Lean-Agile Strategy, A Strategic Discovery Approach

How do we create a culture of innovation that embraces continual change? Traditional Strategic Planning is cumbersome, expensive, and often completely disconnected from the realities of everyday organizational operations and execution. Likewise, it does not create an environment conducive to innovation and continual change.

While Agile has enjoyed success at the team level, it has struggled to break through across organizations to deliver substantive and lasting changes in how the business or its people operate, nor has it led to the requisite systemic organizational changes necessary to create a culture of innovation that embraces continual change. 

For organizations that look to outside help for strategic planning, McKinsey estimates that 70% of all such efforts will fail as they primarily focus on “moving from A-to-B” as a project rather than changing the fundamentals of how organizations, its leaders, and its people operate. Both the pace of change and the need for change is relentless. It does not wait for you to get to B, as by the time you get to B, it will have moved many times, and in ways, you could not have anticipated. And there never really is a B, anyway.

So how do we change the fundamentals of how we operate to create a culture of innovation that embraces continual change? To do that, we believe organizations, its leaders, and their people need to:

1. Close their capability gaps, and we do not just mean the business ones. They also need to be able to update their capabilities over time and to add new ones as needed
2. Embrace two new roles for leaders so they learn how to relinquish personal control to gain organizational control, which also solves some of the biggest organizational constraints to being agile and adaptive
3. Look at value from two time-horizons. Thinking long-term value is good, if you don’t go out of business before you get there.

In this short talk, Dan and Larry share how organizations, their leaders and their people, can change the fundamentals of how they operate to create a culture of innovation that embraces continual change.