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Agile transformation: Everyone else is doing it, so should we? It seems very in vogue, some may call it a fad, for organisations to be transforming to become Agile. Large consultancy houses, who themselves aren’t even close to being as agile as they need to be to help their clients, are falling over themselves to sell their clients Agile or organisational agility. Yet for the most part, there are so many leaders in organisations who believe Agile to be one…

Last year I published a book where I presented a solution for leaders and managers who wanted to improve their success in making organisational agility become a reality in their organisations. You can still click here to buy your digital or paperback copy on Amazon (it even went number one for a few days!) As a lead up to that solution, something I have called the Pre-Tx model (pre-transformation), I identified the top 5 mistakes made by all managers who…

In my book “Leaders, it’s not how you finish … it’s how you start” I coin a phrase: “Pseudo-transformation”. Pseudo-Transformation, as I term it, is the appearance of transformative change, but really little or no transformation occurs. This brings up the interesting concept of what do we mean by transformation and how would we know that transformation has actually taken place? Let’s start with the first question … What do we mean by transformation? I ask this question of all…

Change is difficult is it not? It’s little wonder that so many change initiatives fail so miserably. I believe that one of the main factors around why change fails so often is because people (either individuals or teams) just aren’t ready for change. This then results in some interesting behaviour that many people call resistance to change. This “resistance” if we call it that occurs most often when change is pushed on people. I instead prefer the softer expression “reluctance…

I do love the cartoon above and I often share it with my leadership coachees or trainees as it somewhat reflects my experience of change in organisations. I know that I can relate to each of the images … what about you? I would argue though that the three captions are gross generalisations and are thus wrong! However that’s a different blog post for another day … When I co-authored the 9 principles of Agile leadership in 2017 I purposefully…

In 2017, I co-authored the 9 Principles of Agile leadership on behalf of the Agile Business Consortium. You can review the high-level description of these principles here. In this blog, I describe how these principles came about and in subsequent posts will describe the principles in more detail along with why I think they are important for organisational leaders. But first, let me give you a background as to how these principles came about. DSDM Evolves … DSDM (Dynamic Systems…

The antidote to transformation failure: Start different! According to McKinsey, 77% of all Agile transformations fail! In short, this costs organisations millions in consultancy fees and people-years wasted on ineffective change. Could this time and money be spent differently? I believe that it can and it would end up costing eh organisation less, not only in time and money but in reputation also! In my book “Leaders it’s not how you finish … it’s how you start!” I propose that…

So I have just read a piece of news, my first in some time, when Boris Johnson, when referring to the UK economy is reported to have said “We are also amazingly resilient and creative, we will bounce back.” Of late I have been exploring some interesting concepts. Some of these being quite distinct from Agile, i.e. Taleb’s thinking around antifragility. One term that does come up with striking regularity is the term resilience. One term that Taleb uses is…

This is a rather interesting question, one that I have taken opposing views over the years.  As a humanist, I would have said stress in any shape or form was bad for people and the job of managers would have been to keep this to a minimum.  Minimum may imply that we can’t eliminate it altogether but as managers and leaders would we purposefully apply stress to individuals and teams?  At that time in my career, I did feel that…

These principles we created for the Agile Business consortium in 2017 in collaboration with Katie Taylor, Ed Holt, Parag Googate and Rod Willis. See the white paper at the Agile Business Consortium 1. Actions speak louder than words Agile Leadership is about not only driving and promoting change, it is also about being the change. Those who lead by example and actively engage in their own development, inspire people. This is through action rather than words; as Gandhi said, “Be…