Applied Agility in Organizations
The second level of our Agility in Organizations Series, Applied Agility in Organizations: Shaping Culture for Business Agility offers immersive learning, application, and practice. This program helps leaders identify and shape organizational culture to enable, support, and grow agile ways of working. It builds upon the learning from the Agility in Organizations workshop by leveraging all of the tools and techniques to identify and shape positively impactful organizational change.
Focused on the bottom half of our Agile Leadership Compass™, the Applied Agility in Organizations program exposes, aligns and directs leaders toward improved business agility through exploration of values. Leaders will run experiments to shape the culture to improve business performance and organizational health.
Applied Agility in Organizations: Shaping Culture for Business Agility is offered as a private engagement for leadership and change teams within an organization. Structured as a private, customized program, Applied Agility in Organizations helps leaders within an organization identify and shape their organizational culture to enable, support, and grow more agile ways of working.
Agility in Organizations Series
Applied Agility in Organizations:
Shaping Culture for Business Agility
SHAPING CULTURE FOR BUSINESS AGILITY
Leadership and change teams use the Competing Values Framework (CVF) to identify, direct and shape organizational culture for improved performance and health.
Participants situationally identify, direct and begin to shape organizational culture toward their weakest quadrant through organizational change experiments.
Why is Culture so Critical to Building an Agile Organization?
Culture has been identified as a top organizational impediment for enhanced agility the past 15 years running. Yet still, it remains difficult for leaders to get their hands on it, almost like trying to control fog. Leaders who are able to better understand, build awareness, and harness change-shaping culture that enables, rather than inhibits, agile ways of working will improve their effectiveness, health and performance.
Effective leaders don’t set agility as a goal, instead they leverage agility to achieve business goals. Agility is a way of engaging, empowering, and catalyzing teams to deliver value to customers. Separating agile methods from an agility-supporting value system is essential for success.
How Does the Applied Agility in Organizations Program Help Shape Culture?
Applied Agility in Organizations does not help leaders hang inspirational posters on the wall and run better all-hands meetings. Rather, we help leaders recognize the levers that truly shape culture, further helping modify them to positively focus, align, and accelerate positive change within the organization to improve business results.
Imagine a culture as a shadow. All leaders cast shadows. More senior leaders cast broad, dispersed shadows while local leaders cast acute, focused shadows. Systems, policies and measures cast shadows too. Many employees feel the darkness from all of the shadows. This program helps leaders change the source of the shadows — values, structures, policies, and measures.
Culture emerges from the beliefs of the leaders and is represented through behavioral norms of everyday interactions. It’s simply “what we do around here.” While culture is a complex topic, our program hones in on the core of culture as a value system.
This immersive learning, application, and practice spans three months during which participants use the Competing Values Framework (CVF) to situationally identify, direct and begin to shape organizational culture for improved performance and health.
Who Should Attend this Culture Shaping Program?
All leaders shape culture. While senior leaders shape culture broadly, local leaders shape culture more acutely. The learning and focus of this program can be applied at a broad or narrow organizational level, depending on the leader’s sphere of influence.
This program is intended for leadership teams and dedicated change teams who are in roles within their organization who have both the autonomy and connectedness to influence cultural change. The goals set by participants may be oriented toward more senior leaders shaping broad organizational culture or mid-level leaders who may directly impact their teams and influence the micro culture. Either way, participants must be able to work with their teams to set goals, experiment, and reflect on progress throughout the program.
How Do Participants Engage in the Program?
Professional One-on-One Coaching
Participants engage with an ALJ Guide in one-on-one coaching with a concentration on the leader’s focus and goals for the program. The professional coach provides insight and challenges participants to focus, practice, experiment, reflect, and share.
Leadership Team and Change Team Engagement
Small leadership and dedicated change teams of at least three leaders become the fundamental building block to share in learning, practice, and growth through the course of the program. The facilitated sessions provides a safe space for experimentation, peer-coaching, practice and reflection. Each team is professionally facilitated by one of our experienced Agile Leadership Journey Guides.
Focus, Align, and Accelerate Change Through the Catalyst Canvas™
As introduced in the Agility in Organizations workshop curriculum, this program leverages the simple yet impactful Catalyst Canvas™ tool to create a change strategy including a goal, why now, obstacles, measures and first steps. The Catalyst Canvas™ is an approach based on the V2MOM (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures) tool, developed at Salesforce.com and popularized in the book Beyond the Cloud by Marc Benioff.
Program Schedule
This program involves immersive learning, application, and practice with schedules that are customized for each organization. The facilitated sessions include education, coaching, practice, sharing, and reflection designed for leaders to explore and begin to shape their organization’s or team’s culture toward increased business agility.
Requirements & Credentials
It is recommended, but not required that leaders have completed our Agile Leadership Journey™ Agility in Organizations introductory workshop or a comparable Scrum Alliance™ Certified Agile Leadership Organizations (CAL-O, previously CAL 1) program.
More importantly, the team of leaders must be in roles within their organization that allow them to engage others in culture shaping experiments throughout the program. For some leaders, this may be at the organizational or senior leadership team level while for others it may be at the departmental or team level as part of a dedicated change team.
Certificates earned
