“Resiliency” and “agility” are often rarely understood in the context of implementing these skills within organizations. Companies recognize the need to evolve, or keep pace in a climate where innovation is critical to success—or even survival. But people don’t know how to unlock their potential. Our cognitive biases hold us back from adapting to the most common disruptions. They also stop us from inciting the kind of innovative thought that benefits our organizations and ourselves. Fortunately, research has proven we can retrain our brains to be more resilient and agile at any stage in our career.
Measuring True Process Yield using Robust Yield Metrics
The Imperative to Build a Resilient and Agile Organization - One Mindset at a Time
1. The Imperative to Build a
Resilient & Agile
Organization:
One Mindset at a Time
David Collins & Dr. Casey Mulqueen
2. Agenda
TRACOM Group 2018 2
It’s all about change
Change is stressful
Change models are insufficient
Agility & Resiliency are
necessary
Strategies to develop them
3. The World is Changing
So are the skills needed to thrive
in it
• Pace of change
• Market disruption and
competitiveness
• Jobs replaced by
automation
“The corporate playbook is
being rewritten and replaced
by one that takes business
agility to a level we have
never seen before.”
- Lynne Doughtie,
Chairman & CEO, KPMG
3TRACOM Group 2018
4. All organizations are in a state of change
Change is stressful, even if it’s ”good” change
1
2
3 Change models are insufficient
“A critical component of any organizational strategy to build agility is shifting individuals from
fear of change to excitement about new opportunities or expanding skills.” - Braun et al
4TRACOM Group 2018
Change is the Common Denominator
5. Change is Stressful!
Both Agility & Resiliency are Necessary
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“Pursuing agility
without investing in
resiliency is risky
because it creates
fragility – unsupported
exposure to surprises
and shocks.”
- McCann et al
6. Change Models are Insufficient
Models are no
longer
sufficient
Change happens
in leaps, not
baby steps
Success of change
depends largely on
people, not process
or technology
6TRACOM Group 2018
“Models of planned change may no longer be sufficient to
address the needs of today’s organizations.” - Wolf
Jorgensen, H., Owen, L., & Neus, A. (2008). IBM global making change work study.
Kotter, J.P. (2012). Accelerate! Harvard Business Review, 90(11), 45-58.
7. What is Agility?
Subtitle here
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Organizational Agility:
“Organizational Agility is the capacity to
recognize, create and capitalize on
opportunities in a world full of disruptive
change.”
Personal Agility:
“Adopting a flexible mindset that promotes
the generation and implementation of
original and useful ideas.”
8. What is Resilience?
“Resiliency is the ability to
bounce forward in times of
adversity and to see challenges
as opportunities for growth.”
Subtitle here
8TRACOM Group 2018
9. Benefits of Agility
“Agile firms grow revenue 37% faster and generate
30% higher profits.”
– Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Employees who initiate change have a 43% more positive
impact on their companies than those who just have the
capacity to change.
– Corporate Executive Board (CEB)
9TRACOM Group 2018
10. There is a Gap Deepening
“Quote here”
80% of Senior
Leaders have
already directed
L&D to implement a
program
But…The GAP is
Significant…
42% of
companies
haven’t done
anything
as Agility Becomes More Essential
10TRACOM Group 2018
11. Resilience is at the Core of These Workplace Challenges
11
33%
Of managers
are looking for
jobs elsewhere
$300
BILLION
Cost of stress to
US companies
70%
Of workers are
not engaged or
actively
disengaged
51%
Of employees
are
unproductive
due to stress
50%
Of executives
report their culture
isn’t adaptive to
change
TRACOM Group 2018
12. Resilience Training Is Under-Resourced
Survey of 418 companies asked about
having a program to deal with workplace
stress and Resilience
12TRACOM Group 2018
Due to increasing
stress and need for
Resilience
63% have
no plan yet
15% plan to have a
program within 12
months
Only 22% have
a program
To address workplace
stress and improve
Resilience
But they recognize the
problem and need for
Resilience is getting
worse
15. Agility and Resilience Can Be Developed
Agility training is more
influential than genetics:
Perception of Resilience
training’s influence on
participants:
80% 94% Positive outcome
15TRACOM Group 2018
Learnable
16. Recognize our Cognitive Biases
A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking
that leads to mistakes and bad decisions.
