 Welcome everyone to the session, today's session is the shape of Agility, it will be presented by Yvonne Leibone. With that further due, I would like to hand it over to Yvonne. Thank you so much. Well, good morning or good afternoon everybody. Normally I would be speaking to you from Melbourne, Australia, but today I happen to be in Prague. I am here for the week for another conference and to meet some of our members, so it's nice to be travelling again. But for the next 20 minutes, we're going to be exploring together what it means to be an agile organisation. And the title of the talk may be a little bit strange, the shape of Agility, but we'll explain what that means fairly shortly. But just a few small notes. Yes, there is going to be a hangout after this, which I will be there so to answer questions. So it's a very short time. So please chat, please ask me questions during the talk, but a lot of it will probably be able to be discussed afterwards in the hangouts. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out, please feel free to use the chat, the Q&A, and I'll try and address comments as they go. So let's maybe take a second to share my screen. There we go. Let's get into the core concepts very, very, very quickly. So first of all, my name is Evan Leibon. As said, based out of Melbourne, Australia. For my sins, I run the Business Agility Institute. We have been in existence since 2017. And Agile India has a very special place in my heart, because it was at Agile India in 2016 that we first had this idea to launch the Business Agility Conference in New York, which was the precursor to what then became the Business Agility Institute. And it has a double special place in my heart, because it was as Agile India in 2018 that I heard Linda Rising speak, and she gave us the drive or the idea that we could become more than just a community organization. We could be a research organization. And so for two reasons, in two separate years, Agile India has shaped what we are doing as an organization, or in fact even forming the organization in the first place. So that has nothing to do with my talk. I just wanted to share just how special this event is to me and just thank you all for being here to listen to this. So let's just get into the topic, Business Agility. Why should you care? And I'll give you one very simple reason, because change is accelerating. We've always lived in a VUCA environment. We've always lived with uncertainty and ambiguity, but it's only really been in the last 20 to 25 years where the speed of change has accelerated so greatly that organizations literally cannot keep up. And in fact, the key differentiating factor between whether an organization thrives or dies, whether they can see opportunity in... The key differentiating factor is whether they can see opportunity in change or whether they see change as an obstacle, something to be avoided. And this is the key point. When we talk about Agile organizations, when we talk about business agility, at the end of the day, it has nothing to do with Agile, like Scrum or Kanban, safe or less, retrospectives or stand-ups. What it really ultimately comes down to is do you see change as an opportunity or as an obstacle? Nothing else really matters. And that then brings us to what we mean when we talk about business agility, our definition. Now, a lot of you may have seen some of this before, and if you have, bear with me because we'll get to some of the more advanced stuff fairly quickly, but I'm trying to create a baseline for everybody. In this instance, what we're talking, business agility is a set of organizational capabilities, behaviors and ways of working. I'll pause there for a second. It is not practices. It is not frameworks. It is how you act. And one of the things that we say is if you act with agility, you have agility. I don't care if you're using beyond budgeting or throughput accounting, safe or Scrum. If you're acting with agility, then you have agility. It is an organizational capabilities, behaviors and ways of working that affords your business, the freedom, the flexibility and the resilience to achieve its purpose. Now, this is key. I'm going to say something perhaps a little controversial. You are not in business to make money. You are in business to serve your customer. That is your purpose. Now, the better you can serve your customers, the more money you'll make. That's how business works. But organizations that lose sight of what their purpose is, why they exist, sadly, often lose sight of why they should exist in the first place. But if you can continue to achieve your purpose, no matter what the future brings. Those magic six words. That is what we mean by business agility. That is what creates true business agility in organizations around the world. When it doesn't matter if it's a global pandemic, it doesn't matter if it is a economic downturn, you are able to achieve your purpose. You have the freedom, the flexibility and resilience to achieve your purpose, no matter. No matter what happens. And that is key. So I have to ask you to think. Think about your own organizations. Think about how you work today. Are you able to achieve your purpose if there's another pandemic? Are you able to achieve your purpose if there's another currency, a global financial crisis? Are you able to achieve your purpose if a competitor comes in that you weren't expecting and suddenly disrupts the entire market? And if the answer is no, then you don't have agility. No matter how much scrum, no matter how much safe or less you might be doing in technology, that's irrelevant because you're not. You don't have the fundamental behaviors to achieve the agility that you need to be successful. Now, behind business agility, there are four key principles. The first principle is that agility is a continuum and not a state. It's like tea. You've got weak tea and you have strong tea. There's no magic point when water suddenly becomes tea. What you have is infusion, strength, growth, and same is true of agility. You've got weak agility and you have strong agility. And over time, that agility is going to get better. The second principle is that there is a range of excellence, a range of agility simultaneously, high and low capabilities at the same time. Now that's, again, a key concept when we come to business agility because you're going to work in teams that might be really good in agility. But the team across the hallway in another city over Zoom may not have the same capabilities as you do. And that's okay. It's very natural to have that range of excellence. The third principle is that there are thousands of ways to achieve agility. I mentioned this before. There's no one approach. Again, throughput accounting will be on budgeting. It doesn't matter. And the fourth principle is that the only way that you can achieve business agility is through behavioral change, creating new capabilities, new cultural behaviors, new cultural capabilities through behavioral change. If you change how you act, you will change the culture and you'll change and you'll create new capabilities. That's it. That's all there is to it. So I'm going to talk to you now a little bit about what we mean by the shape of agility. So I think a lot of you may have heard me talk about theory of constraints. I'm not going to spend much time on it, except what I will say is that one of the key elements to understand in how organizations evolve is that there is a constraint to agility. 