Secrets behind what we do - Adventures with Agile

Background

AWA has worked with most of the thought-leaders and pioneers of agility and organisational change over the last decade. We have combined this incredible wealth of knowledge with our own extensive experience to create a people-first approach to strategic change. Many of the models, practices, and principles are now used in hundreds if not thousands of organisations around the world. We get feedback from these organisations and adapt continuously.

Our clients get the continued benefit of our collective learning.

Our contribution to the agile industry and organisational change movement has resulted not only in us receiving awards but in real change in the most difficult and challenging organisational contexts.

The results that we achieve is based upon experience and real-life work. We continue to expand our knowledge and experience and share this with you through our courses, coaching, and with our enterprise strategy partners directly.

This page provides a very high-level view of the models we use to help organisations conceptualise change and build workshops and coaching programs to make a real difference.

Powered by real-world experience

Facts

Over 8000 people trained
500+ years combined experience
70+ countries served
300+ Organisations supported
1000s of courses delivered
200+ meetups
University grade learning environment
A huge amount of bespoke models and practices are shared on courses and to our clients that you can’t get elsewhere

Agile Onion

Agility is not a thing. It is a belief system that enables people to work together to solve complex problems. Agility is achieved when leaders and their teams believe in the three mindset beliefs and derive values, principles, practices and processes from them.

Values and principles guide the decision-making processes that we use in both organisational change and product and service development.

The mindset and values work across industry, organisations, and cultures. However, principles are contextual and relative to the problems your organisation is solving.

Only when we have adopted the mindset, values, and we have a good set of principles, can we create the right process and install the right tools.

The biggest mistake that organisations make when moving towards agility is doing this the wrong way around. Starting with tools or processes such as SAFe, LeSS, or Spotify without doing the mindset work first, results in a slow and expensive failure.

Agile Mindset

The agile mindset consists of three beliefs These are required in order to succeed in solving complex problems with large numbers of people. These beliefs are:

That complexity exists. By trying to solve complex problems, we change the nature of the problem itself. Solving complex problems is rarely finished. To solve these types of problems we accept that we live in an unpredictable and fast-changing world and therefore emerge solutions and processes in increments and learn and adapt with each increment.
The people belief puts people first. Profit, growth, and processes are gained by leveraging the power of both staff and customers. Leaders help create the right spaces for people to feel safe. Only when people are safe, do they have the courage to suggest the next innovative idea and make entrepreneurial decisions.
The belief in continual improvement. All organisms must take feedback from their environments and adapt, or they will die. This belief enables us to continually adapt and improve services to customers, look after staff, improve products, processes, and relationships. Improvement and evolution are critical components in a complex and fast-moving world.

Values

In order to succeed with any change strategy that leverages people and expects innovative and entrepreneurial decision-making that is effective in incremental delivery we build upon these values:

Respect
Inclusion (and diversity)
Psychological safety
Equal voice
Emotional self-management

Principles (heuristics)

Principles are heuristics. They guide both the change evolution and product and service delivery. Whilst heuristics are contextual, these ones work in any complex environment in any industry.

Use an iterative strategy combined with execution to enable change
Align around a very clear motivating purpose
Enable the right styles of leadership
Work on psychological safety, transparency, and honesty every day
Restructure with the big picture in mind but act locally
Apply the right constraints, governance, and autonomy
Distribute decision-making
Use iterative planning with feedback cycles
Experiment and measure results

The AWA Enterprise Change Pattern

The AWA Enterprise Change Pattern is a baseline strategy for change that works in any context. It is a non-prescriptive approach that allows for the rapid development of contextual strategy and execution for any organisation.

As a result, it gives organisations a huge head start when they use agility to solve business problems. It’s built upon a deep understanding of people; how people accept and embrace change; and how organisations can be structured to thrive in complex and fast-paced environments. The Enterprise Change Pattern offers a larger advantage to organisations and leadership teams. It not only speeds up delivery and reduces risk and cost, but it also creates organisations where people want to work because it is based on the agile mindset, values, and principles.

Culture Change

Culture change is a necessary part of moving towards agility and is needed to thrive in today’s complex environment. Culture cannot be changed directly.

Culture is changed by leaders behaving differently and by structural, process, and communication line changes. Culture is changed successfully and in the right direction when there is enough psychological safety and distributed decision-making to allow the right value to flow to customers quickly.

We use the AWA Playbook for organisational change coupled with culture models like the one here to have conversations about culture and to help organisations navigate the path of change.

The secret behind our approach

Everything we do is practical and applicable