Sherpa Alliance

Remember the last time you experienced the benefits of organizational agility – your ability to cope with rapidly changing circumstances and navigate around avoidable-costs and opportunity-costs – think about where that agility came from.  Typically, it didn’t just crop up that day, there and then, in the moment.  Invariably, it came from some things that were already in motion, which you could leverage to mitigate a problem or maximize an opportunity, or you could synergize in some other way with the situation which had arisen unexpectedly (Expecting & Managing the Unexpected).  You had some things in motion, which you had been thinking about, or maybe talking about with your team or maybe acting upon, even though you might not have been exactly sure if, how and when some of them would pay off.  Kind of serendipitous.

Now, remember the last time you experienced a lack of organizational agility, incurring some avoidable-costs or opportunity-costs you might otherwise have been able to navigate around.  Invariably, it’s because you didn’t have enough in motion, to leverage or synergize with.  Serendipity was missing.

Serendity?!  Call it luck if you like (Luck is Where Preparation Meets Opportunity).  For organizational agility, we need luck on our side.  So, how do we make more luck, to benefit from serendipity more often?  By developing the following mindsets and behaviors:

• Being ever prepared through a discipline of Scenario Thinking, Contingency Planning and "Fortuity Planning" (Options, Futures & Degrees of Freedom).
• Drawing from the resulting hindsight, insight and foresight to drive an array of divergent and convergent  (Divergence and Convergence) avenues of thinking, questions, decisions and actions, to generate, develop and nurture our options
• Exploting these options to find a path through the landscape, no matter how it shifts on us and/or what topography we encounter (Path-Finding:  The Art of Possibility & Probability).

Its about the art of possibility and probability.   In his 2007 book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel calls it "strategic pre-adaptation", saying:

"Evolution occasionally equips organisms with apparently superfluous, reproductively neutral features that turn out, quite by accident, to be highly useful when conditions change. This is known as pre-adaptation. To be resilient, a company needs a lot of lightly scripted pre-adaptation – policies that give associates the chance to pre-adapt rather than react. Too much of what gets done in most companies is in response to some already pressing issue; there’s no slack, no space for improvisation, and no way to defend projects that aren’t immediately useful. That’s why so many companies end up on the wrong side of the change curve. Your job as a management innovator is to make sure that the management systems in your company encourage strategic pre-adaptation.”

The willingness to invest in "strategic pre-adaptation", and the associated mindsets and behaviors mentioned above, is a major source of organizational agility.  It is often how breakthroughs are born:

• Maybe something unexpected happens, which could be a problem or an opportunity, creating a situation in which necessity becomes the mother of invention.
• Driven by that creative tension, we start joining up the dots of this situation with some other things we have in motion and, gradually at first and then all of a sudden, a new picture of possibility presents itself.
• As we lean into more creative work to translate those possibilities into probabilities and make things happen, we join up more dots of other utility value and possibilities, ammounting to a breakthrough which no one had envisioned.
• Brilliant! Well, actually, a complex mix of preparation, opportunity, luck, serendipty and strategic pre-adaptation. But take the credit, you deserve it.
• Its about being on your toes or being on the front foot and not being caught flat-footed or on the back foot.

So, what are you doing to encourage strategic pre-adaptation?  That’s what our work is about.  Helping CEOs, Executives and their teams master the whole problem and solution of being In the Driving Seat of Organizational Agility.  Think about the journey of your business as a continuum of actions and goals.  Typically, many organizations are very focused on achieving their annual goals and all actions flow out of and converge on those goals.  A convergence of goals looking for actions, leading actions;  problems (and opportunities) looking for solutions;  fixing bulbs (see the Eastern Airlines story in Divergence & Convergence).  Strategic pre-adaptation is the opposite.  It is actions looking for goals, leading goals; solutions looking for problems (and opportunities);  flying the Plane (see the Eastern Airlines story in Divergence & Convergence).  For organizational agility, we need both Divergence and Convergence - the art of probability, which comes from goals leading actions, and the art of possibility, which comes from actions leading goals.

The number one question we get asked when we start our work with CEOs, Executives and their teams is, "Why do we need a Traction Plan and an Annual Plan of Goals? " (which in some cases they already have - an Annual Plan of Corporate Goals, that is).  Bingo - let our work begin:

• The first answer is easy - "because an Annual Plan of Corpaorate Goals is just that, Annual, whereas a Traction Plan addresses the multi-year journey/trajectory to your vision (typically over a 3, 5 or 10 year time-horizon) and, for instance, 5 one-year plans do not a 5-year plan make!"
• The second answer is a little more tricky - "because an Annual Plan of Corporate Goals addresses convergence (goals looking for actions, leading actions) but not divergence (actions looking for goals, leading goals)".  Here’s where it get’s interesting, as the typical left-brained dominance of most executive teams (Being Half-Brained (Left or Right)) kicks into overdrive and, almost in unison, says something like "huh?".  That’s because strategic pre-adaptation is a foriegn, predomiantly right-brained, concept.  Let the games begin!
• The third answer usually get’s their attention - "because you don’t want an Eastern Airlines in your future (see the Eastern Airlines story in Divergence & Convergence) and, therefore, you must master the divergent, dynamic complexity (flying the plane) and convergent, detail complexity (fixing bulbs) of your journey as a business - that is, if you want the business to achieve its desired flight plan/trajectory of profit and growth (with you getting your piece of that action), without the risk of going into an imperceptible descent … which may already be the case!.  Their protestations of, "oh, I don’t think so, we are focused on doing a lot of things and working hard" only serve tp enrich the Eastern Airlines story as more relevant and scary than ever!

This never fails to be interesting work!