Category: Innovation

The Agile Mindset

Making the decision to become Agile is not an easy one. It requires getting your people out of their comfort zones. You have to ask yourself if you REALLY want to work on it. To do things that differently? To get your people and organization out of their comfort and stable zones while already dealing with so many other challenges? If the answer is yes, one of the key things you will need moving forward is to adopt the Agile mindset.
There are two notions of Agile: The Organization/Team and the personal/individual. In each, there are two dimensions: DOING Agile (use of tools/framework) and BEING Agile (mindsets & behaviors). They are all closely embedded, but first, it’s important to embrace an Agile mindset and way of thinking.
 

What is an Agile mindset?

  • The Agile MindsetIt is about PROACTIVELY CREATING change in uncertain and disruptive environments. Different from resilience, it is about REACTIVELY RESPONDING to change in a constructive way.
  • It is about analyzing how to understand what’s going on, identifying what uncertainty you are or will be facing, and figuring out how to create new opportunities as you go along.
  • Rather than merely responding to change, Agile employees anticipate the future and proactively create change.
  • Organizational agility is the capacity to spot and exploit opportunities in fast-changing environments.
  • Research shows that employees who create change are 43% more effective than employees who merely respond to change. They also have greater career satisfaction and an enhanced sense of personal power and influence.

So, how do you adopt an Agile mindset? Here are some concrete examples of how to become an Agile thinker every day:

  • Become aware of your thinking patterns.
  • Choose to shift your thinking patterns…yes, this is possible!
  • Regularly take the time to just stop doing and think.
  • Adopt the Victim vs Player and the Knower vs Learner
  • Essentialism: Cut through unnecessary thinking/work and focus on essential things (don’t waste what you learned from the current crisis about focus).
  • Remain calm under stress and pressure…Easier said than done? The more you practice this, the easier it will be.
  • Move away from any tendency to use a Command & Control leadership style and adopt the Coaching Leadership strategy. Delegate decisions and control to the closest point of action. Foster collective intelligence and empowerment with accountability and purpose. Make impeccable requests, which demand impeccable commitments.
  • Practice authentic communication skills and techniques. Speak your truth and allow your people to do so as well by creating a psychologically safe environment.
  • Accepting change is not comfortable but it is safe.
  • Think customer and outcome.

 

Being Agile

There are many reasons why a company might want to invest in Agile. They may want to be a more efficient learning organization that quickly and effectively adapts to change, as well as generates new opportunities in a VUCA World. It may stem from a need to support “Customer Centricity” as a part of the core business strategy or culture. Or perhaps they want to make their people stronger and more comfortable with change and uncertainty with minimum stress and maximum efficiency for their mental and physical energy/health.
Whatever the reason, adopting an Agile mindset is a key part of setting out on the Agile journey. BE the agility you want to see in your organization. Agile is not a destination, it is a mindset and a way of working together.

Innovation sounds good, looks good, but it doesn’t always feel good. Why? Because making innovation happen in a large organization is an arduous process. The story we usually hear about this topic is like a mediocre superhero movie. It shows a character that finds a superpower, struggles just a little bit, and then is victorious. By the end of the film, we know we didn’t like it, but we don’t understand why. There were endless fighting scenes and the hero was too tough. What is the problem with this? It doesn’t feel real. We need to see the pain, the characters’ real suffering to believe their journey and value their victories. Embedding innovation into an organization is a lot like this. I used to think that being an innovator was a matter of toughness or inventiveness, but it is not.

How is innovation like a flat tire?

