Sustaining The Organisation
The organisation must remain capable of delivering its goals and objectives. It must continue to deliver the features and services of its portfolio of products. The organisation must be resilient in the face of challenge and change so that it can continue to realise value by delivering to its customers.
In A Nutshell
Stable, integrated and autonomous teams are capable of being self-sustaining. Such teams must exist within the wider context of their organisation. The organisation itself must be sustained. At an organisational level we focus on concerns that transcend the scope of a single team or group of teams. Of specific interest to anAgileMind, the organisation must sustain a positive shared culture that actively fosters the agile mindset. The organisation will also need a coherent view of its range of capabilities and how the emphasis across different capabilities will change in the future.
The organisation must ensure that it is resilient in the face of change and challenge. Change and challenge that come from outside the organisation, perhaps in the form of increased competition or economic setbacks. Change and challenge can also come from inside the organisation - perhaps in the need to pivot the focus of the product portfolio. Resilience starts with ensuring that teams have knowledge beyond their current product focus and by ensuring that we avoid overt specialisms within the team that create potential points of failure and make teams more fragile in their ability to deliver.
Organisations are also the hubs of administration. Whilst not directly linked to the culture of anAgileMind, processes implemented by functions such as Finance and HR can have a substantial impact on the culture we are trying to create. For example, there may be an organisational requirement for managers to appraise members of staff on a regular basis. Such an appraisal system does not fit well with the culture of autonomous, self-organising teams. Leaders, who sustain the culture, must ensure that such antithetical practices are excluded, seeking to replace them with models of continuous feedback, for example. It is very often in these administrative processes that the real distinction between Theory X and Theory Y becomes manifest.
Specific Practices
Communicate the Organisation’s Culture
Model the Organisation’s Culture
Sustain A Learning Environment
Sustain A Customer Led Strategy
On an infrequent basis we assess the health of the organisation. The central indicator of good organisational health is the happiness of the colleagues who work in the organisation coupled with the routine delivery of planned progress towards the goals the organisation has established. We use different tools and techniques to assess different aspects of the organisation’s health.
We collaborate to define our target culture for the organisation. The culture is defined by the purpose, value, behaviours and principles of the organisation. Culture is further influenced and constrained by the structures, roles and working practices of the organisation. Culture is collaborative and consensual in nature and requires conscious choice by all the organisations members to become real.
As leaders striving to foster new and improved culture within the organisation it is critical that we model the values and behaviours that we expect from others - do as I do rather than do as I say. Being human we all mess up from time to time. When we mess up modelling the desired behaviours, we are open and honest about our mistake. We are open and honest about how we are going to put things right. We listen to and accept valid feedback on our leadership wherever it comes from. We act on the feedback in order to improve our leadership.
The organisation must be, and must remain, fully capable of delivering its products and services to its customers. It must deliver the specific capabilities that its products and services demand. As the products and services evolve the needed capabilities will evolve. The Capability Roadmap describes the changing capabilities the organisation must deliver.
However carefully organisations plan their continued growth and development, there will always be the unanticipated, the sudden shocking change. Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from such shocks. Organisations that can respond quickly and effectively will be the organisations that survive.
Related Practice Categories
