Evan Leybourn

 TRANSCRIPT: 

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  00:55

What is your definition of business agility and how is it different than maybe how it’s been described in the past?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  01:04

Yeah, so our definition is fairly straightforward. Business agility is the set of organizational capabilities, behaviors and ways of working that affords your business, the freedom, the flexibility and the resilience to achieve its purpose no matter what the future brings. There’s a couple of elements in that definition. It’s a set of organizational capabilities and behaviors. It’s not a framework, it’s not something necessarily that you do. The behaviors are how you act and the capabilities is what you is… by acting in a certain way, you create capabilities, new capabilities for your organization. When we talk about affording your business the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose, you don’t have to be a proprietary company, you can be a not for profit, you can be a government organization, you have a reason to exist. Now, I’ll call upon another author, Frederic Laloux. Frederick wrote about teal organizations for fairly the top end of business agility. Let’s think of it that way. But in it, he says, profits is like the air, you do not live to breathe, but you do need to breathe in order to live. Now, this is quite important. Your organization has a purpose. And that purpose is not to make money. Money, certainly for a commercial organization, is an indicator that you are achieving your purpose, but it is not the purpose in and of itself. So organizations that understand what their purpose is are able to pivot and adapt, they’re able to respond to global crises like a global pandemic, in order to achieve that purpose, even when everything they’ve done in the past is no longer true. Which is then those last six words, no matter what the future brings. And this is where, this is the agility part here. Because I don’t know what the future is going to hold. I can’t plan for it. And I don’t. Right now, the business agility Institute, we’re organizing a physical conference in New York City in March. And…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  03:52

Hopefully, it’s going to be a little bit different than the last time you guys…

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  03:57

Absolutely. In 2020, we held this conference in March and I literally had to stand on stage on that Wednesday, I think it was the 11th and say the World Health Organization has just declared a pandemic. But we’re planning a physical conference in March. All right. But all right, we consider ourselves to be an agile organization. We know that but, I don’t know when people are going to be listening to this, but it’s currently July, right? So we have about nine months. Anything could happen. Right now we’ve got the Delta variants, maybe we get a gamma variant and Iota variant, something that’s going to impact us. Maybe people just refuse to go back to work. It’s like, nope, no one’s gonna go face to face. Or maybe everyone’s just so sick and tired of being locked down that is like, a chance to meet all my friends face to face again? I haven’t done that in two years! And maybe we’ll sell out within a week. We don’t know. But the truth is, we don’t need to know because as an agile organization, we have the, we know how to adapt our strategy plans based on an uncertain future. So we have multiple real options open to us and there’s certain thresholds and milestones are met, we trigger one set of options versus another. So there’s always that agility is how you survive uncertainty. And COVID is a bad example. Because it’s so easy to point to COVID and go COVID makes an uncertain future. And yeah, that’s true. But it’s too easy. The truth is, we’ve always been or had uncertain futures. The truth is that while COVID is at a scale that most organizations and basically most industries have never seen or certainly haven’t seen since like the last 40, 50 years, this kind of… before that, we’ve had the global financial crisis, we’ve had wars and civil unrest, we’ve had currency crashes and major industrial disruptions. So uncertainty is just a fact of business.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  06:33

Way of life, yea. 

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  06:35

It’s a way of life. So COVID, I don’t like using COVID because it’s too easy. And it makes people think that, oh, once COVID is over, we’ll just go back to normal. No! There is no normal, there’s never been a normal. Your company is going to be disrupted, right? COVID just disrupted everyone at the same time. That’s the only difference. All right? But your company is going to be disrupted again in the next 10 years, I don’t know where, I don’t know how, you don’t know where and you don’t know how. All you know is that you have or need to have the ability to respond, not react, to respond to whatever the future brings. And that’s business agility.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  07:15

And that like maybe to just stick on that a little bit because I think it’s a really good example. And it starts with you, right, as a leader, to embrace the uncertainty rather than, like, what we a lot of times do is lie to ourselves that, you know, there is certainty. So what you just described is, I think, is a good example of a leader or somebody saying, things are uncertain and I have to look at the world as uncertain and be able to understand what my options are and deal with those options rather than run from those options. You know, so I think there’s a lot of data, there’s a lot of especially over the last five years that indicates towards including Laloux, depending on leader and their perspective and cognitive capacity, there is high correlation to how you know the organization is agile or tolerant towards you know, that uncertainty. So what are your thoughts on that relationship between the individual leader and their mindset and organizational agility or business agility?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  08:30

