When more is not better? Your company is trapped!

by Hugo Lourenço




All companies can be trapped into aging advantages and or school mindset executives, so they will be surprised when things change. Perhaps they shouldn’t be surprised, just because it’s not a surprise anymore if you live in the same world as we.

We can protect people against all the flu viruses we know, but we can’t guard against the next adaptation of the virus.

In the natural model of the new economy, regulation, rules, policies, procedures should be treated less like a cure and more as an exercise in learning and development! Policymakers should act like software companies, promising awesome features even imperfections followed by speedy fixes.

The self-assessment can help you identifying pinpoint areas in which you might be at risk of being blindsided and give you the other side of the coin. Simply position your organization’s current way of working and get insights about possible improvements that you might want to make if you’re in the right position to do so.

Evolutionary improvements: Continuous learning

About Continuous Learning perhaps if you are interested you can also view the Google Labs Aptitude Test (GLAT) and guessing here will not help you!

Fast and roughly right, then precise explainable but too late

“nice to do”, not a “need to do”. I’m constantly looking for new ideas, and when I find one I like, I grab on it with ferocious intensity and I’ll not let go until it happens. This is how it happens Agile21®, Scrumday Portugal®, DevOps Portugal®, Experience Agile®, World Agility Forum®, Agile Human Factors®, Agile Marketing®, Agile People®, Agile Analytics®, Agile Engineering®, Workshops about New Ways of Working in the digital age, and doing Business, The Agile Thinkers Academies®, The Agile Thinkers Consulting®, and hopefully much more to come!

What are the odds of your company to succeed with the next product?


Escaping NPR, IRR, TIR tyrannies: Prototype to understand how it works, and what it means

All the companies I talk to are very much afraid of continuous deployment, so let me tell you one thing, this is exactly what stops you to learn fast. Eric Ries suggests that you can prospective winners from losers by how fast-adapt their business activities. At The Agile Thinkers, we start our work with customers by UNCOVER the things that aren’t working so that they can conscientiously use critical thinking about how they get trapped there.

The frequent problem is Status-Quo that makes most of the managers get trapped. What firms unfortunately do, try to plan their new business as though they were operating with a lot more certainty than they actually are. They should give a chance to bring new people for a certain period of time and give them feedback about what is going on, the good and the bad!

Prepare yourself for a fair amount of iterations (this is when you need Scrum to be Agile) rather than thinking you can project and anticipate what is going to happen unless what you’re trying to reach is a commodity, even if new to you. Please ban words like “project”, “projections”, “estimations”, “FTE”, “man-hour”, “milestones”, “quality”, “outsourcing” and “target”. Please replace with “Critical Thinking”, “Feedback Loops”, “Consumer Perspective”, “Team”, “commitment to deliver”. What you want to make as many inexpensive, intelligent mistakes as fast as possible while you’re refining your market or product concept. Use Scrum if you have the right people with the right skills, and the conditions that Scrum needs to work, else it will be a waste of time to everyone unless you can learn from what went wrong, and that also will help you to understand how far you and your firm is to think innovation.

Rather than innovating for a moment or for a product, build a continuous pipeline of innovative ideas and test them as much as you can by empowering people to set up a server, get a sub-domain and try. Of course, you will need to teach them what are the boundaries about the brand or you can become the chief product owner if you can commit 100%, else just teach – learn, from mistakes, they will do a lot.

Learnability: The Agile Thinkers

Instead of hiring primarily for existing skills, shift to hiring for the ability to acquire new skills. In a digital and flat world it isn’t always possible to know what kind of people you’re going to need, so being able to reconfigure people’s (cap)abilities you have can be very helpful.

Our company is the campus of products and services, business is the curriculum of different market audiences, and leaders teach. My role is to teach the next generation of leaders as my personal responsibility. If you are a learner then there is a chance we can hire you!

If you read it until here, congrats! Here’s the link to our upcoming course on Lean-Agile Procurement

author

Hugo Lourenço

Hugo Lourenço is the founder of Experience Agile® and DevOps Forum, Agile Human Factors ®, World Agility Forum ®, Agile21® - Improving through people, and Agile Thinkers Academy ®. Hugo is an Entrepreneur in several businesses and its main focus is to understand how companies are dealing with better ways of working and how to improve their business outcomes for their employees and customers.

Hugo is motivated by his values and getting his opinion recognized, perfectionist and creative as well a strong believer in a better outcome from people’s work, although he has a strong need for personal (people) trust/honest/transparent relationships and also doesn’t expect less than perfection from others too. Hugo was a marine and he is mission-oriented, if your business, department, or team is in danger or needs to be rescued, this is the right mission for Hugo and his international team.

The experience of working closely with the leaders of many of the brands that have already started this “Enterprise Agility” process outside Portugal, has made it clear that the company’s to get ready for an “unpredictable future” should seek to rationalize the portfolio of legacy products, create high-performance teaming, understand why they do what they do, and their impact on the new operating model. Hugo team will guide you to organizational design & a new way of working, and that will emerge psychological safety, emergent leadership, and new business models through sustainable processes.
He collaborates as a guest lecturer in some national and international business schools has a presence in the North American, and European markets.

Skills: Cynefin, Product Management, Project Management, DevOps Trainer, LeanKanban Trainer, Coach, Scrum Professional and trainer, High-Performance Teaming, Emergent Leadership, Design Thinking, Human Factors, Risk Manager, IT Governance and Service Manager.

Expertise in Business Areas: Defense, Healthcare, IT, Telecom, Bank and Insurance, Utilities.

Some of his interests are:
Motorcycle, traveling, reading, surf paddling, skiing, bicycle, cinema, theater, orchestra, museems.

When more is not better? Your company is trapped!
AGILE21, Hugo Lourenco January 12, 2022
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