2018 BUSINESS AGILITY CONFERENCE – NYC

Summary

2018 Business Agility Conference @ NYC is in the books.  More than 300 people attended – they came from all over the world: to listen  to selected speakers, on great topics.  Evan Leybourn (the main organizer) also announced the birth of Business Agility Institute.

On impulse, and with a lot of excitement,  NYC-based meet-up was created: Big Apple Business Agility (BABA)

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Special Shout-Out

Special thanks to Stuart Young (on right, below) from the UK – the legendary professional Business Visualiser who has perpetuated many agile events with his amazing graphic art:

Speakers’ Quotes & Main Take-Away Points

Below are some highlights of the most memorable quotes, from selected presenters.  (Note: some notes are captured verbatim, others are transcribed from presenters’ slides, yet others – closely paraphrased.  What is underlined – really resonated especially strong.  Please forgive any potential omissions and if you find any, please request correction)

>>> Nancy Taylor of IBM

• “Beware of people that say: I am a coach but i really never coached anyone.”
• [There are too many ]”box-checking” agile transformation by companies, out there”

>>> Jonathan Smart of Barclays

• “Business agility is the future”
• “Descale work, descale org, DONT scale”
• “Substitute agile for nimble (without capital A)” [too see is meaning remains the same]
• Change your language from “hi, I am John i will enforce agile on you” to “hi i am John, i will deliver better products for you“.
• [Chasing] “increased productivity leads to churning and faking.  Instead, focus on better value and safer environment”
• “You need enterprise agility, not just [agility for] IT”
• “The better your brakes, the faster you can go”
• [Move from] “task-based definition of success” to “outcome definition of success”
• [You should be ] “moving from hard/fixed budgets to rolling scorecards”

Irony in some of his Jonathan’s slides:

• “Our people are not suited for self-organizing, we’ve got the wrong ones…”
• “We want best of both worlds”
• “Easy job.  Just fire the managers and tell the teams the are in charge now”
• “It can be done without restructuring the back office.”
  “It won’t work, it is just a hype.”

>>>Andy Cepio of Target

• “Don’t crush the chips”: the smallest and most impact-ful innovation NOT to crush fragile chips at the bottom of a box was to make two holes on both sides of a box, as hand grips

>>>Steve Deming of Learning Consortium

• [There is] “lots of agile faking. In Learning Consortium companies have safely, and this is where they can share their experiences.”

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Jimmy Allen of Bain & Company

• “The purpose of good organizational design is to create conflicts”
• “When you get to a certain organizational size, any initiative takes about 18 months…to fail“
• “Micro teams MUST report directly into senior Leadership, periodically. Otherwise, mid-level management will kill agility, as they hate agile teams”
• “Jumping to playbooks is silly.”
• “[You have to] create a vocabulary that describes misery [of your people],so you can speak about it
• “The biggest problem of failed agile efforts is distance b/w sr. leadership and doers”
• “Modern organizations must flatten”
• “Only 1 in 11 companies grow sustain-ably – and yet in only 15% of  cases do those that fail to grow blame the market”

“Scaling as a capability: 10 lessons from the Masters”

1. Recognize that scaling will be critical to your success, demand that your leaders remain in balance
2. Winning repeatable models demand an iterative process; don’t declare victory after a good prototype
3. Don’t jump to playbooks; there are different scaling models depending on the degree of tailoring needed
4. The best scaling models consider the “unit of scaling” to identify resource bottlenecks early
5. Address bottlenecks and “Everyone wants Brent” problem from Day 1
6. Don’t underestimate behavioral change required especially across functional hierarchies
7. Understand the role of the three communities; especially the Scaling Community which acts as a bridge
8. Scaling well demands dynamic resource allocation; shift resources fast behind a “winner”
9. Eventually scaling will demand changes to your operating model
10. Use Engine 2 to build specific capabilities

Jutta Eckstein and John Buck of The Cociocracy Group

• “Every company is a software development company but some dont know it yet
• “There is no such thing as “Spotify model”. If you take their model, inspect and adapt, then maybe it is OK….So they say.”
• “Always use lower case A in “agile” (substitute for ‘nimble’, whenever your can)
• “Fixed budgets will kill organizational agility (refer to Beyond Budgetting)”

Laurence Jourdain of BNP Paribas Fortis

-[You should] “keep a small group of internal coaches but hire many professional coaches from” [reputable places]

Joshua Seckel of Sevatec

• “I don’t have a power point today.  –> I may not have any power but I do have a point to make.”

Sudhir Nelvagal of General Electric

• [The company] “is transforming and it is over 125 years old into a lean start up”
• [You have to make] “huge focus on Senior Leadership coaching”
• Using burn-down charts with Senior Management has pluses and minuses. (E.g. velocity policing [is a big minus])

Susan Courtney of Blue Cross Blue Shield

• Problem statement: “Leadership did not know how to reward talent”
• [Had to] bring in Leadership Development coach
• “Culture change is not negotiable”
• Lessons Learned:
  • “Build critical mass around the journey – find like minded people”
  • “Right people – in the right roles (nice does not = good fit)”
  • “Identify and remove toxic people, especially leaders”
  • “Value culture fit as much as functional skills”
  • “Clarity & co-creation of road-maps”
  • “Do this WITH OR in-spite of HR”
  • “CULTURE-CULTURE-CULTURE…if you say it’s who you are, you have to mean it (actions not just words)”

David Horowitz & Matias Nino of REI Systems

• “We should stop thinking that ‘everything that what happens in retros stays in retros. We should produce a lot of retrospective radiators.”

Melissa Boggs of Agile42

• “Your have to change organizational culture as a barrier to agile success”
• “It makes sense to focus on principles not on practices”

Jason Tice of World Wide Technology

“If you want to be able to speak to HR, you have to learn how to speak their language”

Amanda Bellwood of Sky Betting and Gaming

• “Embed HR people onto teams”
• “Have HR run their own daily stand-ups and have them come and see what other teams are doing at their stand-ups”

Some personal Kodak moments at the conference:

• 1st row (Left to Right): w/ Steve Denning, w/Mike Beedle
• 2nd row (Left to Right): w/Zuzi Sochova, w/Jeff Suit Lopez-Stuit