How do you build an agile workforce?

Agile workplaces are sustained by culture, not technology or process. 

Drucker died in 2005 and since then some of the world’s most iconic brands didn’t make it.  Kodak failed to react to the digital revolution even though it had many years to adapt to the iceberg heading towards its core business.  Nokia has all but disappeared from the mobile industry after dominating it for ten years and Blackberry is still on life support. 

WhatsApp took just six years to acquire 900m users and has displaced the SMS revenues of every mobile operator in the world which took twenty years to create.  Blockbuster Video dominated high streets for a decade was offered to acquire Netflix. Twice. Refusing on both occasions.  The post mortems from administrators, insiders and ex-employees all have a single recurring pattern of failure: the total absence of a capability to change course and direction in enough time to adapt to the fastest ever rate of change in humanity’s history. 

Mckinsey reported in 2005:

“Each upsurge in the number of professionals who work in a company leads to an almost exponential—not linear—increase in the number of potential collaborators and unproductive interactions. Many leading companies now employ 10,000 or more professionals, who have some 50 million potential bilateral relationships. The same holds true for knowledge: searching for it means trying to find the person in whose head it resides"

In 2012 McKinsey found that dealing with email took up around 30% of knowledge workers’ time, and it’s predicted that by next year the daily number of emails sent/received across the globe will exceed 220 billion each day.  As finding people and knowledge becomes more difficult, social cohesion, agility and trust among colleagues declines, further reducing productivity.

Agile companies have discovered that co-operative processes in general seem far more likely to survive than isolated, rampantly selfish entities. This moves successful evolution away from the original ‘principle of natural selection’ to a more holistic, symbiotic view of adaptability, wherein survival is a group or team effort.  We have a so called ‘war on talent’, when compelling research suggests this isn’t actually the problem.

Scientific American recently published research suggesting there is a Surprising Problem with Too Much Talent.

Extract:

“Researchers looked at three sports: basketball, soccer, and baseball. In each sport, they calculated both the percentage of top talent on each team and the teams’ success over several years. For both basketball and soccer, they found that top talent did in fact predict team success, but only up to a point. Furthermore, there was not simply a point of diminishing returns with respect to top talent, there was in fact a cost. Basketball and soccer teams with the greatest proportion of elite athletes performed worse than those with more moderate proportions of top level players.”

Why is too much talent a bad thing? Think teamwork. Think agility. In many endeavours, success requires collaborative, cooperative work towards a goal that is beyond the capability of any one individual.

In his classic novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the Karass and the Granfalloon.

A Karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done. A Granfalloon, on the other hand, is a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is meaningless in terms of the ways it gets things done. It’s like a typical department where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done.  When you find yourself in a Karass, it’s an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a Granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.

Agile workforces are built around culture, not a technology, process or methodology.  One of the best examples of agile culture comes from Valve.  “Valve is the creator of Steam, the pioneering game platform that distributes and manages thousands of games directly to a community of more than 65 million players around the world.”

Here’s one of the opening sections of it employee handbook: 

“Welcome to Flatland

Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily. But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.” 

Unfortunately, everyone’s is talking about building agile workforces, but very few people are doing it.

 "The Agile Revolution?" - a guide for businesses on agile working is available for download on Amazon Kindle.

About the author:

Léon Benjamin is a collaboration practitioner.  He is the co-founder of Sei Mani, a professional services company that delivers extraordinarily high levels of adoption of enterprise collaborations apps. Sei Mani delivers the adoption of real time video, conferencing, messaging apps and ‘Facebook inside’ technologies, for its customers, that enable them to transform the way they work.      

Previously spent 25 years designing and delivering complex IT transformation programmes, managing business change and agile software development in financial services, telecommunications, retail and travel, for blue chip companies, counting Union Bank of Switzerland, Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, Barclays Capital, Andersen Consulting, Airtours, Opodo, BT, Tesco, Argos, Carphone Warehouse and Aviva.