, living, super complex network of stuff. And every single one of you plays a role in that. And every single one of you has influence in that system. We're not going to use the word system, in that environment. And, hey, hey, I learned something today. Don't call it a system. So, each one of you is a part of that. So, that's enterprise agility. Agile, that's weight, that's working. All the characteristics of iteration and ambiguity and so forth in an agile way. So, let me ask you another question. And, sorry, how much time do I have? That time is not on. I just realized that. Another 30 minutes. I got plenty of time. All right, lovely. Another question. So, let's talk about your, now, think about your process. If you're in HR, this is your value stream. This is a recruitment value stream or an onboarding value stream. If you're in a leadership role, it might be, it doesn't really matter. But pick a value stream, a process. All right. Do you have agility in that process? Nope. Crawling. All right. You've modeled the value stream. You know the process. You know where there are unagile parts, but you're not doing anything about it. All right. Walking. You've introduced flexibility. You're able to, you have options and alternatives in that value stream. All right. Running. All right. Your work processes are based on the customer view of value, not on the internal siloed view of value. So, think about that. That's the, the, the, the, that is the wallet's problem. All right. We don't have a credit card process. We have a lost wallet process. And then running is where your processes can be flexible, are customizable. You can ignore them if, and you have autonomy and accountability. It's a double-edged sword. All right. In the delivery of your work. There we go. A little bit better. Interestingly, the, this actually follows pretty closely. Unlike the first results, which was a little bit more skewed, this actually does follow the global responses pretty closely. 50, no, 69% give a, around that, forgive me, I don't remember the exact number, was between one and six. So this is a bit weaker than, than normal. But that's good. One of the other insights that we had from that report were your agility is directly correlated to the number of business functions who have adopted an agile mindset. All right. So if you're doing agile in IT, just like everybody else, right, technology and product management, all right, then you have a pretty ordinary level of business agility. If you've started to adopt business agility in HR, and look, only 22% of respondents have adopted business agility in HR, right, finance and HR have the two, thank you, finance and HR have the two biggest positive impacts on business agility. And I don't have an hour, I have 10 minutes. So I'm going to speed up a little bit. So the next domain, connections. Three elements in the connections, in the connections dimension, leadership agility, the relationship that we have with authority, delegation, empowerment, servant leadership, structural agility, everything from self-managed organizations to the accursed Spotify model. And market agility, the relationship that you have with your supply chain and your distributors and the people in that network. And when you talk about an organization, these are the areas which are getting weak. If we look inside an organization, we had some very interesting insights where we did ask organizations to, some of them to self-assess, and they self-assess themselves in the middle. But when we had independent assessment of those organizations, then they were on average about 20 to 25% lower as that internal assessment. Now, the next set of research is going to explore a little bit why. And we hypothesize it's one of two reasons. It's either that the external people didn't have the full story, they didn't know everything, they didn't see everything, or that internally we have this blinked view that we are amazing when actually you're not. The other thing that we learned was if your business agility transformation is being led by the board, in fact, this graph, sorry, this one surprised me. I kind of expected that the more senior of an organization, the transformation was being led, we would see more success. I wasn't expecting how cleanly linear this line was. It is almost a 25% difference between the agility and the ability to succeed in a market if it's being run from a single line of business versus being run from the board. So if you're doing this kind of transformation and you're just the head of HR, seriously consider that you need to go up to the board and get them to buy into this because that's how transformations work. And there's a good example, SunCorp in Australia did the exact opposite. The board, I'm sure they're nice people, but they weren't exactly agile thinkers. So when the CEO who was an agile thinker left, this was what, seven years ago, eight years ago, something like that now, the board replaced him with a new CEO, great person, knew how to run a bank, didn't know, wasn't an agile thinker. So SunCorp in Australia was, I would say, a global leader in what we would now call business agility. And yet it's all gone because the board didn't consider agility in that selection. Another thing that organization is doing, this is from New Zealand Post Group. This is what they call the sorting room. So think about leadership agility. What do leaders need? Information. They need to make decisions. And it's interesting, sorry, sidetrack. At the Business Agility Conference in Australia, we had a major from the Israeli army give a talk. And she gave a literal war story. And in that she was saying that there are two things that a leader needs to do. The first is to set a vision, set a goal. And the second is to make sure that the team has all the skills and the right culture in order to achieve that vision. It's the only thing that a leader needs to be able to do. And so New Zealand Post Group, and this is, this is what, seven years old now? This is actually quite an old example now. They created this room for their senior executives, the CEO, the group CEOs, because it's a group of companies, a bank, a post office, a courier services, and all those sort of things that you would see in a postal service. And this is a room. This is their board room. Every wall is some form of kanban board showing some element of the organizational initiatives or organizational health. My favorite is the door has a big picture of the elephants. And I don't know if you have the saying here, the elephant in the room. Yes, this was the elephant in the room. And anyone could put a post-it note on the door and force the