Requisite Agility

REFRAME YOUR
BUSINESS WITH
REQUISITE
AGILITYA C T I VAT E A G I L I T Y I N YO U R B U S I N E S S
A DA P T YO U R B U S I N E S S TO A G I L I T Y
Amit Arora · RequisiteAgility.org © 2020

AGILITY IS IN YOUR MIND -
ADOPT NEW MODES OF THOUGHT
Your business success guarantees that you are an expert in one of these already.
‘Context’ thinking –What situation is my customer in now?
‘Process’ thinking – What exactly should my customer consistently do?
‘Relationship’ thinking – Who should my customer partner up with?
‘Transformational’ thinking –What should my customer become?

LET ALL YOUR THOUGHT MODES ACTIVATE
Remember these are adoptions of Living Mental Processes, not of “Practices” or “Ceremonies”
ADOPTING “PRACTICES” IS “COLLECTING” - works for simple situations where best
practice and benchmarks is all you care about.
NEWTHOUGHTS ENABLE ADAPTATION WHICH IS AGILITY!
ADAPTATION and ACTIVATION is applying the power of complexity.

ACTIVATION IS ADAPTATION AND
INNOVATION.
ADOPT - apply exiting best practice - follow the rules (compliance) .
ADAPT - synchronize the internal and external environment - challenge the rules (take them to
the edge).
INVENT - disruptive innovation - change the rules.

NEED FOR AGILITY
Requirements for agility are different across different organisations, and even for organisations
within the same sector or industry because no two set of strategies and cultures are alike. Even
within an organisation the required or requisite agility may be different from one year to another,
from one business unit to another, from one function to another.

THREE FORMS
OF AGILITYP E R S O N A L A G I L I T Y
T E A M A G I L I T Y
O R G A N I S AT I O N A G I L I T Y

PERSONAL AGILITY
Leadership
 Be present and listen to your employees
 Promote and nurture a true company culture of
experimentation and learning
 Recognize and reward teams or individuals for being active
contributors.
Individual Contributorship
 Support yourself as a person.
 Meditate on your guiding principles.
 Crystalize the larger purpose of your work
 Align priorities with those you respect
 Create a cadence for continuously learning and improving.

TEAM AGILITY
Team Leadership
Know on whose behalf your team is working
Know the pain they are feeling and that your team is
working to remove
Know how to tell when your team has actually helped them
Team Contributorship
 Support your teammates as people.
 Take reflective action,
 Make collaborative decisions
 Be conscious of upward and downward dynamics
 Agree on your guiding principles.
 Create shared purpose for your work
 Align priorities across the team

ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY
Organizational Leadership
 Communication is KEY.
 Adapt, adapt, adapt.
 Switch up your management style.
 Inspire learning and personal growth.
holistic approach to leading and managing complex change.
 Empower self organizing teams.
Organizational Contributorship
 Support everyone in your organization as people.
 The presence of networked structures is an important part of the agile, future proof organization.
 You need the right culture to be able to work in networked structures.
 The agile talent and performance system that will support individual aspiration.
 Agree on guiding principles across departments and functions
 Create shared purpose for your work
 Align priorities across the Organization

THE MOST
IMPORTANT
CHALLENGES
A G I L I T Y & C O M PA N Y T R A N S F O R M AT I O N

LACK OF UNDERSTANDING FROM THE
MANAGEMENT
• Not treating the change as a priority,
• Not taking part in the change,
• Setting wrong expectations,
• Lacking the understanding of the
change in general.

WELL-ESTABLISHED CORPORATE
CULTURE, CUSTOMS AND PROCESSES
(AKA “CONCRETE”)
• Fear of change - is for most of us a natural reaction. In general, our organisms love stability
and predictability. New or unknown environments might seem hostile to us, which causes fear.
• High position combined with lack of skills- Any change (either in the current
organization or when applying for a new job) can be harmful, both in terms of money and
position, as it might show their lack of skills, hence such people oppose it.
• Herd behavior - if one person (especially one with a strong personality) opposes the
transformation for whatever reason, others might follow, even if they are in favor of the change.

