How Agile Turns Risk Into Opportunity Posted on : Jul 06 - 2020

In an online reunion of long-time friends recently, I found everyone agonizing between huge opportunity and huge risk. With multiple crises at once and everything being rethought, surely these forced experiments would accelerate positive changes already underway? Yet wasn’t there also a risk that, bad as things are, they might deteriorate even further? There was recognition that the risk would be much lower if we had organizations that were able to “shift on a dime.” Some participants noted that we are beginning to see examples of organizations doing exactly that.

How Organizations Can Change Direction

One participant shared the following story:

There was a high-end restaurant in a big city on the American West Coast that had to rethink their business of some 40 years as a result of the coronavirus crisis.  One day they were in business and the next day they weren’t. What were they going to do? The first thing that they did was that they tapped into their purpose. Their purpose is to feed people. That allowed them to ask the next question: if our purpose is to feed people, then how are we going to do it?

And immediately they came up with three innovative ideas for how they would shift the whole business model. One idea was to keep everybody in employment: they didn’t want to lose any of their staff. The second thing that they should be  willing to throw out every single one of their operational processes s and rethink and redo everything from the ground up.

And they were able to make those changes within a week. And they were able to keep 125 wait staff, employees and other kitchen staff. Since then, they had to go through several pivots  and it's not such a rosy picture anymore. But they still go back to the fundamentals. What's our purpose? And what do we need to do operations-wise to make it happen? There were no sacred darlings. They did whatever they had do to meet their purpose.

Working From Outside-In, Not Inside-Out

This example captured some of the spirit of organizational agility. It was noted that some organizations—even some large corporations—were operating in the same spirit. They start from: what are we here for? What’s our purpose! And they work back from that, looking at things from the outside-in. They ask: how can we draw on all the talents of our staff to achieve this? And what would we have to scrap, no holds barred?

They don’t start from “what business are we in?” and then “how we can sell more of our stuff to customers out there and make money off them?” That is inside-out thinking. Firms operating in this new mode start from the outside-in and go from there. Anyone with a good idea can contribute to the discussion. What do our customers need and then, how can we meet that need? Profits become a result, not the goal. View More