Abstract: Although the notion of organizational Agile and business Agility covers many variations in managerial practices, the site visits of the SD Learning Consortium revealed a striking convergence around three themes or “laws”:
- The law of the customer: An obsession with delighting customers by continuously adding value for customers and users, as well as a recognition of the current need to generate instant, intimate, frictionless value at scale.
- The law of the small team: A presumption that in a volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous world, work needs to be disaggregated into small batches and performed by small cross-functional autonomous teams, working iteratively in short cycles in a state of flow, with fast feedback from customers and end-users.
- The law of the network: The entire firm functions as a fluid interactive network, not merely a top-down bureaucracy with a few teams implementing Agile tools and processes.
Achieving continuous innovation is dependent on an Agile mindset pervading the organization. Pursuit of all three laws is key to sustaining business agility. Individually, none of the observed management practices are new. What is new and different is the way that the management goals, practices and values constitute a coherent and integrated approach to continuous innovation, driven by and lubricated with a pervasive entrepreneurial mindset.
About Steve Denning
Steve Denning is the author of several books on organizational storytelling, including The Leader's Guide to Radical Management (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
Steve is the former Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank. He now works with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia on Agile leadership, innovation and organizational storytelling. His clients have included many Fortune 500 companies.
Steve currently writes a popular column for Forbes.com.
Steve’s innovative work has been recognized world-wide. In November 2000, Steve was named as one of the world’s ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders (Teleos).
Steve was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He did a postgraduate degree in law at Oxford University in the U.K. Steve then joined the World Bank where he worked for several decades in many capacities.
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