Building the Agile Business Through Digital Transformation by Neil Perkin Peter Abraham

Author:Neil Perkin,Peter Abraham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2017-03-24T16:22:28+00:00

The balance between vision and iteration

Jeff Bezos once said:

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details … If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.8

Stubborn on vision. Flexible on details. These words capture the essence of agile strategy. The balance between a strong, directional vision that steers, guides and enables, and adaptive, iterative planning that flexes, adjusts and modifies in response to changing contexts and new information.

Iteration without direction is chaotic. The vision should be challenging, clear and compelling, but it needs to give direction to strategic choices and decision-making throughout the business. Change does not come from the CEO standing in front of the company with a PowerPoint presentation. It comes from constant reinforcement through frequent repetition of the vision and continuous communication of goals and progress. It comes from the behaviours and decisions exhibited by senior leaders and those around us. It comes from what we choose to recognize and reward, and how we structure our learning. Every meeting, every update, every communication is a chance to underline, fortify and energize around that vision.

Yet rigidly pursuing a plan with no room for frequent adaptation leads to declining performance, missed opportunities and limited learning. Real change also comes from the continuous iteration that drives progress towards that vision. It comes from the flexibility that allows for enough autonomy and plasticity to adapt planning to continuously learn and improve. Every sprint, every retrospective, every actionable learning is a chance to advance towards bringing that vision to life.

In Part Two, we discussed the analogy of how the high operational tempo of Blitzkrieg was enabled through a command methodology that empowered frontline commanders to make quick decisions in the face of rapidly shifting contexts. The underlying goal, intent or focus of effort (the ‘Schwerpunkt’) enabled clarity of objective and direction, and combined with a well-understood level of flexibility for frontline commanders (‘Fingerspitzengefuhl’ or ‘fingertip feel’) to enable rapid responsiveness and progression. This is a governance structure built for speed and manoeuvrability.

Using a more modern military analogy, the US Army frame this balance in the terms of a ‘Commander’s intent’ and the ‘concept of operations’. The former:

… succinctly describes what constitutes success for the operation. It includes the operation’s purpose, key tasks, and the conditions that define the end state. It links the mission, concept of operations, and tasks to subordinate units. A clear commander’s intent facilitates a shared understanding and focuses on the overall conditions that represent mission accomplishment.9

The Commander’s intent is the central objective or idea that pulls everything together, the unifying element of the plan, the Commander’s expression of what they want to make happen. The concept of the operation is designed to direct the way in which subordinate units should cooperate to fulfill a mission, and creates the sequence of actions that the force will actually use to get to that objective.

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