Bear with me while I share a personal anecdote. The other day, I had a flat tire. I remember getting out of my car, seeing the flat tire and thinking: “Why today?! I can’t get a break”. I was tired. I knew I have insurance to help me to change the tire, but my macho ego was telling me:
– Can’t you change a simple tire? You have to change it with no help –
So, I hung up the call to the insurance company, grabbed the tools, and started to change the tire myself. But I couldn’t catch a break because the nuts wouldn’t loosen, so I got angry. I wanted to throw the tools and start crying. You may wonder: What are you making such a big deal out of a simple flat tire? Indeed, it was not a big deal. What was the problem?
The problem was not the tire. The problem was not that I could not find a solution. My problem was the meaning I was giving to my lack of ability to loosen up a nut. The problem was I was feeling weak and inadequate for this simple task. After my short crisis, I called the insurance company again and asked for their help. I remember telling myself: “A guy will come and laugh at me because of my poor handyman skills.” I was even thinking of creative answers to defend myself from his attacks. In other words, I was mad at someone I had not even met.
He arrived 30 minutes later. I had loosened up two nuts, but I had three remaining and a broken ego. I saw this man in his mid-50s approaching my car with no judgment. He tried to loosen them and he couldn’t. I had mixed feelings at that moment (I was kinda happy). He was very considerate and explained the nuts were hard to remove because they were old. Luckily, he had some tools to solve the issue. He took out another lug wrench, a hammer, and a long pipe and used it as a lever to remove the nuts, and voila. All that I needed was some tools and a simple lever.

Embedding innovation in your organization

 
This is precisely how innovation in a corporation works. It is a hard job, with multiple tasks and things to do. You might be working on designing a new solution, defining the precise value proposition, and trying to get the buy-in from different stakeholders. Suddenly, an apparently simple problem is holding things up, and you might feel like it is the end of the world. You feel shame. You question your value, your capabilities, your management skills, or even your work.
The problem might seem simple from the outside. Again, it is about the meaning we assign to why we are struggling and feeling like there is a massive wall in our way. In these moments, I have learned that the key to moving forward is to master my emotions and be aware of the mindset that I am using to see the problem. For example, being trapped in a knower mindset makes the issue personal. The dialogue in my head is: “I should know this.” Then everything starts to escalate, and things get out of control. This makes things worse because a knower mindset demands control.
But instead, I can choose a different path: The learner mindset. This requires a humble approach that recognizes that I do not have to know everything. That I can ask for help because there might be a skill or a tool that I am missing to solve the problem. That the person from the other department is not going to laugh at me, and instead, they want the opportunity to help me.
In the end, this is the better superhero movie, with a scared character who is brave enough to keep walking in the darkness of vulnerable moments. As an innovation leader, you don’t have to do it all by yourself. You do not have to have all the skills to make innovation happen. I believe that is impossible. The nuts in this story may represent an outdated process, a risk-averse mindset, misaligned incentives, or a frustrated team.
If you are developing a new product and feel stuck, don’t panic. Accept vulnerability and ask for help. You might find a person with the perfect innovative lever to loosen up the nuts fixated on an old way of doing things.

All organizations are facing disruption within their markets and business models. Most of them are trying to adapt and keep the pace with cutting-edge organizations that are transforming consumer behaviors, creating new wants and needs in the market, introducing exponential technologies, evolving into digital, and raising the bar every day on how to do and conduct business. Transforming a business requires shifting our perception about how we see and understand reality. We need to update our own operating system and cultivate an innovation mindset.
 

Innovation is king in this era, whether we are ready or not

 
When working with leaders and organizations, they often ask: how can we be more innovative? How can we change and transform our business? What will motivate our people to want to try to innovate? How do we develop a culture of innovation in our organization?
When we start to explore innovation in organizations, we discover that different people have different understandings about what it means and takes to develop a culture of innovation. Digital transformation and innovation are often talked about together, however, innovation is a much broader concept.
There are endless definitions of what innovation is. In the end, what they all have in common is “doing something different that adds value.” In my experience, what organizations mean when talking about innovation is “challenging the status quo.” They are referring to challenging their people to think and do things differently. This can apply to any dimension of an organization. It means bringing to life a disruptive idea that can give them a competitive advantage among the rest of the players in the market.
If you want to embrace a culture of innovation, you have to do more than just communicate it or create a set of initiatives.  It involves creating the right environment for people to believe that they are expected and encouraged to test, learn, adjust, and implement new ideas that will enrich their value proposition.
Innovation begins when leaders successfully adopt an innovation mindset. Mindsets are the set of values and beliefs that underpin our behaviors. They are the filters through which we interpret reality and give meaning to our world.  They guide and condition our behaviors. The first step to innovating is believing we can.
 