16TRACOM Group 2018
17. One Mindset at a Time…
17TRACOM Group 2018
When people change their mindset, they recognize positive
opportunity in challenges with Resilience and mitigate problems by
removing creative “mindblocks” with Agility.
18. What is the number of the slip in which boat XX is docked?
18TRACOM Group 2018
18
Adaptive Mindset for Agility
19. Planning Fallacy
• We underestimate time
and difficulty of projects
• We neglect
• Worst-case scenarios
• Interruptions
• Other obligations
• Past experience
19TRACOM Group 2018
22. Conduct a Pre-Mortem
Project yourself
one year into the
future
Imagine that
the idea has
been a total
failure
Write a history
of what
happened
22TRACOM Group 2018
23. Case Studies
23TRACOM Group 2018
“The demand for agility skills is
significant and universal. Our
leaders have identified these
skills as critical to our business,
and relevant to our people at all
levels.”
— Nancy Henson Kopp, EY
“A mindset change freed the
company to pursue change.”
- Andrew Gregory, CEO of
McDonald’s Australia
“Resilience is such an
important leadership
competency because leaders
set the tone for their teams.”
- Steve Franklin, CoBank
27. www.tracomcorp.com
info@tracom.com
303-470-4900
Contact Us [WHY we do]
We believe that improving peoples’ understanding of
themselves and others makes the world a better place.
[WHAT we do]
We synthesize our discoveries into actionable
learning and resources that improve an individual’s performance
in all
parts of their lives. We call this Social Intelligence.
[HOW we do it]
Through research and experience we uncover the
hidden barriers to individuals achieving their maximum potential
and
identify how to help overcome them.
27TRACOM Group 2018
28. The Imperative to Build a
Resilient & Agile
Organization:
One Mindset at a Time
David Collins & Dr. Casey Mulqueen
Editor's Notes
David
David
Need to be Agile (Set up)
Casey
All organizations are in a state of change
Days of steady progress seem to be over
Either creating change or responding to it, or more often both.
If they’re not changing, there’s a problem
Change is stressful, even if it’s “good” change
Agility creates stress for people.
I’ll discuss the research on this. It’s compelling.
Change models are helpful but insufficient
Companies have traditionally used models, like Kotter or the ADKAR model.
While these are helpful, they’re not enough to manage the kind of change happening today.
We need more human-centered approaches.
That’s where resilience comes in to the picture, and even agility.
Casey
There’s a few of bits of research I want to briefly describe.
In a study of 471 companies, McCann (2009) found that agility is related to individuals’ stress.
In other words, when companies make a concerted effort to be more agile, it increases the stress on employees.
More recent research confirms this. Research done at Humana, the health care company, in 2017.
They found that focusing on agility without also training on resilience can lead to increased stress, and business results that fall short of expectations. (Braun et al., 2017).
Important because stress can undermine the benefits of being agile.
If you’re creating agile change, the stress on the workforce can cause employees to be unable to implement the change the way it was designed, so the process fails.
All of these researchers advise organizations to develop agility and resilience together, at multiple levels (individuals, leaders, and teams).
They claim that resilience is always important, but even more important under conditions of high agility and change.
Finally, research at IBM with several hundred companies found that that companies with greater levels of both agility and resilience were more competitive and profitable, even in highly turbulent environments.
So not only is it good for employees to develop both agility and resilience, but the business outcomes make it worthwhile.
Research references will be included in the pdf made available after the webinar.
