Imagine seeing a clear opportunity unfold in your market, only to watch it pass you by because your organisation moves at the speed of a bureaucracy. How often in your organisation do people say, “I love working here. I just wish it was easier to get things done.” You’re constrained by the annual planning cycle or a slow, bureaucratic decision-making process. Maybe we’re just comfortable with the status quo, so comfortable that traditional plan-and-predict management feels easier than the uncertainty of something new.
We Change Slower than the Outside World
A common tension in many large organisations is the sense that the market and competitors are moving at an incredible pace, while internally the pace of change seems slow. You can see the opportunity out there, but it feels like you are on a massive, slow-moving oil tanker. Eventually, the orders go out to change course, but it feels like the very structure of the vessel is fighting against you and by the time you have managed to start turning the ship, the opportunity is gone.
The longest-serving employees tell stories of how the company started, “We were innovative, we used to invent revolutionary technologies, products and services.” For ten years we were innovators. Then the pace slowed. Now, every change feels heroic against the inertia of the system. Once that yearly plan is rubber-stamped, with the budgets allocated, that’s it, we are set. Sure, we can make a few tweaks, and sometimes we can react to the market and achieve outstanding results, but it takes a heroic effort to fight the system all the time.
This isn’t just a matter of perception; it’s structural. In one organisation that I worked with to deliver anything of value to our customers, so many individuals and teams need to be involved. With expertise scattered across continents, decisions bounce between time zones, dependencies multiply, and momentum dissipates. Sometimes it felt like there were more people managing the work than people doing the work.
Often, work gets stuck because no one is prepared to decide what to do, the person with the authority to decide is unavailable, and everyone else is paralysed by fear of making the wrong decision. Sometimes it’s not even clear who is supposed to make decisions, and other times we need to get approval from five different stakeholders in order to proceed. As a result, things get blocked. On its own, each delay doesn’t seem that important, but when there are hundreds of them, the effects compound, and the system gets blocked.
The Bureaucracy Effect
This is the effect of bureaucracy. Every time something goes wrong or someone makes a mistake, we try to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We create new policies, rules or procedures, we create new roles to ensure compliance, and we add new layers of decision-making. At the time, it feels like we are doing the right thing to protect the company and its customers. But the bureaucracy builds up, each new rule like a barnacle on the bottom of our ship, slowing us down. Over time, we collect more and more, but we very rarely take the time to remove any barnacles. After a while, they become the norm, “that’s just the way we do things around here”, and inertia has set in. The big upfront plans give leaders comfort. Nobody wants to change anything because of the fear of being blamed if it goes wrong. Different parts of the organisation are pulling in different directions.
Why Traditional Change Fails
To break through bureaucracy, over the last 20 years, I’ve been involved in many Agile transformations, digital transformations, and, of course, now the AI revolution. The biggest failure pattern I have seen is treating these transformations as a big, episodic change. A year of analysing the problems, designing new operating models, creating plans, and rolling out new ways of working across business units or entire organisations. You can’t break a bureaucracy with a bureaucratic approach. You can’t tap into the potential of your people by implementing a new operating model. At the crux of the issue is how we do change itself. Change needs to change.
From plan-driven to continuous experimentation.
From doing change to people, to doing change with people.
From implementing frameworks to creatively addressing tensions.
From managing change to building internal capability
New Patterns of Change
Here are some modern organisational patterns we can use to guide how we navigate change within our organisations.
Navigate Via Tensions
Tensions are the gap between the current reality and a desired future. Imagine stretching a rubber band between where you are now and where you would like to be. There is likely tension. Work with people in your organisation to identify the biggest tension that is stopping them from doing their best work. Now there might be lots, but pick a big one that resonates with lots of people. By addressing these tensions directly, people can make incremental changes that collectively move the organisation towards greater agility and its broader goals.