Some key elements of an innovation mindset:

 

  • We can all innovate. “We are not in the innovative team” or “I am not creative” type of thinking kills ideas before they are even born. It prevents us from harnessing the team’s creativity and coming up with and implementing alternative solutions for everyday challenges. With the right toolbox and a safe environment, we can all learn how to innovate and expand our abilities.
  • Innovation: not just good ideas. Coming up with an idea is just the first step of the process. The hardest part is executing those ideas. When it comes to innovation, there are structured processes and methodologies that will enable execution and guide us in the process: from coming up with an idea, designing an MVP (minimum viable product), testing it, learning from its outcomes, and adapting the learnings into a new version of the product before we are ready to scale it.
  • Take calculated risks. Be ready for setbacks. Innovating implies stepping out of our comfort zone and trying new things that we have never done before. It means taking a risk and the associated cost that comes with failure. But failure brings learnings that are crucial to improving and growing. Fostering curiosity, asking questions to learn from other’s experiences, and failure is imperative for innovation.
  • Dream big, start small with ruthless determination. The sky is the limit when envisioning the future. An inspiring vision will fuel your passion and determination. Starting small makes things easier to achieve and helps us conquer quick wins and learning points to keep going.
  • Progress, not perfection: Strive for continuous improvement through repeated experiment cycles. We are not looking to nail it from day 1, we are looking to pursue continuous improvement.

When we think about developing an innovation mindset, it seems like common sense. However, it is easier said than done. In our experience, the biggest challenge to developing a culture of innovation within an organization is the leaders’ inability to develop an innovation mindset.
When we start shifting our mindsets, we start changing our culture.

In the first article of this series, we shared the specific challenges we witnessed when launching an Agile Leadership Program at a leading financial services company. At Axialent, we deliberately expose and analyze ‘the gap’ before we intervene. We call it the ‘From-To’. It helps us gain a deep understanding of the problem and empathize with our clients as we embark on co-designing the solution with them. In this second article, we share our thinking around the principles that informed our approach to this Agile leadership journey.

The Journey

Following is an illustration of the Agile leadership journey:


It consisted of three collective workshops, each a few weeks apart, and individual coaching sessions in between them. During these 1:1 encounters, the coach and participant worked on the coachee’s commitment to experimenting with his/her behavioral change. Full disclosure: this structure was presented to us as a suggestion based on successful deployment at the Executive level with another business partner. We took it on to adapt, test, and learn further with the remaining top-200 leaders (executives included).

The Participants

The first aspect of this program was defining the target audience. Traditionally, our client would offer leadership development programs at their corporate university campus, as the location where they ‘built culture’. They liked to mingle leaders from around their geographical footprint, resulting in diverse cohorts that did not necessarily work together daily. This had its pros. However, we wanted to test a new approach: we directed this program at intact teams, meaning leadership teams that worked together every day. We believed that this would allow them to have more earnest conversations around real-life challenges that affected them all directly. The most significant plus for us was that they could make commitments that genuinely mattered to their shared agenda. Participants would be primed for mutual accountability.

Cadence

agile team workingThe second aspect that made this program different was that it was not designed as the typical immersive, residential, intensive x-day workshop. Instead, we scheduled shorter interventions several weeks apart. This design was deployed before the pandemic, so the sessions were held face-to-face. Nevertheless, this concept has survived to this day as a valid structure for most of our hybrid or purely online leadership development journeys.

Test & Learn

Another principle we followed was a prototyping approach of sorts. We ran pilots for each group intervention and led retrospectives where feedback was gathered from participants as if our lives depended on it. We moved past the typical satisfaction survey and got extremely curious about the participants’ experiences. Which were their ‘a-ha’ moments and pain points? When did they flow? With whom did they connect? What did they learn? This provided a wealth of feedback that we integrated into the last legs of the journey.

Shared Accountability

Lastly, we took a shared responsibility approach to facilitation. Both coaches and participants were responsible for the best use of the group’s time together. This is not a new concept, but it gained even more traction as we added elements to the program that emphasized this approach: each program milestone ended in commitments, draft experiments, individual and collective action plans, and a learning buddy system for participants to hold each other accountable for their learning goals. The burden was not on the facilitator; we equally distributed it among all involved. And in teams where circumstances changed mid-journey, both leaders and their facilitators jointly decided how they would shape the agenda differently moving forward.