So, I may give you two answers and they might seem a little contradictory, but they’re not. So the first is, for those who don’t know about the business agility Institute, we are a research and advocacy organization. We’re not consultancy, we don’t do training, we’re funded by our members. We’re a membership organization. But as a research organization, we have currently 14 research teams, exploring everything from the relationship between diversity, equity and inclusion and agility, the relationship between company performance and agility, looking at different, we have one paper coming out called deliberation of leadership, that is talking about the necessity and it’s looking at literature around the link between power and leadership and the need to disconnect that in many cases. But our main publication, the one that everyone knows about is the business agility report. We publish that once a year, we’re actually doing the data analysis for 2021 right now. And in the business agility report, leadership and various aspects of leadership is identified as the top challenge and has been identified as the top challenge to adopting business agility really much since the beginning of every year. Now, this comes in many flavors, sometimes it’s leadership buy in, getting them to actually recognize the need and the importance of this. Sometimes it’s around change management, communicating the need for agility, communicate the need for change. And sometimes it can come down to the generic culture and mindset, which is very much expressed by some of those leaders. Now, in my own personal experience, as I said at the beginning, I was a consultant for a long time, I would say that the top executives get it, people who run companies are exposed to that uncertainty every single day and it’s you can’t become a top executive without having an agile mindset. Even if you don’t have an agile organization and let’s face it, most don’t, those executives have a natural agility, it’s why they’re successful at that level. What we’re talking about those, is sometimes called the frozen middle, those layers, C minus three, down to like, division heads or team or like section heads. These folks are, they exist in a world of process, they exist in a world that is certain or at least the systems pretend that things are certain. So when ambiguity and uncertainty is exposed to them, it’s actually a problem because they’re not ready for it. And so when a transformation comes through, because you want an organization that can adapt, that can respond, you’re hitting against the training, and sometimes decades of experience that says, hey…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  12:31

Conditioning, that gives the conditioning. 

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  12:35

It’s like Pavlovian training. The truth is the uncertainty has always been there, the organizational momentum and inertia has just kind of hidden it but that’s not good enough anymore because the markets are moving so fast. We’re in a point now where in economics is a concept called information asymmetry. And it boils, and any economists who are listening, I’m very sorry, but very simply, too simply there is a disconnect in the information available or known to two parties. And that disconnect, right, the person with the most information controls the price. Sales has operated for centuries, I’ll just say decades, but forever on information asymmetry; the seller knows more than the buyer. For one of the first times in history, that is no longer true. As a consumer, as a buyer, you have so much information at your fingertips. There is no excuse for you as a buyer not to know more than the person that you’re buying from. And so information asymmetry is at best now equalized, at worst flipped. So your consumers and your customers know more about your business and how and what you’re selling, than often your own sales people. And this is a problem. No, it’s not a problem; this is an opportunity. This is a challenge. And because of this, this is part of the reason why disruption is so rife, it’s why industries are so ripe for disruption because a new company who can address a customer need better and faster than an established company can completely cannibalize the market base of an existing company. And that’s information asymmetry in action and that’s agility, oh, sorry and that’s disruption in action and that’s why we need agility. And it’s the leaders who if they do not have the skill, and it is a skill, it can be learned; if they do not have the skill to create an agile organization and to lead an agile organization, then the company will fail, maybe not today, but definitely within the next five or ten years. 

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  15:00

Yeah, so maybe just to expand on that the third in last years and I’m assuming there was similar silos, and I’m assuming silos are tightly tied to the organizational architecture, business architecture and you know, as you were talking and referencing like how things evolve, like, I was recently re-watching in a class, Gary Hamel talking about like, you know, at the beginning of the last century, there was, you know, an average size of a company was four people. Right? And, you know, like, over the last 100 years, especially last probably, you know, 40, 50 years, we’ve tried to scale things up and structure things. And you could say sometimes it worked, but like it’s definitely not working in the context of dealing with that uncertainty and Volker world that I guess, not a guess but we’re in. So organizational structure, governance, architecture, the other part of the of the coin I’m assuming, what are you seeing in that space and what needs to change?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  16:20

Yeah, let me go back to an earlier question. What is business agility? And let me add something to that before I answer the question you just asked because I’m gonna answer what business agility is not. Business agility is not agile business, is not agile outside IT. This was actually the mistake I first made when I got into this space. So in 2008, as I mentioned, I was a director in the Australian public service. I wasn’t a great director. I was a good team leader, I was a good project manager but I’d never run whole of government program. I was never responsible for a section. So it was an entirely new skill set and one I’d never learnt. So it’s an entire another story as to how [cross-talking 17:15]

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  17:16

Peter principle right? 