Participatory Change
People don’t resist change; they resist having change done to them. Participatory change means including those affected by the change in diagnosing issues, co-designing experiments, and owning outcomes. Don’t do change to people, do it with them. Invite volunteers affected by the identified tension, help them understand the root causes, and design one or more experiments to address it. Change should be identified and owned by the people impacted.
Design Safe-To-Fail Experiments
Experimentation is at the heart of learning and adapting in agile environments. Guide people to design small, safe-to-fail experiments. These experiments allow teams and organisations to test new ideas, learn from the outcomes, and adapt their strategies based on real-world feedback, fostering a culture of innovation and resilience. Experiments that test hypotheses by immersing people in a change and monitoring impacts. For this to succeed, an expectation must be set that many experiments will fail, and that’s welcomed as part of the learning process. To make this safe, the experiment should be small. For example, rather than involving all 60 teams, let’s add testing capability to 2 or 3 teams and measure the impact on quality over a couple of months. The other essential element to make it safe is fast feedback loops.
Feedback Loops
Set up a rhythm every couple of weeks to review experiments against their desired outcomes. This creates an opportunity to make adjustments, stop experiments that aren’t working, or scale experiments that are having a real positive impact. Invite people who are not involved in the experiment, but have an interest; through this transparency, seeds of similar experiments can spread organically to other parts of the organisation. A feedback loop is a regular cycle of review where you compare results to expectations and adjust. The faster the loop, the faster the learning and adaptation.
Leaders Go First
Leaders are key facilitators of an organisation’s experimentation and learning processes. Leaders take on mentoring roles, guiding rather than directing groups as they design, implement, and learn from experiments. Leaders can also be role models embodying the behaviours, attitudes, and practices they wish to see throughout the organisation. By being visible proponents of agile values and principles, leaders inspire trust and credibility, making it easier for others to follow suit. So be the change you want to see in others; sometimes you need to go first.
Continuous Participatory Change
I once got myself fit enough to run a half-marathon. Over six months, I trained hard, running shorter races, until I was able to complete my transformation and complete the race. I had my success, and I was fit. However, after the race, I stopped training, watching what I was eating and drinking, and as a result, I got fat. Enterprise Agility is a lot like your fitness; it is not achieved through a single transformation (we are agile now), it’s something you always have to work at. Just as fitness requires ongoing effort and habits, organisational agility requires continuous change practices rather than one-off transformations. Organisations that are adaptable and resilient have change built into how they work, the people who are doing the work are clear in their purpose and they sense what isn’t working, and they are free to experiment to improve the system.
Adaptable organisations don’t get trapped in big, episodic transformations that rarely deliver the promised rewards. They foster continuous change, and their leaders act as catalysts and facilitators for positive change, working with people to improve the system.
Takeaways to Try
Ask questions to help people identify their biggest tensions. Focus the questions on identifying what’s true now, rather than what they are worried about in the future.
- What is the biggest gap between where we are now and where we want to be?
- What’s stopping us from doing our best work?
- What are we avoiding right now?
- Where do we currently see the outside world moving faster than we are?
Once you have identified some tensions with a group, pick one, one tension at a time, but pick one that will have a big impact. “What is most tense right now?”. Brainstorm possible remedies, go extreme to start with. Then work with the group to identify possibilities, as you discuss, you are not trying to make them perfect solutions; you are trying to make them good enough for now, safe to try. This allows us to move forward without being paralysed by the search for perfection. The key to making them safe is to make them small, bold enough that they will have an impact, but small enough to break through the resistance. Once you have a new practice, policy, or new thing you are going to try, ask a few more questions.
- What do we expect to happen as a result of the proposed action?
- How will we know if our action resulted in the expected outcome?
- How long do we run the experiment before we will see an impact? And if this is more than a few weeks, you may want to split the experiment into smaller parts.
- What do we need to conduct this experiment (people, resources, funding, approvals, etc)?
- What are the risks? And how can we use that to improve the experiment?
Change needs to change, make it part of what you do and ditch those big transformations. The world is constantly changing, so standing still is not an option.
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