As you can imagine, some things worked, and some things did not click at first. Far from disappointing us, we confirmed that the approach was valid: prototype, test, gather feedback, integrate it, learn, and share the responsibility to improve iteratively and incrementally. This was an agile learning journey after all. We would not have it any other way. Or would we? In the next and last article of this series, we will share the top lessons we learned alongside our clients as we deployed this leadership journey.

We look forward to exchanging points of view and continuing to learn together if you’d like to comment below!

Doing agile is challenging but being agile is transformative. Where is the right place to start? There is no one right answer. But first things first. What is the difference between doing agile and being agile?

Doing Agile

Agile is not a methodology; it is a mindset you can apply in your life and your way of doing business. Agile is common in the software development industry, but any industry can use and benefit from the agile mindset. For me, doing agile is about implementing specific behaviors or ways of doing business based on four values and twelve principles (the Agile Manifesto). Therefore, a way to do agile is to implement frameworks or methods that are very powerful to organize, collaborate and prioritize tasks and workflows in a team such as Scrum or Kanban.
Most teams try this approach. I don’t think it is wrong, but I do think it is incomplete. When teams focus just on using SCRUM, they forget why they are implementing agile. In other words, they can’t see the forest for the trees. Agile is not about speed. It is about producing better outcomes for the business in a rapidly changing world. For example, a team measures the number of new features (outputs), rather than new subscribers (outcomes). It is okay to have deliverables, but new features do not guarantee business results.

Being Agile

Being agile, on the other hand, is about transforming your mindset. It has to do with how you understand the world. It encourages a new way of leading teams, developing a product, or testing ideas. Being agile is transformative because it forces us to put the customer first and focus on developing the things that matter.

Why Being Agile is So Hard

Being Agile is common sense, but not common practice. It goes back to the Waterfall Project Management framework. This way of managing was created during the industrial revolution. The goal was to find the best way to optimize a production line. Things are different now because the speed of change is so high that companies need to adapt every day. And what is tricky about change is that it’s not so fun. Change means constantly learning and coping with uncertainty. And learning with the wrong mindset means failing, which touches our insecurities.
doing agile vs being agile
I remember coaching a Product Manager to include an experimentation mindset in their agile sprints. In order to do this, she had to coordinate experiments with a team of UX designers and developers. The team was struggling because everyone wanted to have everything perfect. It’s okay to pursue doing things right. The problem is when perfection is a way to keep your work within your comfort zone. For example, their focus was on having the perfect design or the perfect line of code. Instead, they should have been trying to understand the impact their new features would have on their customer. But they preferred to focus on what was less scary for them: the technical output.
Everyone had a reason for this. The PM was new to the role, so she did not want to measure outcomes because, for her, that meant she did not understand the customer well enough, and she was not ready for the role. The developer did not want to measure outcomes either because his job was to make a button work and get that perfect algorithm. He did not see himself as having to change the customer behavior. The UX designers did not want to test with mockups. Instead, they had to do things properly and follow their internal procedures as good design mandates.
This makes sense because it is harder to commit to impact customer behavior (outcome) than to produce an output. It is hard because apparently, the former is not under the team’s control. And this is true if you look through perfectionist lenses, but it is not the only way.

The Simple Solution

Sorry, there is no simple solution. But there is a solution. I will summarize some key points, but I also want to anticipate that agile means implementing a profound cultural transformation and that is a complex process that takes time.
As a manager, you need to accept the impact of working under agile. You cannot ask teams to use Kanban but have a two-year roadmap of features that the team needs to develop. Instead, it would be best if you adopt a learner mindset. As Jeff Gothelf says, you are creating an infinite product. A product that is constantly evolving with the market, and you can’t know what the market will want in two years. A learner mindset implies testing and learning (failing) repeatedly.
Second, test and learn is tough if you don’t create psychological safety for your team to explore the unknown. This is a new way of leading in which leaders need to be capable of having crucial conversations to understand what failure means for each individual on his/her team. The best way to incentivize this is to stop appraising faster outputs, but faster learning cycles. Retrospectives or reflections are crucial but do not focus only on technical issues. Explore the individual dimension. This can start with a simple question: How did you feel during the experiment?
Finally, as a leader, you need to create a shared vision where everyone understands that a line of code impacts the company’s ROI. You need to be consistent and aligned with the results you demand. It is okay to have clear objectives and key results (OKRs), but they should be centered on changing customer behavior.

