Perspectives Through Personal Agility
In our minds, a project or an organization is all about the complexities in today’s fast-paced, competitive, and dynamic environment. It does not matter what kind of projects or organizations we plunge into. It could be any industry: small, medium, large, or mega. Besides there being a lot of ambiguity, we need to deal with human behaviors. The biggest impact is on leadership skills that are talked about in the Project Management Institute article, Navigating Complexity.2 From our perspective, personal agility with its seven flavors can positively influence the ability to manage complexities and this can be considered as an ultimate goal to deliver the expected projects’ or organizations’ outcomes.
In an ideal world, projects are linear and the project or the organization’s performance is easy to measure. Keeping in mind our definition of the project/organization, the project or the organization’s performance is in a predicament as projects are empirical and nonlinear endeavors. We cannot simply use measurements from the project management triple constraints (scope, cost, time).3 We need to do a deep dive into more meaningful measurements, for example, stakeholders’ and in particular customer’s satisfaction, project team or an organization’s happiness, just to name a few. In order to succeed as an organization or project team, we need to have a sense of purpose. This is not confined to projects only. In this context, we need to be aware of unfinished projects where we care about long-term products and value for customers, which encompasses the whole organization. The success for a team or an organization is to build great products and maintain sustainability. This can lead to a long-term sense of purpose and high performance measurements.
A high-performing project or an organization reaches the final outcome even though there might exist a myriad of complexities. It is all about achieving the highest level of outcomes agility. Complexity can be mastered through other agility flavors. Teams and organizations that want to master all or any of the agility flavors have much higher chances to deliver a high-performing organization, project, product, or deliverable. With its sense of purpose high-performing projects and organizations are all about delivering value, which entice customers and bring long-term satisfaction to the table.
Taking a look at the opposite horizon of the ocean, a low-performing project or an organization can be considered as one where a team or an organization is unable to deliver the ultimate goal, which is stakeholder satisfaction. This is notwithstanding the achievement of the basic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from the leaders’ and managers’ triple constraints theory mentioned above. This is where organizational agility needs to be ubiquitous for which the seven agilities will certainly chug the boats faster and efficiently.
~Education agility
~~Change agility
~~~Emotional agility
~~~~Political agility
~~~~~Cerebral agility
~~~~~~Learning agility
~~~~~~~Outcomes agility
Teams need to have the courage to measure a project or an organization’s performance that are under a great level of involvedness. Teams need to constantly predict customer satisfaction or the Net Promoter Score,4 and this is only possible through feedback loops. This courage of an individual to obtain feedback is a soft skill, which is perfectly addressed as an ability to hone personal agility flavors such as Learning Agility, Change Agility, and Education Agility. Project and organizational performance is undoubtedly all about Outcomes Agility.
One of the most important “game changers” in an agile organization is how you manage your performance system. Do you want to have a team or a group of people? It is very important how we manage goals and performance appraisals in a company.
What You Measure Is What You Get
WYMIWYG
The things that matter most at the workplace aren’t measurable. You can’t measure directly the level of trust among team members or the members of an organization at large, but that trust level powers everything that the teams and the entire organization does. We can’t measure the degree to which team members want to be doing what they’re doing but that element is essential to an organization’s success. The same applies for personal agility. Although you cannot measure it directly, it plays a very important role when striving for performance. Personal agility is an understanding of agile mindsets in today’s modern organizations. People say “be Agile, don’t do Agile,” but how can you know if you are already Agile? How can you measure it? You cannot improve what you cannot measure since a number value cannot be calculated nor an indicative formula can be put on the measurement of trust. The fourth point in a Forbes5 article says: “If you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it.” This is why our model is crucial in every sense—meaning 360 degrees.
A team or an organization is what you have when people have the same purpose and goals. This is obvious to understand but rare in many organizations. In most organizations, people and teams have individual goals. The manager gives an individual a set of goals and then, after some time, there is a performance appraisal. How, then, can cross-functional projects succeed when we have a group of people with individual goals from managers? Performance is a team sport, not an individual sport for organizations. Even if the leader or the project manager builds a team with a workshop defining organizational or project goals, this is not a system change and by the time performance appraisal is done, people will only think about their individual goals. This is because performance appraisal is conducted for a single person and not for the project.
