Expensive Problems >> Principles >> Practices

End-to-end flow of value

Continuous Improvement

Autonomy and Empowerment

Organizing Around Value

Sustainable Pace

Alignment around Outcome-oriented Goals

Energized People

Leaders who Serve

Speed and Empiricism

All worthy Agility Principles (at least I think so…) 

But why should anyone care? 

I mean, it’s much healthier to focus on principles than practices as a goal. 

But even these principles are a form of HOW. They don’t answer the WHY. 

Ask “So what happens if we DON’T follow this principle?” a couple of times and you will get closer to expensive problems:

• Miscommunication, duplicated efforts, and decreased effectiveness.

• Delays and an inability to adapt to changing conditions.

• Bottlenecks, demotivated employees, and ineffective product development processes.

• High turnover rates and decreased output quality.

• Poor team morale, lack of direction, and reduced organizational success.

Ask “so what” again and you get to some juicy expensive problems business leaders might actually be losing sleep over: 

• Wasted resources, increased operational costs, and missed strategic opportunities (a really expensive problem in the age where money isn’t free anymore)

• Falling behind competitors, losing market share, and failing to meet customer expectations. 

• Hindered innovation, slowed time to market, and subpar product quality, impacting revenue growth.

• Increased recruitment and training costs, disrupted team cohesion, and negatively affected customer satisfaction.

• Decreased productivity, inability to achieve business objectives, and a decline in overall organizational health and profitability.

Now what? 

Option 1: You already know you want to focus on a specific principle. Great. Make sure you include a “Why Now” that connects it to an expensive problem. (and if you can’t find one - maybe rethink the conviction on that principle? ) 

Option 2: Start with a Why conversation exploring the expensive problems your organization is currently having. THEN try to find the agility principle that would help address that problem.

Here’s an example:

Don’t tell a senior business director “We’re gonna use KPIs now”. 
Don’t even tell them “We’re gonna work on improving Alignment, Outcome-orientation and Empiricism now”
Don’t even tell them “We’re going to use KPIs to improve alignment so that we deliver better business wins”
(don’t ask me how I know…)

Instead - Facilitate a dialogue around the top expensive problem on their mind. Use Five Whys or Cause and Effect Loops to identify principles that could help. Explore which practices make sense to everyone to try and work on that expensive problem. 

Which option would you go for? 1? 2?