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  17:18

Yeah, no. It definitely was the Peter Principle; I got promoted to my level and competence. And it took a very good leader above me to point out my arrogance and the assumptions and get me to look at how to be better. And so one of the things I did was I looked at agile because remember, I’ve been using agile as a developer and as a team leader, as project manager since 2003. So I looked at that and it’s like the problems I’m facing as a director are the same class of problems I face as developer right? Coordination, cooperation, uncertainty, getting groups of people to actually develop a product quickly and of quality, could the same principles that I used in an agile space work in a business setting? Now the answer was yes. And so. But this wasn’t business agility, this was agile business. Capital A agile business. And so I took concepts like iterations into running the section, I took concepts like pair programming, I just called it pair work, into the organization. And it worked. Like writing a memo, a ministerial brief with two people, creates a much better, much faster documents than one person writing. Now, the problem is, there was no agility in the system. We were constrained and going back to Theory of Constraints, we had constraints to agility, those constraints were organizational governance and bureaucracy. We could do agile, right? But it was very difficult for us to be agile at a business context. So we could do pair programming or pair writing, we could write this brief, but we still had to send it through the 4 layers of hierarchy. So I was the executive director, then there was the assistant secretary, the first Assistant Secretary, the deputy secretary, and then the secretary. So even as an executive director, there were four layers above me.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  19:31

Typical government structure with public.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  19:35

So that minutes had to go through four layers of executives who were not agile in the slightest. Anyway, there’s an entire conversation around delegation and different types of delegation; are you delegating heads or delegating hands? And in the government setting, those executives treat delegation like I just need an extra pair of hands. I’m the head, if it matches my own mental model, it will pass. So all I need is another pair of hands to do what I’m thinking as opposed to delegating heads which is here’s the outcome, you do it as best as you see, my job is quality control and just as validation, making sure things are within tolerance, not exactly as I want them to be. Anyway, that’s an entirely different conversation, I’m getting sidetracked. But sending this minute up, we weren’t agile in the system. So do you actual question, governance, structure, processes, when we talk about business agility, it’s not the same as saying agile business because what we need is agility in the system, we need different capabilities to emerge that enable an organization and organization to respond to whatever happens. And these capabilities are things like the ability to lead through empowerment and influence. Think about that. We don’t need leaders to lead through, well definitely not fear but through direction. It’s about, it’s that delegation through heads. It’s I need this minute to go to the secretary or go to the Minister to explain something that’s critically important. If I’m going to lead through direction, it’s gonna take three months, if I’m going to lead through empowerment, it’s gonna take three days, right? We need the ability to continuously improve. Those feedback loops, inspect and adapt. Like that’s agility 101. And we need a company to inspect and adapt. Not just a team, not just a product; we need the ability to seize emergent opportunities, right? If something happens out there in the marketplace, if you take longer than your competitor to seize that opportunity, your competitor are gonna own that space, they’re going to own the market, not you. So and again, we’re a research organization, we actually have a research model, a behavioral and capability model built on 82 behaviors and 13 capabilities. That’s just three of the capabilities that I’m talking about. We’ll run out of time I talk too long. But the point is that we need an adaptive governance structure that promotes agility. I want to add one last thing, because there’s like a principle that underlies all of this. And that principle is trust. So think about trust in; when I was a consultant, I used to work for IBM. And like every single large consultancy, their travel processes were bureaucratic and slow. I had to get approval to travel. I never once got declined approval but I always had to ask for approval. And if it was q4, I had to go to the country manager to get approval. Now the reason being IBM is trying to save money, they want to stop unnecessary travel, all that kind of thing. But the problem is, sometimes I wouldn’t get approval to travel till the day before. So I can guarantee you that governance, which was designed to save money, cost the money back because… 

