Address the biggest inhibitors to business agility

Business agility is all the rage! Look at all the books and articles about how wonderful life will be when your business becomes agile. However, how easy it is to become more agile when you only focus on the four most prominent inhibitors lurking in your organization that push you to maintain your own brand of as usual.

According to McKinsey and others, there are four main inhibitors that can destroy your plans and implementations of a more agile way of doing business:

• Underlying IT systems
• corporate culture
• Organizational structure
• business processes

Underlying IT systems

Your underlying IT systems can limit your agility without you realizing it. Creativity suffers in a digital world of ones and zeros. Once set up, everyone and everything should conform to your standards and not the other way around. Add to this the leverage effect of GIGO or Garbage In, Garbage Out and an inside mail for everyone, based on a false fact or figure, and you can literally sabotage even the best thought out strategy. Now it is more important than ever to find that balance point between acting and reporting.

corporate culture

How aware are you of the written and unwritten rules that influence and often govern the way your organization interacts, both internally and externally? like the proverb fish out of waterCulture is so transparent when you’re in it that it’s almost impossible for you to notice until you’re kicked out of it. As David Gerber wrote in his book “The E Myth,” you can either work “in your business” or look at it from the outside and work “in your business.” Can you guess which one is harder to make? Having an objective view of what you do requires training, but without even trying to look in your business you will never see how your own cultural behavior is slowly suffocating your company.

Organizational structure

The older and larger your organization, the more rules and guidelines for doing business will be the “(Enter your company name here) way” it becomes. Add to this the added pressure of your IT systems and reporting structures and very soon it will take days to negotiate the paperwork and signatures required to take a day of training or upgrade your PC. Look no further than how many laws are DAILY in every country on the planet and soon even law abiding citizens are breaking some kind of law or statute without even knowing it.

business processes

There are a number of very successful processes, such as 6 Sigma, Lean Production, etc. They are designed to serve the greatest common factors relative to your average employee. However, this means that all outsiders, entrepreneurs, and anyone on the cutting edge will be marginalized. If you’re looking for a great way to stifle creativity and courage, look no further. If you’re looking to encourage these achievers, then you need to relax those critical bottlenecks where they feel constrained. Look no further than the former telecom giant Motorola and what happened when 6 Sigma took over the company. Designed by Bill White in 1966, this business process permeated the company to such an extent that many of the creative people who were responsible for Motorola’s success were expelled into more creative pastures. Combined with one or two major financial storms, these factors were enough to cause the company to die slowly at first and then faster.

Each of these inhibitors can kill any attempt to create a sense of agility in your organization. Combine them and your chances of getting your company out of the clutches of as usual, drops to practically zero. Why?

…because we are creatures of habit. As much as most of us love to talk about change, we are only really for it when it requires someone else to change. We love certainty and we build systems, cultures and behaviors to create that certainty, yet we constantly delude ourselves into a false sense of security that our complex models provide. Look no further than Long Term Capital Management and the two Nobel Prize winners who nearly crashed the financial system in 1996 because their investment model was not broad or robust enough to handle the larger-than-expected event of Russia defaulting on its bonds. .

The key to meeting the challenges of these common inhibitors is to become agile. However, your agility must be an effective combination of strategic, operational and relational tools and practices. Focusing on just one of these areas is like sitting on a one-legged or two-legged stool—neither stable nor comfortable, and will leave you vulnerable to bumps you’re not prepared for.

The biggest step you can take to begin the process of managing these inhibitors is to balance your application of agility tools from these three areas and focus your energy on the horizon instead of all your past accomplishments. No matter how good you once were, if your systems and culture are focused on key performance indicators that are based on track record, you may miss out on the next big trend or financial storm ahead. The market will not forgive you no matter how wonderful you think your culture is. Just ask Nokia, Motorola, DEC and many other big latecomers. Think ahead, think agile!