When you hear the term “agile,” is it one of those business terms that makes you roll your eyes? You may have heard it thrown into some corporate gibberish by a business bro, because it does work really well there. Example: A company that facilitates agile teamwork between cross-functional teams is one bound to successfully impact the next paradigm shift of visionary strategic thinking. I KNOW. But it’s a shame it gets lumped in with synergy and bleeding edge (was cutting edge really not good enough?), because agility is not just another meaningless word.
If you don’t really know what agility (in terms of business) is, you might think it’s just the ability to quickly pivot. But I’m not really talking about agility, the generic adjective; I’m talking about Agile as in the framework for getting work done that originally started with — what else? A manifesto. The manifesto was written in 2001 by software developers who thought there was a better way to work together to write code.
Now Agile (now promoted to capital A, since I think we can say it’s a proper noun at this point) is used not just for software development, but as a framework for project management, sales, marketing and business in general. The essential idea is to break up large projects into smaller chunks of work, and then measure everything so you can deliver value faster, fail faster and learn faster. Work is performed by small teams, rather than siloed individuals, and while there are obviously team leads, the corporate hierarchies of old are not the status quo. Customer value is prioritized above almost everything else.
All of this allows businesses to (and I hate to use yet another buzz word, but stick with me here) pivot quickly, discarding experiments that don’t work and moving on to others, getting quickly to what customers actually want and are willing to spend money on. Businesses that started small using an Agile methodology and then grew rapidly include Uber, Spotify and Airbnb; it’s also been implemented successfully by NPR to develop more programming with fewer resources.
Anthony Coppedge is an expert in Agility and coaches sales and marketing teams now in its application. He’s written before about the concept, and today he talks about its importance in AV. I don’t need to tell you this, but never has a there been a time in which the need for business agility and the ability to pivot is more clear. In a matter of months, many of our friends’ business models have become defunct. It is a painful lesson. If you were lucky enough to come out of this crisis relatively unscathed, you may not exit the next one as such. Heed the warning and know this: You can save cash and prepare contingency plans and it is probably wise to do so. But few could have predicted what happened the last few months, and it’s impossible to have a plan for every outcome. What is possible is preparing yourself, your team and your business model to be ready to rapidly adapt no matter what comes your way.
Check out Anthony’s must-read article below and begin thinking about it. How could you become more Agile?