The Characteristics of Nimble Execution
In a previous post, I defined a nimble organization as one that has a sustained ability to quickly and effectively respond to the demands of change while continually delivering high performance. Gaining and sustaining nimbleness is not easily or casually achieved. To fully leverage its potential requires commitment and tenacity from the very top of an organization. This begins when members of the Board (or equivalent strategic sanctioning body) and senior leadership declare their deeply held belief that nimble execution is a vital strategic advantage. This conviction must then be translated into two levels of intention: more
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The Contained Slide
In my last post, I talked about The Zone, that place where dysfunctional symptoms form and begin to have an adverse impact on productivity, quality, and safety. This is where an organization can learn to operate in a “contained slide”—functioning just short of losing full control, yet able to squeeze the optimum speed and agility from its reservoir of adaptation resources.
Competitive ice skaters must contend with pushing the limits of their speed when going around corners as well as the traction that occurs between the blade on their skate and the surface of the ice. There is an optimum point when pressing this boundary that produces what can best be described as a contained slide. This is when skaters rely on their abilities to read the subtle information gained from their senses and experience to accelerate or slow down so they only briefly lose their balance (chaos), but then quickly regain it (order). Just as the speed begins to exceed a skater’s ability to regulate further action, he or she more
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Between Bedlam and Calm—The Nimble Zone
In my last post, I described nimble organizations as those with a sustained ability to quickly and effectively respond to the demands of change while delivering high performance. Constrained organizations, on the other hand, constantly inhibit their own efforts to implement change.
Today, clients struggle with perpetual unrest and ongoing change, and there is no terrain without vulnerability—only greater or lesser risk and liability. Constrained organizations see themselves as having to choose between two hazards: non-competitive order or hyper-unstable chaos. They fear that if they under-use their adaptation capacity, they won’t be able to keep pace with market demands that are growing increasingly dynamic and competitive. Yet, if they thrust more change on their people than they can effectively absorb, more
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Constrained or Nimble? Name Your Organization.
“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
— Edward Deming
As change facilitators, we are just as vulnerable as any professional to becoming so focused on the tactical trees in front of us that we lose sight of the forest. Compare this with the orthopedic surgeon who diagnoses the stress fracture but dismisses repeated migraines, or the urban planner who develops his piece de resistance in one small section of town, but ignores expanding decay in surrounding areas.
We run the risk of being so focused on helping organizations with their individual change endeavors that we don’t take into account their ability to address change from a generic standpoint. If we are riveted to the initiatives at hand, we can fail to help prepare our clients for changes that haven’t even been identified yet. When this happens, we unintentionally keep them in a strictly reactive mode instead of helping them also address the preventive side to execution…helping them get ready for more
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Embedding Structured Flexibility Into the Implementation Process
In my last post, I talked about the narrow realm between order and chaos where organizational nimbleness can be fostered. The zone where regulation and unruliness intersect offers the greatest possibility for people and organizations adapting to changing circumstances. Structured flexibility is a framework for exploiting this area where predictability and instability can be integrated; it is a mechanism designed to help people adhere to, as well as officially break from, sanctioned procedures. more
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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
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Order and Chaos
Too little liberty brings stagnation and too much brings chaos. —Bertrand Russell
In an earlier series, I shared some thoughts on the importance of both the art and science of our craft. As professional change facilitators, we must rely on both to give clients what was promised. Each must be integrated and balanced with the other, yet most sponsors are more attracted to the science aspect. That is, they consider methodology and deliverables more tangible and therefore easier to grasp and justify investing in. Don’t get me wrong—they want us to display the “art,” side of our craft, too, but they are generally drawn much more to the part of what we do that they can see and more easily understand.
Sometimes sponsors want to impose methodology concepts and tools on the organization, rather than give guidance about how and when to use them (as well as give a little leeway about their actual deployment). Practitioners, too, can become so enamored with the mechanisms we provide that we give the impression that it’s “the only way.”
It’s rarely in a client’s best interest for the people applying implementation methodologies to simply comply with their use. more
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Putting It All Together—The Mechanics of Capacity Management
Previous postings in this series have highlighted certain aspects of capacity management:
- Attending to the effects of future shock: resistance, results, encroachment, credibility
- The mental, emotional, and physical energy required to make adjustments in expectations
- The difference between capacity and resources
- Operating in The Zone
- Calculating change demand and measuring remaining capacity
In this final posting, we’ll look at the mechanics of the actual capacity management process and explore how it can be used to balance the demands of change with the capacity that remains. more
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How to Manage Capacity
There are two aspects to capacity management—its relationship to stability and uncertainty, and the measurement of its variables.
The Zone
Managing capacity involves:
- monitoring the supply of, and demand on, adaptation capacity, and, when necessary,
- making adjustments in order to operate in “The Zone” (a space for pursuing as much change as possible while minimizing the negative effects of future shock).
As I stated in the first post of this series, future shock occurs when the demands of change exceed a person’s or group’s capacity to properly deal with its implications. (This is reflected in their inability to maintain productivity, quality, and safety standards). At first glance, you might assume that future shock is something to avoid at all cost. However, that’s not what I’ve seen from leaders who consistently achieve their change objectives. more
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How Do People Learn to Adapt to Change?
Major change is triggered when people face a significant discrepancy between what they expected and what actually happens during change. People adjust to change, not by learning to like what is taking place, but by forming new expectations that can lead to success under the new conditions. At a personal level, three types of energy are required to make these adjustments in expectations: more
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Future Shock: The Scourge of Organizational Change
“Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” —Alvin Toffler
Toffler nailed it. Forty years ago, in his groundbreaking book of the same name, he coined the term ‘”future shock” to describe the various problems that arise when people deal with more change than they can metabolize. Like fingerprints or cornea signatures, each person has a threshold for dealing with change. Once past that boundary, any more change triggers the “shattering stress and disorientation” of future shock.
Toffler’s prediction of what could happen is an all-too-familiar reality for us today. A quick glance at any TV, Internet, or newspaper summary of current events provides ample evidence that we live in a world inundated with dramatic fluctuations and redefinitions of what we, until recently, thought was stable. The increases in the volume, momentum, and complexity of transitions we contend with surpasses anything we could have imagined only a few years ago. There is no longer any safe haven from ongoing turbulence and uncertainly. Everywhere we look, people are either in future shock or recovering from some degree of it.
Organizations Feel It Too
To keep up with customers and competition, organizations must react to external pressures for change, as well as accommodate their own desire to change. To a growing extent, the combination is overwhelming. In fact, it is precisely because the downside of change has become so prevalent and costly in recent years that our profession has grown as much as it has. more
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