Planning Doesn’t Have to Be the Enemy of Agile

strategic planning has fallen out of favor.

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Agile planning has a number of characteristics:

frameworks and tools able to deal with a future that will be different; the ability to cope with more frequent and dynamic changes; the need for quality time to be invested for a true strategic conversation rather than simply being a numbers game; resources and funds are available in a flexible way for emerging opportunities.

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A process able to coordinate and align with agile teams

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A process that makes use of both limitless hard data and human judgment

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Consider the Dutch financial services firm ING Bank. It restructured its operations in the Netherlands by reorganizing 3,500 employees into agile squads. These are autonomous multidisciplinary teams (up to nine people per team) able to define their work and make business decisions quickly and flexibly. Squads are organized into a Tribe (of no more than 150 people), a collection of squads working on related areas.

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Each tribe develops a QBR (Quarterly Business Review), a six-page document outlining tribe-level priorities, objectives and key results.

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Soft data is also vital. “While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generate wisdom. They may be difficult to ‘analyze’, but they are indispensable for synthesis — the key to strategy making,” says Henry Mintzberg.

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In an agile organization, teams use design thinking and other exploratory techniques (plus data) to make rapid decisions and change the course on a weekly basis. Decision making is done by a team of people, offsetting in this way the potential biases of a single person making a decision based on her individual judgement. To some extent, an agile team-based organization enables the possibility to leverage qualitative data and judgement — combined today with infinite hard data — for better decisions.

If you change course on a weekly basis, it seems like you don’t know where you’re going.

Posted on August 21, 2019