Conclusion

To sum up, being agile can sound cool and imperative, especially in these crazy times. Sometimes we want a quick solution — we might think agile can be the vaccine to get everything under control again. But things do not go back to normal with quick fixes. Conscious leadership is more relevant than ever. We need to change our mindsets, being players and learners who take care of each other at every step of the way. That is, for me, the best way to be agile.

agile shaping your culture

At Axialent, we are not experts in Agile. Our expertise lies in helping organizations build the cultures they require, in light of their business strategy, and develop their leaders to be living proxies of that culture. In the last two decades, agile has emerged as an unstoppable practice among organizations, and it is changing their cultures.

The question for us is: are you managing the resulting culture change intentionally? Is agile shaping your culture by accident or by design?

Adopting an agile way of working can be fraught with challenges. We experienced this first hand when we launched an Agile Leadership Program at a leading financial services company. I’d like to share the lessons we learned behind the scenes of what was probably the most audacious adoption of agile in a non-tech industry.

We accompanied the top 200 leaders of this organization, in 24 cohorts, across 11 countries, in a 6-month long journey that combined coaching them individually and as leadership teams. This gave us a privileged vantage point to observe their struggles and the gaps they were trying to bridge.

In this first article of a series, we will focus on the specific challenges we witnessed, because we follow this principle: ‘no gap, no coaching.’ Clarifying the gap before we intervene helps us gain a deep understanding of the problem, empathize with our client, and offer higher chances of finding an adequate solution to prototype, test, and learn.

Here are some of the conclusions we reached after exposing the gap:

1. Agile brings about a new leadership paradigm and not just a more effective way of working.

It is hard to imagine companies embarking on an agile transformation and taking it lightly. They aim to become much better in terms of quality, time-to-market, productivity, and, above all, employee engagement.

Most believe that adopting agile unleashes talent, makes team members accountable and generates one-team dynamics. Other firms might be driving a similar shift, but they’re not calling it an agile transformation. The name is not what matters.

Beyond the rituals and ceremonies they adopt, or the frameworks they embrace, the essence of today’s business transformations lies in changing how leadership is felt, conceived, and performed, in a way that is radically different. This happens in most cultural transformations. The difference that agile brings is the context.

2. From rigid, hierarchical ‘command-and-control’ leadership to servant leadership 

In this company’s context, the gap for leaders was shifting from a rigid, hierarchical ‘command-and-control’ leadership style to a servant leadership style.

This change required the top-most executives to give up being the center of the organization. They were now expected to be at the service of the teams who worked closer to their clients than the leaders ever were. They were supposed to coach those teams, instead of giving them detailed instructions.

Leaders’ main focus now had to be on removing any and all obstacles that prevented those teams from delivering value to the customer as quickly and effectively as possible. Even if those obstacles were the leaders themselves.

Can you see how counter-intuitive this could be for an executive who climbed the ranks by being a good soldier, was promoted for being a great soldier, and just as he or she was about to reach the summit of a 2-decade-or-more climb is told ‘sorry, the glory is down there?’

3. From micromanagement to  autonomy, engagement, and empowerment 

For employees, the central gap was shifting from a culture of micromanagement to one where autonomy, engagement and empowerment are expected, exercised, and promoted.

The intention was to evolve from being managed and having linear career expectations to self-managing themselves and their own career. Why? Because this company believed that it would help them shift from feeling resignation, skepticism, and fear of feedback to feeling engaged, empowered, and looking at feedback with openness and acceptance. The logic was attractive. However, change was not automatic.

From Do Agile to Be Agile

At Axialent we believe that, for any change that truly matters, it must operate first at the Be-level. It’s in that mushy place where thoughts & feelings, values & beliefs, and needs & wants reside (and that top execs seldom look at from so high above) where we have found the most significant leverage.