MERCILESS TRANSPARENCY
Failing tests?
Missing features?
Dozens of bugs?

TRANSFORMATION IS A HUGE CHANGE
• Changing the organization is not an easy task nor a
quick one.
• The bigger and more “stale” an organization is, the
more difficult it gets.
• Problems might arise when pilot projects are
finished – what should be next?
• Without a plan of how to make use of all the
learnings and momentum from the pilot
participants it can be for nothing.

WHY ISN’T YOUR CURRENT APPROACH TO
SCALING AGILITY WORKING?
• Your copy of another organization’s model doesn’t work.
• Your organization’s design conflicts with the goal of agility.
• You are trying to “copy and paste” what works for one team to all teams.
• You are independently optimizing different parts of the organization.

THE BRAND
IDENTITY
PROBLEM
R I S K S O F N OT I C I N G A N D R E S P O N D I N G
TO C H A N G E

STATIC VS CHANGING
• Consistent Products vs New Offerings
• Comfortable Answers vs Challenging Questions
• Meeting Accepted Standards vs Going Above and Beyond

BRAND RISKS OF STATIC VS CHANGE
• Too Static
– Brittle
– Old-fashioned
– Open to Disruption
• Too Changeable
• Shapeless
• Unpredictable
• Open to Public Failure

CONDITIONS ONLY CHANGE IF THEY
ARE NOTICED
Change? What change? I don’t see any change
Umm what about…
• New Regulations
• NewWorking conditions
• New Materials
• EmployeeTurnover
• New Market Demands
• New Competition

DRESSING THE BUSINESS TO SUIT
THE MOOD
What do I feel like delivering to my customers today?
Umm what about…
• Violated Contracts
• Missed Deadlines
• Unmet Accountabilities
• Poor SEO
• Customer Churn

REQUISITE AGILITY
NOT RECKLESS AGILITY

WHAT IS REQUISITE AGILITY?
Requisite: Required by the nature of things.
Agility: To sense, adapt and make changes with speed, flexibility and precision on a timely basis.
Requisite Agility taps into the power and energy trapped in volatility, uncertainty, complexity and
ambiguity.

HOW HEALTHY IS THE HEART OF YOUR
ORGANIZATION?
• A healthy heart is not constant, if it was constant it would be fragile, not agile.
• When we climb stairs or run our heart increases pace to match the demands of its
environment.
• When we are at rest, our heart decreases the pace to match the demands of its environment.
This is the best example of requisite agility.

REQUISITE AGILITY IS APPLIED
THROUGH THESE ITERATIVE STEPS

THE REQUISITE
AGILITY
FORMULA
R A = PA X TA X O A

REQUISITE AGILITY = PA · TA · OA
Personal Agility = PA. Coaches who help
individuals to tap and unlock their personal
potential live here.
Team Agility =TA. The application of Lean, Six-
Sigma, Kanban, Project Management and Agile
lives here.Agile is a subset of Team Agility.
OrganizationalAgility = OA. The design of
missions, strategies, structures, systems, products,
services, processes, value streams, technologies,
financials and culture change lives here.
.
The pace and depth of change inside the organization is synchronized with the rate of
change in its unique environment and context.
Three forms of agility are interwoven into one.

HOW TO MEASURE PA, TA & OA
PA = ΔP ≥ ΔE
TA = ΔT ≥ ΔE
OA = ΔO ≥ ΔE

EXERCISE
• Is your coaching strength more in PA orTA or OA?
• Why do you enjoy in what you do ?
• Where is your center of gravity and where is your
energy?

