Leveraging Agility on a Ways of Working Simplification Initiative

FlowImpact Yoga, a fast-growing network of studios, continues using the Think It, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It operating system.

On the last employee survey, they saw improvements in cross-company collaboration and goal clarity, which makes the mediocre results in Decision-Making an area to try to improve.

In a leadership team meeting, they decided to treat this as an OMTM (One Metric That Matters) and treat it as a worthy goal.

Early on, they realized this was a multi-pronged issue with many moving parts and no clear-cut solution—a Gordian knot. It was an excellent opportunity to leverage agility practices to tackle the complexity.

As the cross-functional team that opted in to tackle this gets going, a key question they ask themselves is, “What will be our Increment? How will we achieve transparency that gives us the evidence we need for steering?”

They quickly realize that moving the needle on the metric that matters will be a lagging indicator that wouldn’t move fast enough to steer. However, they can ask their colleagues to rate Decision-Making Speed and Autonomy for each major decision being made as well as on a more frequent basis, e.g., every two weeks. They believe this will be a good leading indicator for the metric that matters.

The desire to get traction on the leading indicator leads them to break the challenge into small slices and focus their discovery, validation and intervention. They select one decision type in one area as an initial area for their experimentation.

This is when they move from Thinking to Building. In this case, building means trying out new decision frameworks and decentralizing several decision types while providing improved context for alignment. By finding a fast-moving outcome metric, they can try many more things in the same period. That proves crucial because their first experiments fall flat. But after several tries, they find an intervention that shows promise.

They spend a bit more time validating and then start working towards a wider deployment of this intervention—they are getting ready to “Ship It” into the organization. Once the intervention is in place, they continue to monitor, find some issues in other decision areas where the alignment approach requires a different structure, “Tweak” the decision-making SOP a bit, and then they are happy with the results they’re seeing.

Decision-making is no longer the biggest constraint people face. It is time to move on to the next one.

So…