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  24:08

You’re paying three times the price of the tickets.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  24:12

Now, remember what I said, I never once got declined. So I was trust worthy. But the system was designed not to trust. It was designed to assume that I don’t know when is the right time to travel. I don’t know when it’s appropriate. And so the system wasted money because it didn’t trust. Now, agile governance is built on trust. It’s not blind and that’s why we talk about audit, governance versus approval governance. Approval governance is stop until I tell you to continue. And that stop is a delay. It increases costs, it increases both real cost and opportunity cost. Whereas audit governance is continue unless I tell you to stop. Because if I make a mistake, I buy a flight, I don’t need to, that audit will pick it up. And then if I’ve made a mistake, I guarantee I’m not going to make that mistake again. Right? Because and learning from your mistakes, I’ve got a nine year old child, it’s how she learns. It’s how we all learn.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  25:30

As you’re saying that like it reminds me of just going back to understanding the systems, understanding the both human systems and why trust is important to us as humans, but also, just from a systems perspective and complexity or looking at organizations and we’re saying it’s almost like looking organization is a complex adaptive system, adding human spice to it or side to it and saying like how do we decentralize? How do we create those guardrails rather than having go through a stupid process that doesn’t make sense, it’s costing us more, because we don’t understand how to design systems and we don’t really understand people, we’re assuming that people are not trustworthy or that they’ve dumb so? Or not necessarily maybe, you know, dumb maybe too strong a word but that’s what it indicates when you look at how the system was designed or the process was designed. We can switch gears a little bit. Another thing that caught my attention and I wanted to get your thoughts on it, is when respondents described communication and collaboration as the single biggest benefit that business agility has brought to their organization. And this was a huge jump from, I believe, the year before. And in every organization that I go to, you know, usually collaboration and communication is the biggest issue. So, you know, just figure out how to better collaborate and communicate and you know, you’ll be much better off, don’t worry about any of the Agile stuff, right? And I wanted to just maybe get your thoughts on, were you surprised by that or what do you think about that jump from the year before?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  27:20

So the year before, I think customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction. But last year’s report was… so we published it in September 2020. We’ve been collecting data since September 2019. So we had completely coincidentally, 6 months of data pre COVID and 6 months of data post COVID. In fact, I think the numbers were like 45% pre, 55% post in terms of number of respondents. So we could actually see some real impact variation that COVID-19 brought because companies had to respond. And we saw some real substantive changes. For example, manufacturing jumped to the number three industry. Manufacturing had, in fact, I think in year one, I don’t think it was in the top 10. It was so consulting and technology has always been one and two. I think they’ve swapped a couple of times, but they’ve always been one and two. And that makes sense. Consultants, especially the midsize consulting firms, it’s there for people who you become a consultant because like you want to push boundaries, you want to try different things and so they often try it to themselves. Maybe not so much like the big four, but certainly the midsize consultancies. Tech firms, they’ve been doing agile since the beginning. So it makes sense that tech firms have greater agility. But manufacturing jumped and a large part that’s because a lot of these organizations, they saw what happens when you lean too far. Right? And so their supply chains, they’ve been applying lean since the 80s. And their supply chains was so lean, that they were fragile. So they wanted to keep the lean benefits but bring agility into the system, not fragility into the system. And so that’s where business agility, that’s why the spike in business agility. We also saw that regions shifted. And if you’re American listeners, I’m very sorry, but agility dropped in North America quite substantially. Agility in Asia jumped 25%. Agility worldwide grew 15%. But agility in North America dropped 10%. And this hasn’t been published yet, because we’re still doing the data analysis but right now, America is dropping again. The 2021 report, which will be coming out in about six weeks is showing that America has gone from being number one in the world to I think second last after Middle East and Africa. So we have some, I have theories as to why that is, no evidence as to why those theories are holding true but definitely have some theories as to why this is the case. But that’s not sort of what you asked. When we’re looking at communication, COVID was a communication challenge but because it was such a challenge, it forced organizations to really, really focus on it. So we definitely saw that over like, pre March 2020 and post March 2020, the improvement to communication and collaboration increased, not because you can communicate and collaborate better when you’re working from home but because it forced people to be deliberate about it, it forced people to actually invest in new, both technological tools as well as just like processes and approaches to improve collaboration. So because of COVID-19, because of that focus on improving collaboration, especially in an agile setting, that’s like business agility, enabled greater collaboration and communication in a time when communication collaboration was most needed.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  32:06

