Episode z - change is hitting you in various paces

Referring to my last post about embracing continous change I would like to dwelve a bit deeper into this topic ...

Imagine being in a board meeting where your CEO becomes obviously nervous during the presentation about your ideas how to change the organization. The word "agile" triggered physical malaise and surfaced a common belief in traditional enterprises that agile equals to "erratic and chaotic behaviour". The anti-thesis to the (in my humble opinion fake) assumption of being in control and being able to plan the future. OK. Let's stop here and look how an approach looks like to regain trust in your executive management.

It is the (not new) concept of "multi-pace layering" which unlocks your dilemma and dramatically helps to structure your transformation story. Imaging running a "core business" since over 150 years to transport people and goods in a safe, reliable and on-time manner. More and more competition emerges eating pieces of your cake, which forces the enterprise to react. You have to enhance your core products and services to realize new growth opportunities (add-on business) and catch up with increasing customer demand. And you will realize that re-inventing yourself and innovating your business model(s) is imminent. Your conventional models and thinking patterns just do not apply anymore.

And voila - we have identified three zones which are characterized by very different paces and different calibrations needef for your transformation journey.

The bottom grey zone is your "core-business layer" and is most probably still your main revenue stream. Disrupting that zone can cause your main value stream to collapse - and therefore your management rightly is very sensitive about any change or irritation in that area. Nevertheless it should be the main target for selective optimization and efficiency improvement activities. Especially if you have security critical areas (just imagine flight or train operations) where human lives are at stake. In that case it is highly recommended to narrow down and segment that critical area as tight as possible in order to not blur related areas with too high constraints. You do not want to introduce any experimental or unpredictable methodologies. Keep it solid, secure and predictable. Optimization and standardization are your friends ;-)

The orange middle zone is your tactical and operative area

And the green area is the "disrupt yourself zone" where all the new principles and models should be aggressively applied. Make sure that you create an environment which allows a startup like culture and be cautious to not let your corporate inertia sneak too much into this zone. But make also sure that you establish a feedback and learning cycle between the new agile zone with your core areas. It will be a "ridge walk" between isolating the green zone and not loosing contact to the other zones.

So far so good - what this now mean in more detail - this is another story.....