Achieving company-wide agility is seen as a challenge for organisations, at the same time it is important in the VUCA world. In our recent interview with Jutta Eckstein, we understand why it is important. She also discussed in detail about Bossa Nova to leverage innovation from all the employees. Jetta has shared her insights on being connected to the society as well.
Let’s read;
Q1. According to you, why company-wide agility is so significant to be talked about in detail?
Jutta: The world we’re living in currently, also referred to as the VUCA world (meaning volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) challenges companies to be agile throughout. And agile doesn’t mean here applying Scrum or SAFe, it means as a whole company to be flexible, responsive, adaptive, and also nimble – or in other worlds to apply agility company-wide. Only this allows companies to both survive and thrive on disruptions.
Q2. What is Bossa Nova, and how it contributes to leverage innovation from all employees?
Jutta: BOSSA nova is an approach for company-wide agility. It enables your company to be agile, in the real sense as explained above by synthesizing Beyond Budgeting (adaptive budgeting), Open Space (leveraging the power of innovation from all employees), Sociocracy (flexible organizational structure that allows decentralized decision-making), and Agile (continuous learning via experiments and feedback). Especially (organizational) Open Space leverages innovation from all employees by not defining a job description first and then looking for people that fit that job description (or in other words by then putting people in the box that’s defined by the job description) but rather seeking and strengthening continuously the potential of every individual. Thus, thinking beyond job descriptions.
Q3. It is generally believed that management is responsible to induce innovation. What is your advice to get away from this mindset?
Jutta: The problem with this is that we believe there can be a single person i.e., the manager, who knows who will be innovative when and thus invites to e.g., an innovation lab, a brainstorming -, or a design thinking session. However, every single person is innovative and there is no fixed time for innovation. Innovation has to happen at all times and by everyone. Therefore, Organizational Open Space is needed to invite everyone at all times to come up with a new feature, new product, or a new idea and – if there are other people who think this is a great innovation, those people start to work together for making it happen. The procedures companies often have in place for approving new ideas actually, kill most often the ideas and frustrate people to suggest new ones because these procedures are too difficult.
Q4. One of your blog mentions – Being connected to society is an essential ingredient to long-term profitability. Please explain.
Jutta: Well, no company is an island meaning, every company is part of a greater ecosystem and is nurtured by that ecosystem and should also in return nurture it. And also if a company wants to have a reputation of being agile, people expect the company to take a societal responsibility and to be humane, caring, transparent, and participative. This is also for the greater benefit of the company because it gives the company’s products a market advantage and puts the company in a better position in the “war of talents” – both because of its great reputation.
Q5. Where do you see the Agile community going five years down the line?
Jutta: I think we will see the community broadening its reach more and more. This is amongst other things, based on digitalization – meaning that more and more (or even all?) companies become software companies because no matter what your “real” product is, the key differentiator will be the software. So the community will broaden beyond software and interestingly this will be happening because of the spread of software.
Q6. Is there anything you do not like about the way Agile is being implemented?
Jutta: Well, I do like how agile is implemented – however, I see a big risk in how many people look at agile as a recipe, as something where people can be certified to support a well-defined behaviour. Because a certification per se is about verifying the person has a well-defined knowledge and a specific way of thinking. However, agile is about the opposite – it is about continuously exploring new ground and learning new things permanently.
Q7. One question you think I should have asked you. Please answer as well.
Jutta: Well, you touched the question a bit and by the way, I don’t have a good answer but the missing question is: What is our (the agile communities) responsibility in the dramatic changes we’re seeing right now?
I’m exploring this currently. For example, all too often we think if we delivered value and the customer is happy we’re done. So we seldom take the responsibility on how that value is used, what impact does it have on the world. Is it used for supporting humanity or is it hindering it? Is it consuming even more energy or is it helping reduce it? On a site note, one forecast predicts that in 2030 IT will need 21% of the world’s energy consumption. Thus, I wonder if we can start small by changing the DoD (definition of done) and also verify e.g. the energy consumption of the value we’re creating or if we can overall increase our awareness on how we can ensure that our contributions are overall positive. I think also as agile coaches or as the agile community in general, we can make a difference and we should.
Jutta Eckstein is an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She holds a M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. in Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has a unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. She has published her experience in her books Agile Software Development in the Large, Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and together with Johanna Rothman Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in your Project Portfolio.
Jutta has recently co-written with John Buck a book on Company-wide Agility. This book focuses on synthesizing Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agility.