From there, the leaders and those they lead can shift behaviors more effectively at the Do-level. Training people how to do agile was not enough.

They needed to dive deeper and actually be agile.
In that deep side of the pool, there is anxiety, tension, and even fear among leaders and team members alike. “What will happen to me and my career in this company?”, “How can I protect my safe haven?” “Will we increase risk by letting go of control?” “What do you mean that control is ‘bad’? We’re a regulated company! Control is not only good – it’s mandatory!”

Reconciling these dilemmas was suddenly part of their job description. They looked at their toolkit and realized they needed a different set of tools to deal with this new reality. So, we set off to replenish them from our stock.

Understanding these gaps helped us walk in our clients’ shoes as we embarked on this journey alongside them. In the following two articles of this series, we will explain the design principles we followed and the most prized lessons we have learned and would apply in the next opportunity that comes our way. Come along for the ride!

my innovation mindset

Ten years ago, I decided to focus my career on helping organizations innovate by developing new products and services. Because of that, I did my best to embrace what I considered an “Innovation Mindset.”  I thought to myself: I need to become an innovator and adopt this mindset in my life. For me, this meant not being afraid to try new things, takings risks, and doing my best to be creative. However, as a result, I became someone who struggled with routines because I thought an innovative person should not be static.
As I started to grow personally and professionally, more complex problems appeared in my life. The idea to optimize, or improve, some aspects of my life did not resonate with my “innovation mindset.” I didn’t have a problem with the idea of improving and trying new things. The conflict I had was that for me, optimizing meant finding a routine and sticking to it.
 

The breaking point

 
my innovation mindsetThen, eventually, there was a point when I realized that the pain of not doing anything was larger than the pain of change. So, I started my Optimal Me journey. I decided to start with my nutrition. I reduced sugar, carbs, and read some books on the topic. I have to be honest, I could not become a keto person, but I became conscious about how I eat and how my body feels when I eat garbage (aka “junk food”).
Then, I continued my journey and started tracking how many hours I was sleeping. I downloaded an app and noticed how bad the quality of my sleep was. I kept going and explored new ways of exercising, measuring my HRV to understand my nervous system. In other words, I got quite nerdy about it. I started to read about meditation and practiced it 3 to 5 times per week. I tried specific ways of breathing to deal with stress, and so on. My point here is not to talk about all of my experiments in the Optimal Me program, but to reflect on the fact that what started as a small step became a deep dive on improving several aspects of my life.
 

Readjusting my innovation mindset

 
As a result of implementing these improvements, I was able to cope with some personal and professional problems and found the balance I wanted to achieve (for now). You might wonder if I currently have a fixed routine that includes all of these tools or techniques? Not quite. I do have some routines, but there are a lot of things that I stopped practicing. I thought I had failed because I had explored so many things during the last two years that I was not applying regularly. For example, I remember thinking: “Why am I not tracking my sleep anymore?”
The answer is simple. I am aware that now I sleep fine. Then I realized that some of those experiments helped me to deal with moments of stress, anxiety, and more. I was not using those techniques, apps, or routines simply because I did not have those problems anymore. However, now I have a set of tools that I can use when I feel I need them again. And this is the whole point of optimizing my life. Develop awareness, learn, test, and repeat if it makes sense. Otherwise, save it for later.
I realized I had a framed optimizing my life in the wrong way. It’s not a journey that you start and finish. It’s a life-long learning process of self-awareness and trying new things to deal with all the life-changing challenges that appear along the way. The cherry on top is that this is how innovation in organizations works. Having a successful business is not possible with a fixed optimization formula. The things that worked in the past may not be useful in the future. This is how I optimized my innovation mindset.
 

What happens when procrastination gets the best of us?

