I’ve just spent two days immersed in Business Agility at the Sydney Business Agility Institute Conference.
Here are key lessons I’ve brought back.
An agile culture and mindset are vital. It’s not just about using agile tools.
Agile is definitely moving out of IT and it’s being adapted into the rest of the business world. Practitioners are dropping rigidity; it’s not a cult! It’s evolving as it should. After all, isn’t that agile?
Some organisations aren’t using the agile word, even though that’s what they’re doing. Has the term lost some of its shine? Maybe. But the ideas of iteration, feedback and learning as you go are still fundamental.
Agile is going steady with emotional intelligence. It’s all about involving people, collaboration and humanising the workplace. Teaming, radical candour, change management and resilience were all on the business agility agenda, and rightly so.
If agile is going steady with EQ, it’s also two-timing great conversations and high-quality connections. Building trust, and leaders allowing themselves to be vulnerable, are key parts of business agility.
And lastly a word about agile leadership. Yes, it does mean trusting the team. It does mean taking risks. And it does mean taking action. As one speaker said: “It gets messy.” I agree. Life (and leadership) is messy – get over it.
In our complex world, we need to drop the fiction of simple cause and effect, collaborate, learn and be agile.