Do you think, in what ways is it going to continue to challenge that? Because like, as we look at, you know, going back or the going back, or going back to work, in a sense, in what ways do you think the taking of blood that we got from COVID, as far as like, you know, just how we work, how we collaborate and communicate, is it going to continue to kind of push the organizations towards that greater collaboration and communication?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  32:37

So I think we’ll see greater agility just in general. So people often ask me is top down or bottom up, what’s better? And the answer I used to give and I think the answer that most people give is both. But it’s a cop out. It’s also the wrong question. Because it’s a false dichotomy. It’s not top down or bottom up. I think of organizational transformation like brewing a cup of tea. So there’s no point, at some point, you have a cup of water and another point, you definitely have a cup of tea, right? There’s no point where suddenly, water becomes tea. It’s about strength and infusion. You put the tea leaves in, heat, motion, stir around, you let it brew, and then over time, it gets stronger and stronger, you get more tea. And the same is true of agility. I don’t like to use the word transformation, I prefer the word journey, right? You have change agents throughout the organization, you have motivation. A global pandemic is a good motivation towards agility. That’s the heat. You got motion, people moving around, working in different projects, engaging in different things. And so these change agents are infusing agility throughout the organization as it moves, as the pressure and the heat is made. And so this organization, there’s no point at which it’s suddenly an agile organization like that tea. There’s a point where it’s definitely not agile. There’s a point where it definitely is agile.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  34:35

Or if you add some more water or something else to it.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  34:40

And there’s all sorts of things that happen. At a certain point, water becomes tea through infusion. An organization has agility, builds greater agility through infusion. And so COVID-19 has created the heat, right? It’s created one of the environments for agility to flourish. And so the need for better communication and collaboration will continue. And agility will continue to be an approach, a very good approach to actually creating that. And so this kind of, if you think about the, if we think about organizations, we think about how they grow and they progress, I think 2021 through to 2022, we will see more and more organizations become deliberately agile and we will also see more and more organizations become organically agile, and they may not even call it business agility. They may not call it anything. Those behaviors will naturally emerge because it is what is necessary and because the organization values those behaviors

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  36:17

And that’s yeah. That remind me of just like I had a discussion with Mike Cohn and he exactly said that. He’s like I live for a day where we don’t call these things, you know. Do you think in that sense, the frameworks and the whole business around certifications, frameworks, and all of this is also at its peak?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  36:40

That’s a good question. Yes and no. So I believe very strongly in education. I think education is important. Now, education is different from certification. I think we will see, business agility education expands. So we’re running one of our research projects right now that we’ve just started is an evaluation of 100 MBA schools and their MBA programs, looking at the level of agility. So think of it like an MBA agility index, right? Which MBAs naturally promote agility and which ones do not? That we’re very, very early on, I can’t, there’s nothing I can share on that piece of research. We’ve only just literally only just started in the last three weeks. But I think we’ll see education and learning around the concepts of agility, not necessarily agile, but the concepts of agility instilled through all professional leadership, education, like MBAs. You already see things like the PMI when they bought disciplined agile and they bought flex. They’re doing it because they’re trying to build agility into the project management profession.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  38:24

Well, that’s good and like what, I’ve been talking to several people that I respect and I feel like I have, it’s almost like going back to the basics, going back to like decoupling or taking apart these frameworks and looking at the patterns within these frameworks and then almost constructing something that works in your context a lot rather than saying, hey, you know, use Scrum, go to Miljan two day class or go to somebody else’s class. And, you know, but rather like, you know, you got to start thinking like, why do you have daily stand up? What is the purpose of it? How would I contextualize that in my environment rather than that Scrum says, you have to have a daily stand up.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  39:05

Yeah. And so that’s critically important. Because as I said early on, business agility is not agile business. And there are things that we can learn from agile frameworks and there are practices that we can adopt. But it’s contextual and every organization needs to look at, they want agility, they want all those capabilities, those 13 capabilities I was talking about.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  39:31

That’s why I put this agile to agility.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  39:35