According to Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D., procrastination is a common human tendency. About 20 percent of adults have regular bouts of procrastination. She claims it is so common that no one can ever completely avoid it. Psychology researchers say that procrastination is characterized by the “irrational delay of tasks despite potentially negative consequences.” How can we overcome this paradoxical challenge that so many of us are facing?
Recently, I committed to writing an article for our website and, at the time that I did, I was energized and enthusiastic. Time passed, other work piled up, and… ahem… I admit I was tempted to renegotiate the deadline. The challenge is that at Axialent, our culture frowns upon the behavior of making excuses – one is expected to be a player, own up, and honor commitments, or renegotiate the terms of the agreement.
Bummer.
The victim in me was agonizing, wanting to say, ‘I don’t have enough time.’ A more culturally acceptable version of this at Axialent is, ‘I prioritized other commitments.’ But what about my commitment to write the article? What happened to my willpower in this situation? In any case, that was not the best version of myself.
Instead of letting this angst go to waste, I decided to use it to jumpstart this article. I wondered whether others who may read this could be beating themselves up for similar situations. And I thought that those readers might find it helpful to know that, 1) they’re not alone, and 2) there’s a science-based method out there that allowed me to put this article together and get-it-done.
 

So, what can we do when procrastination gets the best of us?

 
What happens when procrastination gets the best of us?
If you think that I listened to a pep talk that made my fingers glide across my computer keyboard, think again. The fuel that got me going was something I learned in one of Axialent’s newer programs called Optimal Me. There was no motivational speech, just scientific facts on how the brain works, how our mind works, how our body is this smart machine that I had neglected. Among many other provocations, this one nugget of wisdom stuck with me: better than having the motivation to do something is having a motive. Why? Because motivation depends on my emotional state, while a motive will always be around when I need it.
So, as all my anguish poured in at the thought of submitting this article, I turned to my motive. I just had to remember that the ultimate reason I had for writing this is not to produce a perfect literary piece, comply with a deadline, or respond to a colleague’s request. My motive is to share less-than-extraordinary experiences that could make ordinary people’s lives a little better. It’s to be of service and maybe help others out.
Once I connected with that, my energy reset. My mood was out of the question. I put in the work. A less than perfect first draft came out. I trusted my colleagues to edit it with due professionalism. And got-it-done.
 

The Optimal Me method

 
Optimal Me is not a recipe book from where I took this advice, plugged and played. It’s a journey that exposed me to thought triggers from a carefully curated stack of knowledge about our well-being. More importantly, it enticed me to experiment my way to better-being (yes, I just made that word up). How? The course’s experimental nature made it attractive because it became a game that I was happy to play – albeit without gamification.
I’ve participated in development programs before where learning outcomes were based on knowledge consumption. Others, the transformational ones, relied on double-loop learning. This program is different in that the main goal is to learn to experiment for the sake of experimentation. Knowledge was not there to be consumed but to shape my experiment. I was free to pick the topic that I was more drawn to among all the curiosity triggers I received. I felt empowered to shift mindsets and learn!
This comes with a bonus: I, the participant, reaped the benefits of this program in full. I did not learn something that I was expected to ‘pay forward’ to my team (like leadership skills) or ‘pay back’ to my company (like technical skills applied to my job). What I learned by experimenting with productivity directly affected my well-being at work. What I learned after experimenting with nutrition, sleep, and exercise affected my body.
Given the constant uncertainty we’re living in these days, more and more companies we engage with are earnestly concerned about and caring for their people’s well-being. If you work at one of those companies and want to explore a non-threatening, enjoyable, and science-based method to address this pain point now, I recommend you give Optimal Me a try. Experiment. It will be worth it.
 

If you would like to see the recording of our live Optimal Me webinar with Oseas Ramirez, click here.

Our world is changing faster than ever and with those changes, we need to learn to adapt quickly and intelligently.  Scenario planning 2.0, as my colleague Fran Cherny describes it in his recent webinar, is all about how fast we can read, listen, and integrate new information and adjust our plans quickly. But what exactly is the role of scenario planning 2.0 in execution excellence?

