agility operting system (AOS)

1.  Bringing an AGILE Journey Orientation into Focus. Agility requires a paradigm shift of focus, because change has changed, becoming much more like a dynamic journey on a shifting landscape. The longitudinal dimension of journey-orientation has emerged as a third and primary dimension around which we must reframe our focus and approach to translating agile strategy and agile execution into traction. If anything gets lost in translation, we experience wheel-spin, which can cost us a fortune in lost revenue growth, profitability and cash-flow.

2.  Reinforcing an Mind-Set of AGILE Operations Management. Paradoxically, agile strategy and execution depend first and foremost on high reliability agile operations management. In continuous process businesses, errors unfold rapidly and propagate quickly, creating chaos and crises management, which can become increasingly chronic, often with disastrous consequences. All businesses are continuous process businesses to some degree, and high reliability agile operations management prevents chaos and crises management. 

3.  Enhancing Strategic Productivity for AGILE. We are used to thinking about productivity at an operational level but not so much at a strategic level. Our productivity at a strategic level depends upon using an integrated framework and set of agile tools, to avoid overwhelm and formulate a progressive strategy work product. The test of good strategic tools is how quickly we can pick up the conversation next time from where we left off last time. Our agility depends upon it.

4.  Accentuating Short-Range Culture for AGILE. Accentuating means, to stress or emphasize; intensify; single out as important; mark with an accent. More than ever before, the culture of execution and agility which we need to cope with short-range pressures and performance expectations must be loud and clear to all, with leaders turning up the volume. 

5.  Keeping our AGILE Flight Planning Envelope Expanded to the full scope of the problem.  Agile executives spend the right time in the right place at the right time. Our flight envelope is prone to collapsing back to the short-range operational pressures, because of two conspiring forces: the tyranny of the urgent and our unconscious-resistance to the important but more ambiguous and abstract work of long range strategy. This leaves us flying blind; the kiss of death to agility.

6.  Tackling Operational Productivity for AGILE. Our productivity at an operational level is about handling day-to-day workflow, among shifting priorities, problems and opportunities. It’s about our time management, priority management, project management and many other related concepts, individually and collectively as a team, driving the fast-cycle communication, coordination and collaboration which are essential for agility.

7.  Holding a Recurring, Rigorous and Rallying AGILE Strategy Process. The essence of agile strategy is conversation; if you don’t have much conversation, you probably don’t have much strategy. Unless we hold ourselves fully accountable, a strategy process can easily become ill-disciplined, open-ended and laborious.

8.  Re-engineering AGILE Structures, Processes and Systems. The efficacy (capability and capacity to produce a desired result) of our infrastructure of agile systems, processes and structures is a key, not just relating to our core business-processes, but also our infrastructure of other management-mechanisms, such as meetings. Meetings are a mess in many businesses, subtracting from our agility.

9.  Orchestrating an AGILE Goal-Setting Cascade and Review Process. Agile alignment throughout our business depends upon a well-orchestrated cascade and review process of agile goal-setting and performance-feedback, balancing the over-engineered rigidity of too much and the organic open-endedness of too little.

10.  Unlocking and Challenging AGILE Mental Models. The paradigms, mind-sets, assumptions and beliefs held by you, your team and your organization are the mental models through which you interpret the world. Old, used-up and out-of-date mental models imprison our thinking and ability to see new possibilities and pathways. That’s cancerous to agility

11.  Guiding Agile Leadership Presence.  Our style and skills of agile leadership and communication set the tone for our agile culture, creating resonance (or dissonance) with the team-work we desire. We are the role model that our team emulates, founded on our intellect, resilience, emotional intelligence and intuition.  

12.  Handling Accountability for Long-Range Culture for AGILE. Our culture regarding the long-range thinking and commitment to advance strategic initiatives can often be very challenging and prone to excuses rather than results. Excuses are rife in many businesses, with everybody buying in at all levels, like a pyramid marketing Ponzi scheme. Dismantling this pyramid by how we handle excuses is crucial, to sustain the accountability we need for agility.

13.  !ntegrating Enterprise Execution Capability and Capacity for AGILE. The execution capability and capacity of our enterprise is more than the sum of the above parts — though often all of the parts are there but the whole hasn’t emerged. Extraordinary integration (hence the "!" mark) is required, to combine the art and science of a unifying architecture of execution. This includes recognizing and teaching agile execution as a system and a discipline, of accumulating knowledge, tools and techniques, broadly and deeply throughout the organization. Our enterprise agility depends upon it.