Some comments to ‘Uber moments’

A colleague shared this on LinkedIn yesterday:

http://uk.businessinsider.com/ex-barclays-boss-anthony-jenkins-on-fintech-and-bankings-uber-moment-2015-11

Just a few quotes pulled out – phrases bolded by me:

• The big question, as Jenkins points out, is whether these huge institutions can move fast enough to get ahead of the wave of change
• And thirdly, leaders need to lead differently. In my experience, people become more risk averse the more senior they become. But doing the same thing a little better is now the riskiest thing you can do.

The need for speed seems to be in many established industries, but manifesting itself in different ways.

One common symptom though is that the existing governance practices and organizational structures no longer support the challenges of today.

The typical response is more controls and less willingness to take risk. Which for many just end up making things worse.

Many established companies are struggling big-time to break free from their self-created ‘prisons’.

Few realize that before you willingly take some risks, allow some degrees of freedom to innovate and experiment, and before you gain the speed and ability to truly navigate in execution few other things really matter.

There are some fundamentals that needs to be in place: a structure that supports you in adressing your actual challenges and opportunities and a focus on balancing load to capability and optimizing the flow of generating results.

Experience shows that with the right interceptions, you can radically improve your situation within a relatively short time. It takes just a few days to make the course corrrections and depending on the size of your organizations everything from a few weeks to a few months for the effects to ripple through (check out the #AgileSpark concept on tis blog).

Once you get the fundamentals in place, you experience dramatic improvements.

This is the new agile. Enabling and managing flow in delivering your strategic roadmap. Creating an environment where everyone has the opportunity to contribute and freedom to perform.

Agile is evolving far beyond being team level rituals and an IT delivery mechanism. It’s a concept for leading,  organizing work and delivering results at an optimum rate in knowledge-intensitive industries.