WHERE EAGLES DARE – THRIVING ON CHAOS

Business leaders often are faced with the challenge of managing through uncertain times.

Faced with market disruption, eluding profits, meaner margins, eroding employee morale and lesser throughput, they have the daunting task to produce better results amides these disruptors.

The accelerators that can turn the wheel around need to be carefully evaluated, planned and executed to perform at optimum speed and efficiency.

During times of disruption, such as a pandemic that we are faced with today, the leader has to identify new markets, innovative products, value driven and cost effective services, and provide smarter solutions to the problems faced by their consumers.

To address this, a new way of thinking should emerge.

Business Agility and agile thinking may be the need of the hour.

Agile Thinking is the ability to consciously shift your thinking when and how the situation requires it. The Whole Brain® Model provides a powerful framework to ensure you can make that shift, identifying four different thinking preferences, (Analytical Intelligence, Results Driven Intelligence, Relational Intelligence and Creative Intelligence) and giving you the skills you need to leverage each.

Check out this link – https://bit.ly/3c00u46 where you can learn how best you can use the whole brain thinking model to become an agile thinker.

A person with an Agile mindset, thinks quickly and is mentally acute or aware.

The challenges such as globalization, sustainability, web-based and social technologies, rapid pace of change, fierce competition, and diversity that are faced by today’s business leaders should be addressed with a highly critical thinking (deep and accurate understanding of a situation) ability which is at the top of essential agile competency that is needed for a leader.

Agile critical thinking is a framework for applying critical thinking to decisions made in an organizational setting. We can call it the ACT (3-stage) framework; wherein “A” is assessing the situation, “C” is considering all the evidence and “T” is taking actions based on the evidence. Agility is built into each stage prompted, for example, by new information coming to light or a change in the situation.

As an Agile thinker you can also invent new business ideas by asking some probing questions such as:

Why are we doing this?

What if we tried doing it in a different way?

Is this a truly new idea?

Can we get excited about this idea?

Can we visualize what the result will be like?

So how can you the business leader start thinking in an Agile manner?

You can do this, too. The key is making a habit of metacognition—thinking about your thinking:

1. During the day, pause to ask what kind of thinking is most appropriate to the task at hand. Consciously choose when to analyse, organise, personalise and strategise. When solving a problem, mentally walk through each mental process.
2. Allow time for thinking. Create space during your day to reflect on the kinds of questions mentioned in this post. Put the most important answers in writing.
3. Seek outside perspectives. When solving problems or asking for feedback, we usually seek out people who are on the same “wavelength”—those who are most likely to confirm our opinions. It’s a lot more comfortable to get validation than pushback. Yet there are times when a contrary perspective is what you need to get results.

Now, lets look at Business Agility.

According to Agile Business Consortium, Business agility is the ability of an organization to:

• Adapt quickly to market changes – internally and externally
• Respond rapidly and flexibly to customer demands
• Adapt and lead change in a productive and cost-effective way without compromising quality
• Continuously be at a competitive advantage

Business agility is concerned with the adoption and evolution of values, behaviours and capabilities. These enable businesses and individuals to be more adaptive, creative and resilient when dealing with complexity, uncertainty and change leading to improved well-being and better outcomes.

Here is how, you, the business leader can transform your business with agility as its primary enabler.

Agile business change is all about aligning into an agile organizational structure that is coupled with an agile business operations.

The levers that you need to look into are and change are:

• People
• Culture
• Leadership
• Strategy, and
• Governance

All these have to be transformed into an Agile WOW (Way of Working).

This is all about enterprise transformation that when implemented properly with the expert guidance of an Enterprise Agile Coach, or a trusted Business Advisor, you can be rest assured that you are pivoting towards your True North.

P.S. Vasanthan Philip is an Agile evangelist and expert in transforming organizations into an agile enterprise by coaching leaders  across the organizations and working with diverse groups to bring about change that results in exponential growth and higher productivity. As a Business coach, he uses a proven coaching framework that produces great results. He can be reached at +91 9003075368 or on email at: vasanthan.philip@gmail.com.

He is an author of a bestselling leadership book: “Tilt The Iceberg” and has over 3 decades of organizational experience. He is also a prolific writer, trainer, speaker and a coach.