To alleviate this problem constant checks with your team members about what their goals are need to be performed. This needs to be a regular checkpoint. To give a sample of why this is required, in the technology industry, there are ongoing discussions between business and IT. Technical people do not understand business people and vice versa. It is not that they use different language, but that each has different goals.
Another important aspect of goals that impact performance is how they are managed in a hierarchy. Strategy is realized through goals from the top. The challenge is to connect these different worlds: leaders of a team and members of other teams (e.g., the management team). We tend to put our team goals first. It is natural but also dangerous for companies. Strategy realization plans should be transparent. Individual goals and team goals should correspond to organizational strategy as written in a PMI article.6 This correspondents to Outcomes Agility.
In our mind, honing the seven agilities of education agility, change agility, emotional agility, political agility, cerebral agility, learning agility and outcomes agility enlarges the probability of project and organizational success and elevated performance. Based on extensive experience and research the equilibrium in the seven personal agility flavors is the way to achieve high performance. There are seven different flavors of personal agility. It is important to keep all of them in balance. All the project team members need to know their current state of personal agility in an organization. Here we bring a huge, unique, and “one of a kind” value via the Personal Agility Lighthouse™ Index. This is a self-analysis assessment (see Appendix) where every project participant can learn more about himself/herself in an organization. To find out which agilities are already honed and which should be further developed, the project team members are provided with hints, tools, and methodologies on how to learn and get better at them. Thus the probability of achieving high performance increases for everyone in the organization.
There is no one or right way to implement the seven agilities. It all depends on the teams involved, the organizational structure, culture, maturity, and the projects’ and the organizational goals. There are of course a few “exceptions to the rule” aspects of implementation teams that should be focused on. People with highly honed personal agility can create enhanced Organizational Agility. There are many people who are focused on organizations and at the same time forget about individuals. Personal Agility is all about focusing on those individuals who can and want to change organizations. Misunderstanding or trying to address personal agility via some other methodologies/procedures may or may not work. There are no shortcuts in terms of mastering the seven agilities.
One pitfall that should be considered and talked through is transparency of measurements and metrics while applying and expending the seven agilities. Another drawback is linked to the teams’ and organization’s awareness of customers’ needs and wants. Teams need to distinguish what will pay off and what is just a whim. If individuals hold on to their beliefs, not wanting to grow with the organization in all the directions that the wind may take you, then there will be an eminent downfall.
If individuals discontinue and not use their learning ability, which happens to be a big part of the Personal Agility nuances, then it objectively resonates with what the World Economic Forum (WEF)7 says about “Learnability.” The WEF says: “It’s time to take a fresh look at how we motivate, develop and retain employees. In this environment, learnability8—the desire and capability to develop in-demand skills to be employable for the long-term—is the hot ticket to success for employers and individuals alike.” They further go on to explain in detail as shown in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2
Projects get off track every time project teams and organizations forget about clarity and continuous feedbacks. Without full self-expression and unambiguousness, teams tend to have their own sense of performance based on internal judgment of the project’s and organization’s KPIs (qualitative, quantitative, leading, and lagging). The organization and its teams can just disconnect from the project’s stakeholders and thus can slip into low performance. Teams need to work in full limpidity mode by showing the product advancement and by measuring the KPIs together with stakeholders. The short cycle of product development, coupled with the constant availability of the services and products for customer evaluation and feedback, makes close interactions possible between the organization, teams, and the stakeholders. Although this will not prevent teams and the organization from pitching into a low-performance mode, it will unfold the progress very quickly. It can also unveil each and every stakeholders’ involvement as they will want to give the feedback and their concerns sooner or later. Then by continuous adapting and adopting, the teams and the organization itself can have the possibility to get back on track. Adapting, adopting, and then adapting. This virtuous cycle is never ending for a high-performing organization as shown in Figure 3 below.
Figure 3