executive to talk about that topic. The executive went from meeting once a month to meeting once a week. It went from eight-hour board meetings to two-hour deep. They just looked at what was important. And they did this because they could see at a glance everything around them. And the other great thing this organization did was they made that room open. Anybody could walk into that room and go, huh, that's what we're doing. Now, obviously some things were confidential. So you'd have Project Omega, rather we're about to lay off 1,500 people because some things are confidential. But anyone could walk in and see what was going on. And we're seeing these kind of rooms happening. DBS has something similar, but it's portable boards. Every exec has a portable board. Amex is doing it. Actually, VistaPrint, I think, is doing it, to be honest. I think there's an example from VistaPrint. The last dimension, the mindset dimension. A lot of arguments around this. Think of this as the organizational culture. There are three domains here. A learning mindset. This is a growth mindset. The ability for an organization. And this, by the way, is not the mindset of an individual. It's the mindset of the business, of the company. The aggregate culture of everyone who exists. So a growth mindset. One that enables experimentation, learning, failing fast. A collaboration mindset. Something, and this goes sort of hand in hand with structural agility, but it's, okay, here's a question. Who wants to break down the silos in their company? Rubbish, you cannot do that. Absolutely ridiculous. We are monkeys. We evolved from monkeys. Back here is a monkey brain. Actually, no, that's the lizard brain. The monkey brain somewhere here. It doesn't really matter. We have a monkey brain. In that monkey brain, what do we do? We form tribes, not Spotify tribes, actual tribes. 150 people, Dunbar's number. Wonderful thing. These tribes happen. Us versus them. Literal thinkers versus emotional thinkers. We classify, we put ourselves in boxes. It's what we do. Our brains are coded to pattern match. It's literally how we survived. Well, everything. Humans are one of the... I would probably go so far as to say, I don't know if this is evolutionary theory correct, but we're probably the best pattern matches on the planet. But that means we build tribes. We build silos. Us versus them. Brown versus white. Male versus female. Liberal versus labor. Democrats versus Republicans. It doesn't really matter what the tribe is. We form them. A collaboration mindset is... Actually, let me take two things. Number one, the whole point of structural agility is to build silos. Not to break them down, but to build them, but to build them right. So that HR versus everybody else. No. That's how organizations are structured. There's this antagonism. Oh, HR won't let me do it. We have to follow the HR processes. They're not saying HR's a partner. They're saying HR is them and we are us. Instead, what we do is we build organizations where a silo, the value stream and the flow is harmonious. Where from idea to execution, from input to customer, is one team. And then we have another and it might be by products. It might be by customer journeys. It might be by customer experiences. There's no organization in India that structures their company around, this is the onboarding experience. This is the payments experience. This is the communications experience. And they're cross-functional. So there are developers in there. There are HR people in there. There are finance people in there. They build it around these ideas. So we build silos. It's natural. The last one is an ownership mindset, which is pretty much all about pride. Now, I'm out of time, so I'm not going to ask the last one. But I am going to ask this one. Top challenges. Deck. What's deck? Someone translate deck for me? No, deck is gone. Fixed mindset. Funding. Finance. No one likes finance. Mindset. Fear. So I gave this talk at the APAC HR forum a couple of months ago. And it's really interesting to see the answers from a HR context are actually very different from the global answers that we got. I've got leadership, mindset, fear. These answers are very... I don't want to say soft. But these are about the people side of the organization. The challenges that you're facing are people challenges. The top three challenges globally. Number one was leadership by quite a large margin. Number two was organizational structure. The organizational structure didn't work. And number three was buy-in. A lack of buy-in across the organization. So in the 30 seconds I've got, two minutes actually, I want you to think about your organization as not a system apparently, as a complex adaptive system, as a very dynamic living organism. With multiple moving parts, where the process that you are running, you might think of it as... you might have it modeled out in BPMN, and you might know the steps, but that is an overly simplified view of the reality of your organization. Your organization is complex, your organization continuously evolves, and there is no one shape. There is no framework for business agility. We do see benefits. We see... These are my favorite quotes from the survey. Our retention of both clients and staff is much improved. Business agility has given us a competitive advantage and allows us to react quickly and pivot as needed by our customers. This results in faster customer acquisition, faster time to value, and bigger market penetration. To be honest, I was actually surprised. As much as I believe business agility is a financial benefit, I didn't expect to see that in the results of the survey so quickly, because we are very young. It's been around for 100 years, but as a community, we're still fairly young. That was quite interesting. Let me finish up by saying two things. Number one, your organization and your role in the organization is dynamic. It will always be dynamic. You do not have a role. You have to do for the organization to continue to exist. Organizations that are fixed, organizations that put you in a box will be dead. Seers went bankrupt just a couple of days ago. It's... The biggest companies are failing and they've been failing for decades. And that change and that churn will continue. If you want to exist in the market five years time in ten years time, then I'm sorry, I don't know what that market's going to look like and nor do you. If you do want to exist in that market in five or ten years time, you've got to be prepared to change and adapt and if you can, try and lead that market. I believe I am out of time. You are. Thank you very much everyone. Have a wonderful day. Thank you.