20 years ago, that constraint was technology. And so it didn't matter. It would take three years to bring a product to market. And so Scrum emerged, XP emerged, agile methods emerged in technology to remove or relieve that constraint. But the corollary theory of constraints is that there is always a constraint. And so once we had product teams that could create potentially shippable product increments every two weeks, the constraint moved. And in my life, in my career, it moved into operations because that team could no longer. Every two weeks, we had this potentially shippable product increments, but it had to go to a staging environment because we had to wait three months or six months for a release window. And that release window was the constraint to agility or rather operations became the constraint to agility. Now, around 2008, 2009 DevOps starts to emerge as a concept. Organizations get better technology. Again, creating a new space, a new constraint, because once you release the constraint to operation, the constraint moved. Now, in today's world, that might be HR or finance or the PMO. It doesn't matter if you can create a potentially shippable product increments in two weeks. It doesn't matter if you can deploy in 11 seconds, if it's going to take you four months to get hiring approval to hire the right person. It doesn't matter if it's going to take you nine months to get a budget change approved. It doesn't matter if it's going to take you two months to get onto the agenda for the Change Advisory Board or the Project Control Board. Your constraint to agility has moved out of the technology domain. Again, your organization may be different. Your organization may well have the constraints in technology. In so many organizations, the constraint has moved out of technology into these other areas. No amount of agility, no amount of coaching and transformation in technology is going to increase the agility that you have in the system. I hope that makes sense. I'm moving very quickly. I've only got 20 minutes here. I'm going to get into the key points. Give me one more slide and then I'll get to what I mean by the shape. I just went to the very end. Bear with me. Sorry. I want to clarify one important point. Business agility is not the same as agile business. There's nothing wrong with agile business, i.e. agile marketing, agile HR, agile finance, agile PMO. Prefixing a business function with the word agile does not create business agility. There's nothing wrong with it and it can be very effective. Agile marketing is a very powerful thing to do because marketing has a very similar domain space as technology. There's ambiguous outcomes and there's a low cost of change. Agile, capital A agile, Scrum, Kanban, XP, TD, FDD, whatever framework that you like, works really effectively in marketing because it has the same context, the same domain space as technology. But as an organization, you do not have business agility just because you took agile outside of IT. It's where most organizations begin, but if that's where you end, it's not enough. So I just want to share this as a key point because so many organizations completely miss it. So let's talk about behavioral change and the shape of agility. First of all, remember what I said about behaviors? You can only get agility through behavioral change. Well, the great thing about behaviors is behaviors can be observed. If they can be observed, they can be measured. If it can be measured, it can be modeled. So I'm going to introduce three different organizations very quickly. This is an Australian government agency. This is the shape of agility in that organization. This is the weight of behaviors that exist. Now, one thing you will note is that we go from minus one to one. In that minus one to zero range are what we call the detractors. These are the behaviors that are pulling agility backwards. And this organization is very strong in detractors. There is very little forward momentum, pulling agility forward. Most of the behaviors are pulling agility backwards. But no organization has zero behavior, zero agility. So even this organization that has no intention of doing business agility has some agility. Has some behaviors that are pulling it forward. Not enough to change the agility of the organization, but some. When we look at this organization, some of the strongest behaviors really focus in on very just basic good leadership behaviors. These aren't particularly strongly held, but these are the ones that are pulling it forward. The way the leaders craft the employee experience, the way that compensation is fair. These are the behaviors that are strongest in this kind of organization. The next kind of organization, this is a European manufacturing organization. They don't have a technology function or at least not much of one. Their adoption of business agility has come through industry 4.0 and has come through factory automation and warehouse automation. Now what you will see is compared to that first organization, there is a weight of behaviors. The shape of agility is mostly positive, but is weakly positive. That shaded blue area is what's called the interquartile range. 50% of the organization sits in that shaded area. And in this organization, it mostly sits within what we class as the passive or the neutral space or the neutral range. So that means that even though they are positive agile behaviors, they're not pulling agility forward or backwards. They're very stable. They'll happily stay where they are. Which means if you want to increase agility, there has to be some kind of pressure, a transformation for example, that will pull it forward. Whereas if you just left this alone, it would stay exactly where it is. It wouldn't move much, a little bit forward, a little bit back, all that kind of thing. In this kind of organization, we see much stronger behaviors around leadership. Again, much more what we would class to be agile leadership. Creating connections through empathy and coaching, holding people to account and create and delegating, establishing psychological safety. These are what we would class as agile leadership behaviors. And at this shake of organization, those are the behaviors that are strongest. This is the last organization that I want to touch on. And this is what we would class as a very mature agile organization. It looks similar to the one before, but what you'll see is that the interquartile range is much more positive. In fact, this is in the promoter range. So this organization has ongoing pressure, a natural pressure, ground up pressure, pulling agility forward. And so when we look at this organization and how it is shaped, this organization will never not be agile. And for reference, this is a United States technology organization. They've been doing agile for 18 odd years. They've been doing business agility for about eight, I think it is. And so this is a very stable state. And again, what's different here is that a lot of behaviors that have changed are around governance and they're around systems changes. So in that middle space, the shape, the behaviors that were strongest were those behaviors that related to leadership. But in these advanced organizations, the systems of the organizations have now caught up and it is the systems of the organization which are now creating agility throughout the organization and throughout the system. So I've given you a lot of information in a very short amount of time and I believe my 20 minutes are up. So I would like to take a moment to really thank you on this. I'll quickly answer Pradeep's question in 30 seconds and that is, we have a behavioral model that we have developed over the last three years. That it's based on our research over about a thousand organization. And so we can actually then use that behavioral model to model an organization. If you're interested in seeing the behavioral model behind it, email me, send me a message or look me up on LinkedIn and I'll send you through the actual the behavioral model behind these shapes. All right, I believe my time is up. Hey, thanks, yeah. Thanks everyone. And I appreciate Ivan today sharing his experience on the topic.