The role of scenario planning 2.0 in execution excellence

 
The Role of Scenario Planning 2.0 in Execution Excellence: Two people planning for the future
Ongoing reviews and adjustments are an essential part of execution and that’s where applying scenario planning 2.0 is most effective. To do so, we must first slow down enough to be able to smoothly read, listen, and integrate new information. Only then will we able to rapidly respond and adjust execution moving forward.
Traditional scenario planning is a crucial part of strategy and business planning. It helps us consider different options and possibilities, depending on the marketplace’s current situation. Traditional scenario planning is part of good business planning; key to a company’s plan to operationalize its strategy. However, scenario planning 2.0 is different. Learning how to implement it is an important skill that any great leader needs to practice in the pursuit of execution excellence during times of fast change and uncertainly.
Axialent’s approach to execution includes developing an execution infrastructure, as well as managing the ongoing implementation of work. Part five of the model below shows how execution is managed in an organization. It is during these implementation cycles that scenario planning 2.0 will have the greatest impact. Organizations must have meetings to discuss how to manage new information and make decisions with regards to what processes, mindsets, and behaviors need to change. Once these decisions have been made, leaders can adjust the areas of their execution plan that require attention and continue to review and improve them throughout the cycles. Here is a model that illustrates our approach:
The Role of Scenario Planning 2.0 in Execution Excellence: execution excellence model
 
 

The impact of new information

Reading, listening, and integrating new information as it arises can impact aspects of a business’s execution infrastructure. Most importantly, integrating new information can change in people’s mindsets and behaviors, and the processes that support collaboration. The two essential aspects of execution infrastructure that are most affected by these changes are people and process (seen in the model above). Making adjustments in response to these changes does not require stopping execution implementation. Instead, it highlights the areas that will most be impacted by new information, (i.e. people, process, and direction).
 

CONCLUSION

The role of scenario planning 2.0 in execution excellence is an important one. Although traditional scenario planning has been a core part of strategy and business planning, in the current conditions, scenario planning 2.0 is core to execution. By leveraging this practice and the components of execution infrastructure, we can quickly make adjustments to processes, mindsets, and behaviors. This, in turn, builds capability as business moves forward and makes directional changes.
 
To learn more about scenario planning 2.0 and how to run this powerful exercise with your team, watch the recording of Axialent’s live webinar or click here to speak with one of our representatives to learn more about our Execution Excellence offering.

Hand holding jigsaw puzzles, Business partnership concept.

Traditional scenario planning helps to prepare an organization for the future. The method asks leaders to consider possible future scenarios and how they could affect the business’s strategy in order to formulate the best plans to tackle any given outcome. 

But,  what happens when the future suddenly seems more uncertain than ever? The wheel is moving really fast these days. What we thought was true yesterday, might not be true tomorrow. We are facing fast changing environments in which people and organizations are struggling with how to adjust to it all. Some of the more common words I have heard when working with teams in the last 90 days are uncertainty, anxiety and feeling “stuck”.

Preparing ourselves

We cannot control what others decide, what consumers want, and what governments will do. We can only prepare ourselves to see the possibilities in advance and be at our best to quickly adapt our plans. The traditional way of planning no longer works and applying the scenario planning method won’t be enough under the current conditions. The issue now is not how many scenarios we can build based on assumptions and premises, but how fast we can read, listen, and integrate new information. The world is changing too quickly to be able to make predictions as we did in the past. There are new variables and a lot of unknowns.
We need to find a new way forward, which honors the need for long term plans, while learning how to adjust with agility and effectiveness. Just think, even the definition of what “long-term” means has been upended. Even yearly plans could be considered long-term now!

Scenario Planning 2.0

Now the question is, how do we find the way forward? How can we plan and create a vision if we are still reeling from the recent changes and figuring out how best to adapt? How can we support our team members and help them feel less anxious as we forge ahead together?
The way we do this needs to address not only the business planning and strategy, but also how we can build trust within the team and inspire and energize them. It requires learning a new way of applying an updated version of scenario planning; one where the current situation changes day to day, or even hour to hour. The updated version of scenario planning means having frequent and regular conversations with your team to discuss assumptions, impact, and action plans. This is not a one-time event, but a regular exercise that will align your people and help to inspire confidence in an uncertain time. Scenario Planning 2.0 will help you and your team find a way forward. A way that is aligned despite the different perspectives about the future, and that provides the mindset and practices that can help you adjust based on new information.

Learn more

I gave a webinar masterclass to explore this methodology further through a simple, yet powerful exercise that many leaders are already benefiting from. To watch the webinar recording and learn how to run this beneficial exercise with your team, click here.