SETTING THE SCENE FOR BUSINESS AGILITY

AWARENESS: THE NEED FOR BUSINESS AGILITY

• Business Agility: Drivers and Criticality
  • Gain insight into the significance of business agility in a VUCA environment.
  • Understand the foundational concepts of Business Agility within relevant business contexts.
• Business Agility: Values, Principles and Dimensions
  • Learn about the essential values and principles that enable business agility.
  • Discover the importance of these values and principles in fostering organizational intelligence and new ways of working.
• Case for Change: Empowering Teams
  • Recognize the competitive advantage of self-organizing, cognitively diverse teams empowered to make decisions.
  • Learn about the critical success factors, including trust, safety, collaboration, cohesion, autonomy, mastery, and purpose, as well as individual accountability.
• Case for Change: Customer Value and Continuous Learning
  • Understand the importance of focusing on outcomes over outputs to delight customers.
  • Discover the need for real-time knowledge generation and innovative thinking in creating disruptive outcomes.

COMPELLING VISION, FOCUS AND CLARITY OF PURPOSE

• Compelling Vision and Clarity of Purpose
  • Learn how to align teams and organizations around an inspiring and clear vision.
  • Gain experience in methods for creating and communicating compelling visions and purposes.
• Focusing on the Big Picture and Emerging Future as an Agile Business
  • Envision the future state of business agility and identify the necessary steps and skills to achieve it.
  • Understand how to use this visioning activity with your teams.
• Understanding Customers, Stakeholders, Business and Emerging Markets
  • Develop empathy for customers to deliver differentiating value and experiences.
  • Apply tools such as persona maps, customer journey maps, and empathy maps to improve awareness of customer and stakeholder contexts.

ENABLING BUSINESS AGILITY

NEW WAYS OF THINKING

• Developing a Growth Mindset
  • Learn to adopt a growth mindset to enhance resilience and thrive amid uncertainty.
  • Discover how to reframe failure as an opportunity for learning.
• Blind Spots, Mental Models, Patterns and Sense Making
  • Recognize and understand blind spots and mental biases in shaping perceptions and beliefs.
  • Learn to examine and reframe mental models to better address business needs.
• Relationship Between Complexity and Business Agility
  • Gain an overview of complex adaptive systems and relevant management models to accelerate change processes towards business agility.
• Recognizing and Managing Dilemmas, Paradoxes and Polarities
  • Distinguish between traditional problems and unsolvable dilemmas, and learn to manage them effectively using polarity management.

NEW AND DIFFERENTIATING BEHAVIORS

• Ask vs. Tell: High-Performance Questions
  • Learn to define and utilize high-performance questions to enhance organizational outcomes.
  • Discover techniques to use these questions in day-to-day conversations.
• Making Value Visible
  • Understand the importance of defining and generating value through completed work delivered to customers.
  • Learn about the role of customer feedback in valuable learning.
• Experimenting and Hypothesis Testing
  • Learn to craft hypotheses and conduct rapid experiments to accelerate learning and business agility.
• Complex Dynamics of Change, Polarities, Systemic Problems and Disruptive Threats
  • Understand the complex dynamics involved in creating sustainable change.
  • Learn about lean change practices and how to reframe disruptive threats as strategic opportunities.

IMPLEMENTING AND SUSTAINING BUSINESS AGILITY

FRAMEWORKS, TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

• Lean Systems Thinking
  • Learn the importance of end-to-end systems thinking to eliminate waste and achieve effective outcomes.
  • Understand how to apply lean systems approaches to focus on strategic goals and value creation.
• Lean Startup and Canvases
  • Gain knowledge of the Lean Startup framework to validate innovative ideas rapidly.
  • Learn about minimal viable products and the benefits of “failing fast.”
• Design Thinking Approaches
  • Discover how to apply design thinking to accelerate organizational effectiveness and business agility.
  • Focus on the needs of people, technology possibilities, and business requirements.
• Flow-based Values and Systems
  • Understand the key values and practices of the Kanban method.
  • Learn to visualize workflows, reduce batch sizes, limit work-in-progress, and improve continuously.
• Iterative Framework and Sampling of Practices
  • Learn how iterative frameworks accelerate learning and value creation.
  • Understand the benefits of frequent discovery and delivery cycles.

BUSINESS AGILITY AS THE NEW NORMAL

• Creating Space for Optimal Engagement and Value Creation
  • Analyze the components of an agile environment that fosters innovation, ownership, and continuous learning.
  • Devise strategies to create such environments in a VUCA world.
• Action Plans and Tools to Accelerate Business Agility
  • Reflect on and synthesize workshop learnings into practical action plans and development tools.
  • Extend Business Agility mastery and learning beyond the course.
• Continually Reinventing
  • Identify ways to make the ongoing application of business agility a habitual practice.
  • Understand the importance of continuous reinvention in the journey of business agility.
• Measures of Success
  • Learn the role of leading indicators and value-based metrics in driving learning and business agility.
  • Understand how to set adaptive and continuously improving measures of success.

OPTIMIZING FOR IMPACT

OPTIMIZING THE ORGANIZATION

• Outcome based Organizational Structure
  • Learn to build an organizational structure that aligns with strategic goals and optimizes value streams.
  • Understand how to map value streams to ensure all activities contribute to the strategic vision.
• Roles and Responsibilities
  • Discover how to define roles that promote clear communication, enhance teamwork, and empower independent decision-making.
  • Learn to balance direct outcomes with continuous improvement in responsibilities.

DISCIPLINED AUTONOMY

• Enabling Constraints
  • Learn how to establish enabling constraints that foster innovation and accountability within a structured framework.
  • Understand how to define boundaries that guide without stifling creativity.
• Process Clarity
  • Learn to create transparent and well-defined processes that facilitate collaboration and autonomy.
  • Understand how to maintain quality and adherence to essential protocols while enabling autonomous decision-making.
• Professional Practices
  • Discover how to develop and refine professional practices that balance mandatory guidelines with flexible recommendations.
  • Learn to collaborate with peers to continuously improve standard rules and practices.