Yeah, that’s exactly it. So we can learn from agile, we can take a lot from it, we can respect the heritage, but we don’t have to do it. And even the Agile community says this. Don’t do agile, be agile, right? Being agile is agility. That’s the goal. That’s what’s important. So more and more organizations are going to be… So more education is going to be integrating these concepts; they may not call it agile, they may not teach stand ups, but they’ll be teaching agility, natural native agility. In terms of the… right now, organizations are in pain and they need help. So I’m not a consultant anymore. And as I said, I don’t think transformations are necessarily like… A journey to agility is not a project, it doesn’t have a start and an end. It is an ongoing journey; it’s that agile to agility journey. But I do think that organizations are going to be looking to experts, those who have done it to guide them and help them on the journey. And there are good experts and there are bad experts. And I’m not going to get pulled into the… 

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  41:06

Cooks and Chefs

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  41:08

Yeah, yeah, all that kind of stuff. But organizations need that support. Many organizations need that support. Where they need that support, they’re going to be calling on education to teach and to learn. And where there is education, there is validated learning and that’s what a certification is. The certification is not saying that you are an expert in something, is not saying that you can do something. A certification is saying we validate that you have learnt something. Right? Now there are professional level certifications which are different. So IC agile expert certification, Scrum alliances, CEC, CTC, CSPs for example, which are not education based but they’re valid is like, it’s not validated learning, it’s validated practice. Yes, I’ve done this, here’s evidence that I’ve done it. That’s a different level of certification. I think those will become more valuable over time. Our community has a habit of very short term thinking, which is ironic given what we’re talking about. But quite often, someone sees oh, there’s money in certification so that they build up their own and they actually devalue the thing for the entire industry. And they have a problem. But right now, those professional level certifications actually do, for the most part, show that someone can do something. I think that will become more important in the mid-term. And the validated learning will be important for as long as organizations see the struggle and they need help on the struggle and thus the education. At a certain point, we’re not there yet. I believe agility will become…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  43:11

Something you don’t talk; it’s just what you do, right?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  43:14

It’s just, it is how we do business. Right? In the same way that no one goes to a class to learn traditional management, most MBA programs do I suppose. But when I got promoted and the reason I had the Peter Principle when I first became a director is I never got taught how to be a director. It’s just how leaders operators and what was assumed and expected. At a certain point, we’re just going to assume and expect leaders to be or to have agility or to be agile. And that days is probably 10 years off.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  44:03

Yeah, no, I mean, that aligns with mine. So maybe just, I had another question which we don’t have time around like how business agility, perception of business agility varies drastically based on who you ask? Well, we’ll leave that as a something that people can go and read the report. But when it comes to the 2021 report or anything else, leave us with some insights that you have or may have that most people may not based on what you do. If you have like a nugget or two.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  44:42

So first of all, I call you back to Theory of Constraints. There’s a constraint to agility in your organization and it’s probably not the software team anymore. 20 years ago, or 18 years ago for me, 2003 I was doing Scrum and we were deploying every two weeks. But we weren’t applying to production, we were deploying to staging because we had an operations team. And our operations team had a release window. And that release window was once every six months. So whilst my team’s agility was measured in weeks, the system’s agility was measured still in months. Now, I left the technical world by about 2008. But around that time, DevOps starts to emerge as this thing. And DevOps was the system, finding ways of improving agility. And so now Amazon can deploy into production every 11 something seconds. Fantastic. What does that mean? It means the constraint to agility was software, we invent agile, then it was operations, we invent DevOps. So but where’s the constraint today? In your organization, your natural agility is not measured in days, weeks or seconds, it’s measured at the speed that you can recruit, it’s measured at the speed you can get a budget change or a budget approved, it’s measured at the speed that your steering committee or project control board or change advisory board meets because they are the ones who approved the next phase gate.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic  46:28

Or maybe there you can change your policy.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn  46:31

That’s it! These are the constraints to agility. So find the constraint, figure out which part of your organization is the limiting constraining factor to agility and that’s where your coaches should be. I guarantee that for most of the listeners, the investments in the Agile or business agility transformation is not at the point of constraint. They’re probably already reaching diminishing returns of their transformation investment because they’re the point at which their transformation is being focused has reached a local maximum, right? And we need to get to move that transformation focus to the area of constraint so that the entire system can improve. And that’s probably the biggest insight I can share. And I’ll say, look to HR, look to finance and look to your governance and compliance processes. Those are right now for most organizations, the biggest constraints.