The Imperative to Build a Resilient and Agile Organization - One Mindset at a Time

Editor's Notes

• #3: David
• #4: David Need to be Agile (Set up)
• #5: Casey All organizations are in a state of change Days of steady progress seem to be over Either creating change or responding to it, or more often both. If they’re not changing, there’s a problem Change is stressful, even if it’s “good” change Agility creates stress for people. I’ll discuss the research on this. It’s compelling. Change models are helpful but insufficient Companies have traditionally used models, like Kotter or the ADKAR model. While these are helpful, they’re not enough to manage the kind of change happening today. We need more human-centered approaches. That’s where resilience comes in to the picture, and even agility.
• #6: Casey There’s a few of bits of research I want to briefly describe. In a study of 471 companies, McCann (2009) found that agility is related to individuals’ stress. In other words, when companies make a concerted effort to be more agile, it increases the stress on employees. More recent research confirms this. Research done at Humana, the health care company, in 2017. They found that focusing on agility without also training on resilience can lead to increased stress, and business results that fall short of expectations. (Braun et al., 2017). Important because stress can undermine the benefits of being agile. If you’re creating agile change, the stress on the workforce can cause employees to be unable to implement the change the way it was designed, so the process fails. All of these researchers advise organizations to develop agility and resilience together, at multiple levels (individuals, leaders, and teams). They claim that resilience is always important, but even more important under conditions of high agility and change. Finally, research at IBM with several hundred companies found that that companies with greater levels of both agility and resilience were more competitive and profitable, even in highly turbulent environments. So not only is it good for employees to develop both agility and resilience, but the business outcomes make it worthwhile. Research references will be included in the pdf made available after the webinar. Sources: McCann (2009) Agility is related to stress Develop them together at multiple levels (individual, team, organization) Braun (2017) Develop together Resiliency is important, but even more important under conditions at high agility and change Focus on agility alone increases stress and poor results
• #7: Casey Change happens in leaps, not baby steps There was a time when change was more incremental. Change is fast and often big. And that’s the shortcoming of change models. Change models are no longer sufficient These models were developed in a different era. Kotter’s model was presented in 1995. In no way disparaging change models – they are very helpful – but they need more human-centered support. Kotter himself has recently written that the model by itself is inadequate in today’s world. (2012) He said that the model was built for a hierarchical world, but that hierarchies are now too slow and ineffective. He claims what’s needed are people with the right mindset to create change. People with a mindset of “I want to and I have the opportunity to influence change” instead of “I have to or this is a requirement.” Organizations must influence people’s emotions in order to have change success, not just focus on the rationale or logic of change. That’s a very important point and it’s something we’ve learned to include in our agility and resilience processes. Success of change depends largely on people, not on process or technology. IBM Global Making Change Work Study (Jorgensen, 2008) Research with over 470 companies from 15 nations and 21 industries. Focus was on how to close the gap between leaders expecting change and feeling prepared to successfully handle change. This gap increased from 8% to 22% over the course of two years (from the years 2006 – 2008). What they found is that only 41% of projects met objectives within time, budget, and quality standards. 59% missed at least one objective or failed completely. Most importantly, their analysis also showed that success of change efforts depended mostly on people, not on process or technology. So this echoes and confirms what Kotter said and what all this other research has found.
• #8: Casey We’re going to have a polling question in a second, but first let me be clear on what we mean by agility and resilience. There’s two types of agility – organizational and personal. Organizational agility is the goal. It’s what companies want to achieve. Capitalizing on opportunities. They get there by developing the agility of their people. Personal agility is about developing a flexible mindset, and this allows you to come up with good ideas and then put them into practice. When individuals and teams develop this ability, it creates an agile organization.
• #9: Casey Resilience is more than bouncing back, it’s bouncing forward. When change feels overwhelming, reframing the experience as an opportunity for yourself to develop new skills, learn new information, or help your colleagues. This is what we mean by resilience.
• #10: David Research done by the Corporate Executive Board shows that employees who initiate change have a 43% more positive impact on their companies than those who just have the capacity to change.
• #11: David
• #12: David
• #13: David
• #14: David We’ve done research here at Tracom to look at the benefits of Agility. We measured people on our agility profile and compared high scorers with low scorers. Important to note that these results are based on other people’s ratings, they’re not self-ratings. In other words, these are the opinions of co-workers. You can see the results for yourselves. All of these are important aspects of agility and are abilities that organizations place high value on. So being agile pays off.
• #15: David McDonalds data
• #16: Casey David just talked about the benefits. It’s also completely learnable. We’ve looked at the research – only 20% of your ability to be agile is genetic. So you can’t blame your parents for your lack of creativity. It’s something that can be learned and developed, with practice. Resilience can also be learned. One comprehensive study by the American Heart Institute found that 94% of employees across companies said that resilience training had a positive impact on them. That’s a huge number and it highlights how much employees are clamoring for help when going through change.
• #17: Casey There’s two steps for becoming more agile and resilient. They share this in common. First, you have to recognize that cognitive biases have a big effect on your thinking and behavior. These biases affect everyone. They’re subconscious and they’re systematic, meaning they happen all the time without us even being aware of them. You’re going to get first-hand experience of a bias in just a minute.
• #18: Casey We mitigate these biases using strategies that shake up our typical ways of thinking and behaving. It’s all about changing habits, and this is done by practicing new behaviors, one at a time. These new behaviors – new habits – aren’t dramatic, but they have a big influence. By doing this, we change our way of thinking and behaving and this makes us more agile and resilient.
• #19: Casey We want to give you an experience of a bias that is probably influencing your agility. This is a pattern recognition problem. You have to solve for the last number. Good news – nobody gets this right. Bad news – most young children would get it right. Happens because over time we lose our ability to view objects from different perspectives. We’ve become habituated to seeing things in a linear, right-side up position. This contributes to what we call the anchored mindset and it limits our ability to be agile. This is just one example, but now David is going to take us through another bias and a strategy to mitigate that bias.
• #20: David
• #21: David
• #22: David
• #23: Casey This technique is very effective because it overcomes our unrealistic optimism about a project or plan. It forces us to step outside our own skin and take on an outsider’s perspective, like a novelist. By doing this we recognize obstacles that we couldn’t see previously. And of course this allows us to plan for those obstacles.
• #24: David
• #27: Synaverse Latitude financial