Urgency: The Critical First Step in Organizational Change
Urgency is the key to launching any organizational change initiative, including an Agile Transformation. Leaders must inspire people with a compelling reason to change and create urgency to act now – not later.
Simon Sinek, best-selling author of Start With Why, explains how leaders must inspire people with a compelling reason to act.
John Kotter, one of the leading experts on organizational change and leadership, writes in his book Leading Change that the first critical step in successful change management is to create urgency.
Whether you are just embarking on an Agile transformation journey, or you’ve hit a plateau and need to break through, leaders must align people with a clear answer to these questions:
Why is this important now?
What other initiative will we defer to make this a priority?
Image by Nick Jones under Creative Commons license
To be urgent across the entire organization, the Agile transformation must have clear business goals - objectives that matter to executives, e.g. customer satisfaction, innovation, time to market, quality, or employee engagement. These business outcomes are critical, but they are not sufficient by themselves to create urgency.
Urgency looks like this:
“We’re losing market share to smaller competitors. If we can’t deliver better products faster, we’ll be a minor player in a few years. Our Agile transformation is the vehicle to turn things around.”
OKRs and KPIs are set to achieve business outcomes and the associated Agile practices.
Transformation KPIs are agenda item number one in the monthly executive operations review.
The C-Suite is proactively engaged in the initiative. They constantly remind everyone of the goals in weekly staff meetings, all-hands meetings, company newsletters, and those TV monitors all around the office.
CxO: “I need a commitment from each one of you as VPs to make this your number one priority. Tell me one other initiative that you will delay so you can make time for this.”
CxO: “We will create a comprehensive strategy for the Agile rollout. It will replace or subsume all of our scattered initiatives on quality and process improvements.”
A lack of urgency looks like this:
Checkbook-only commitment. “Here’s the budget approval for the Agile consultants. Give me a progress report at the end of the quarter - you know my schedule is too crazy for me to get involved.”
‘Installing’ Agile. “I want everyone to adopt the MORe Agile framework. I expect to see 90% compliance by the end of the quarter.”
Training-only. “Agile is important. Send everyone to the Scrum training and then the PMO will make sure they follow the process.”
Everything is #1 priority. “Agile is important. but it can’t interfere with our other initiatives. Just figure out how to make time for it.”