Why There’s No Such Thing as Perfect (Agile) Transformation
Are you looking for a case study of a company that successfully managed the transformation to become more agile, customer centric, or product led? If that’s the case, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but you won’t find the one that tells you exactly what to do to successfully transform your organization.
Sure, you can find examples of highly successful organizations in your industry or field who have learned to quickly adapt to change. These organizations may even praise agile ways of working, being user centered, or even product led. But this doesn’t mean you can simply follow in their footsteps.
Why? To put it simply, it’s a journey and every organization must find their own way of doing what’s right for them.
We can’t all be Amazon or Netflix. Your organization has a unique combination of circumstances—your size, history, industry, current ways of working, talent with a certain background, etc. This is why the “copy paste” method simply won’t work.
With this blog post, I would like to offer some new perspectives on how you can bring about cultural shifts and mindset change. If you rethink your definition of success, you’ll be in a much better position to achieve your ideal.
The images below help illustrate what I mean.
The first image shows how we can look at two major components—the size of an organization and how modern its ways of working are. You can see that there’s a broad distribution of both org sizes and ways of working.
Consider this overview of some well-known companies. This gives you a quick sense of ages, company sizes, and industries. I’ll leave it to you to decide where they fall on their transformation journeys. But I bet that if your product folks picked the ones they look up to when it comes to state of the art product development practices, it would most likely be the Amazons, Netflixes, and Facebooks on this list.
These companies (Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix) belong to a subset of organizations who have been agile, customer centric, and product led from the outset. This is what I refer to as the “native corridor.” The size of the organization does not necessarily matter. Some large orgs are squarely in the native corridor and some small orgs are completely old school.
The third image shows that the larger an organization is, the more diverse its approaches to work are likely to be. For example, you might have a multinational bank that has adopted an agile approach to product development in the head office, but this doesn’t mean that the tellers in local branches are empowered to work in the same way. So if you work for a larger organization, it will take way longer to transform all parts of the org and some parts might get closer to the ideal much faster. That’s okay—it’s just how things work. I’m mentioning this because I think it massively helps to set your expectations appropriately.
So now the ultimate question is: If we can’t compare ourselves to the companies in the native corridor, what’s a good way to track progress when it comes to a cultural shift?
The answer is speed of change. If you are adopting new ways of working faster than similar companies (in terms of org size, product development team size, organizational maturity, etc.), then you’re on the right track.
The final image shows that the transition from old-school to modern ways of working does not necessarily follow the same pattern. Some organizations or teams can make this transformation faster than others. Orgs that started this journey a few months ago could potentially surpass those that started years ago if they are intentional about the process. Your aim should be to create enough pull to change as many areas of your organization as possible.
The companies that succeed at creating momentum are focusing on the following things:
They invest in training for all roles and functions from upper management to individual contributors to start the change process.
They plan to go slow for some time. If you are learning a new skill, you need time to apply what you’ve learned and time to reflect on it. This isn’t possible when everyone is going full-steam ahead all the time.
They bring in coaches for a limited amount of time to make sure they stay on track.
They deliberately hire people who have already been working in environments like the one they want to create and give them the chance to share their experience.
They create communities of practice where people from the same function can talk about their learnings and share success stories.
What does this mean for you? I recommend benchmarking yourself against companies that are playing on the same level. This could be based on org size, years in business, predominant business model, industry you are operating in, speed of innovation in your industry—you decide which dimensions are most relevant.
It’s also essential to focus on progress more than on the end result. Instead of saying, “We want to be like Amazon,” try to be more specific with your goals and the exact steps you’ll take to get there. This can help you create a clear objective like, “We want to be data obsessed like Amazon because that will help us with X. We’ll start with initiative Y and focus on that aspect for the next Z months.”
I hope that I’ve given you some food for thought and made the case for why the definitive case study does not exist. But if you are still looking for a more detailed description of how other organizations have approached their transformations, Barry O’Reilly has some great examples (check out American Airlines, ATPCO, and Tesco Bank), as does Alex Osterwalder in Invincible Company.
Just remember that the goal is not to benchmark yourself against the “wrong” companies. Focus on finding your own way of accelerating the transition and stay open and willing to learn.