Agile island versus a silo
Imagine you have a silo, kind of like a big bucket filled with balls in it, and you have these people doing x kind of work in x department, but there is a problem because you have a number of these different silos across the organization.
They aren’t really talking to each other across the organization and there is very little in the way of cross-functional learning, collaboration or effective communication happening.
Each silo relies on a single point of contact.
What you need is people to be working together across the whole organization.
Sometimes, it can be really hard to do the work of authentic agility. Sometimes, the organization simply doesn’t have the appetite for that degree of change and so they invest in marginal gains, which is fine, you can do that.
There are circumstances where time is against us.
It could be a start-up that is running out of money. It could be a large organization that is struggling with their share price on the stock exchange. It could be a company that is being disrupted in the market by a new, innovative, and agile competitor.
A moment that is crucial in the evolution of our business and its ability to sustain itself in the market.
An agile island is an opportunity to create a pocket of agility in the ocean of your organization and you invite people from the ‘mainland’ of your organization to work together in an authentically agile way.
A place that embraces leadership that buy-into Agile values and principles. A place that embraces individuals who collaborate, communicate, and create as a high-performance team. A place that celebrates experimentation, inspection, and adaptation.
That is a great way to jumpstart Agility in your organization and have an environment that pioneers in product development, collaboration, and creativity.
A beacon of hope for the rest of the organization that inspires others to reconsider how they are working and thinking, and invites them to test new ways of working, funding, and creating.
How is that different to the Agile silo?
Because this agile island works across the whole value stream. It connects and co-creates with all elements of your organization and serves as an inspiration for others to observe, experiment and recreate agility within their own departments.
As you build momentum, you can create more agile islands, and create a whole archipelago of agile islands across the organization with each island forming and evolving authentically and sustainably.
If you are thinking of growing business agility within your organization and finding the idea of a wholescale agile transformation too overwhelming, consider creating an agile island and slowly building out more agile islands from there.
John Coleman has deep experience and expertise working with executives, #leadership teams and product development teams to achieve increased #businessagility and create environments where creativity and collaboration produce high-performance teams.
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