Sanjiv Augustine & Roland Cuellar had the opportunity to attend the 11th Annual Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna, Austria along-side the Scrum Alliance team. The theme was The Power of Ecosystems – Managing in a Networked World.
Howard Sublett, Co-CEO and Chief Product Owner at Scrum Alliance, was one of the opening speakers and shared an insightful talk about a shift from leaders being the ultimate source of knowledge to cross-functional, self-organizing teams and ecosystems being empowered and equipped to seek new opportunities. He used maps as a metaphor to represent this shift. Prior to the 13th or 14th century maps had fixed edges because the leader was the source of all knowledge. Then something changed, a map was written that included the unknown, and in the unknown was the image of a sea monster, an object that represented everything that just might exist outside of the confined boundaries of the old school map. This acknowledgement that the leader doesn’t know everything, and there are new opportunities to seek, spawned a sense of adventure. He ends by saying “for God’s sake draw your sea monster”.
Howard’s talk brings us right back to the theme of the event, The Power of Ecosystems – Managing in a Networked World. It also resonates with LitheSpeed as we have an unwavering focus on Business Agility. While maps, sea monsters, eco-systems, business agility are different ways of saying it – what it comes down to is empowering cross-functional teams to have choices, to make decisions, to seek opportunity and to embrace a culture of adventure – all while keeping in alignment with the organization as a whole.
What is Business Agility? Business Agility is an organization’s ability to create and respond to change. It is achieved by taking a customer-focused view and applying the agile mindset, principles and practices. This involves everyone from individual team member to the portfolio level, across the enterprise. As Agile methods evolve from IT teams to an industry standard, an Agile approach needs to take hold across silos and in every department. Business agility thus extends Agile beyond IT to business functions like marketing, sales, operations; and most importantly to the ‘C’ Suite. Do you want to learn more? Visit BusinessAgilitySparks.com or contact us at LitheSpeed. We’d love the opportunity to help lead the way on your shift to Business Agility.