REQUISITE
AGILITY
REFRAMES
CONTRADICTIONS
T H R E AT S B E C O M E E N E R G I E S
O P P O S I T E S B E C O M E C O M P L E M E N T S

REQUISITE AGILITY (RA) FEEDS ON
VUCA
Sources of power in a business
Static Business Shapeless Business Requisitely Agile Business
Stable Demand Emotional Customers Volatile Demand
Consistent Standards InexpertAuditors Uncertain Credit
Conservative Investors Personal Charm Complex Standards
Predictable Innovation Innumerable Buzzwords Ambiguous Market Signals

RA BUSINESSES HAVE INTEGRITY
WITHIN CHANGE
By Delivering a Consistent … within changed …
Outcome Working conditions
Look and Feel Materials
Customer Experience Personnel
Pain Point Recognition Diagnostic Tools
Value Above Replacement Competition

RA BUSINESSES CHANGE WITH
INTEGRITY
By Scaffolding New… While maintaining…
Value Current Interaction Model
Offerings Backwards Compatibility
Market Capability Core Functionality
Employee Skill Development Performance and Safety
Incentive structures Intrinsic motivation

A FIELD GUIDE
TO AGILITY
I D E N T I F Y I N G A G I L I T Y I N T H E W I L D

DYNAMIC PRACTICES OF AGILITY
• InformationTransparency- makes the sharing of the knowledge increasingly relevant to
connecting up the ‘whole’.
• Rapid iteration and experimentation- the whole emphasis today is on rapid and fast
cycles of learning.
• Continuous Learning - we need to find ways to ”cut out time” to explore and look for new
ways to learn to improve ourselves and what we do within organizations.
• Flexible resource allocation - we need to be adaptive, fluid in any organization and team
design.
• Open physical and virtual environment -holds the real future and with so many
organizations denying social tools the key to make it ‘purposefully designed’ is to make the
activities clearly visible to all that need to know

DYNAMIC PRACTICES OF AGILITY
• Sensing and seizing opportunities – is important to drive innovation as the catalyst of
change.
• Technology, systems, and tools - keep looking at moving towards technology frontiers.
Exploring and exploiting contributes to a better holistic desired business outcome.
• Role mobility - constantly match the present skills with organizational needs.
• Active partnerships and ecosystems - trade in knowledge, in contribution, in working
alongside others to co-develop.
• Reflective action - construct and integrate new knowledge within the context of existing
knowledge and expertise
• Collaborative decision making- individuals collectively make a choice from the
alternatives before them.
• The upward and downward dynamics

EXCELLO LAW
Companies get direct access to partner-level lawyers,
who in turn receive complete flexibility over when and where they work
“Organisations need to build agility into their
foundations and champion it in their company culture.
Fake agility happens when companies only attach the
principle to current working practices, which does not
shift attitudes to working culture.”
- George Bisnought

DEGREE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Degree of environmental change is determined by e.g.:
 Cost of unforeseen changes
 Volatility of Market Demand
 Changes in Credit Picture
 Turnover of competitive rankings in the industry
 Regulatory initiatives

DEGREE OF AGILITY
Degree of agility is determined by:
 Flexibility inherent to the organization.
 Level of collaboration prevalent.
 Openness to change and adaptability.

NEXT STEPS FOR AGILE LEADERS
If you are planning an AgileTransformation or have one underway, it may be helpful to think about
these questions:
• What is the level of understanding and buy-in for Agile at the executive level?
• How big is the gap between how our ‘system’ operates today and what it needs to be?
• Is our organization structured for requisite agility?
• How to decide on sensitive critical intervention points in designing the RA Process and start projects?
• What is the process that enables one to come to a more integrated picture of developmental steps?
• How does the current thinking about agility influences building a picture of the future,and how can this be
approached differently?
• What is the interplay of influences that RA takes into account in understanding how ‘agility’ is evolving in an
organization?
• How can RA broaden our understanding of possible evolutionary processes and move away from simple cause-
effect interpretations?
• How is the RA process part of larger processes in the organization?And how does RA help in facing pushbacks
from larger processes (eg. political,historical, …) in the organization?

THANK YOU
Please if you have any questions just ask
www.requisiteagility.org
amit@requisiteagility.org

Requisite Agility

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