Sources:
McCann (2009)
Agility is related to stress
Develop them together at multiple levels (individual, team, organization)
Braun (2017)
Develop together
Resiliency is important, but even more important under conditions at high agility and change
Focus on agility alone increases stress and poor results
Casey
Change happens in leaps, not baby steps
There was a time when change was more incremental.
Change is fast and often big.
And that’s the shortcoming of change models.
Change models are no longer sufficient
These models were developed in a different era.
Kotter’s model was presented in 1995.
In no way disparaging change models – they are very helpful – but they need more human-centered support.
Kotter himself has recently written that the model by itself is inadequate in today’s world. (2012)
He said that the model was built for a hierarchical world, but that hierarchies are now too slow and ineffective.
He claims what’s needed are people with the right mindset to create change. People with a mindset of “I want to and I have the opportunity to influence change” instead of “I have to or this is a requirement.”
Organizations must influence people’s emotions in order to have change success, not just focus on the rationale or logic of change.
That’s a very important point and it’s something we’ve learned to include in our agility and resilience processes.
Success of change depends largely on people, not on process or technology.
IBM Global Making Change Work Study (Jorgensen, 2008)
Research with over 470 companies from 15 nations and 21 industries.
Focus was on how to close the gap between leaders expecting change and feeling prepared to successfully handle change.
This gap increased from 8% to 22% over the course of two years (from the years 2006 – 2008).
What they found is that only 41% of projects met objectives within time, budget, and quality standards.
59% missed at least one objective or failed completely.
Most importantly, their analysis also showed that success of change efforts depended mostly on people, not on process or technology.
So this echoes and confirms what Kotter said and what all this other research has found.
Casey
We’re going to have a polling question in a second, but first let me be clear on what we mean by agility and resilience.
There’s two types of agility – organizational and personal.
Organizational agility is the goal. It’s what companies want to achieve. Capitalizing on opportunities.
They get there by developing the agility of their people.
Personal agility is about developing a flexible mindset, and this allows you to come up with good ideas and then put them into practice.
When individuals and teams develop this ability, it creates an agile organization.
Casey
Resilience is more than bouncing back, it’s bouncing forward.
When change feels overwhelming, reframing the experience as an opportunity for yourself to develop new skills, learn new information, or help your colleagues.
This is what we mean by resilience.
David
Research done by the Corporate Executive Board shows that employees who initiate change have a 43% more positive impact on their companies than those who just have the capacity to change.
David
David
David
David
We’ve done research here at Tracom to look at the benefits of Agility.
We measured people on our agility profile and compared high scorers with low scorers.
Important to note that these results are based on other people’s ratings, they’re not self-ratings. In other words, these are the opinions of co-workers.
You can see the results for yourselves.
All of these are important aspects of agility and are abilities that organizations place high value on. So being agile pays off.
David
McDonalds data
Casey
David just talked about the benefits.
It’s also completely learnable.
We’ve looked at the research – only 20% of your ability to be agile is genetic. So you can’t blame your parents for your lack of creativity.
It’s something that can be learned and developed, with practice.
Resilience can also be learned.
One comprehensive study by the American Heart Institute found that 94% of employees across companies said that resilience training had a positive impact on them.
That’s a huge number and it highlights how much employees are clamoring for help when going through change.
Casey
There’s two steps for becoming more agile and resilient. They share this in common.
First, you have to recognize that cognitive biases have a big effect on your thinking and behavior.
These biases affect everyone.
They’re subconscious and they’re systematic, meaning they happen all the time without us even being aware of them.
You’re going to get first-hand experience of a bias in just a minute.
Casey
We mitigate these biases using strategies that shake up our typical ways of thinking and behaving.
It’s all about changing habits, and this is done by practicing new behaviors, one at a time.
These new behaviors – new habits – aren’t dramatic, but they have a big influence.
By doing this, we change our way of thinking and behaving and this makes us more agile and resilient.
Casey
We want to give you an experience of a bias that is probably influencing your agility.
This is a pattern recognition problem.
You have to solve for the last number.
Good news – nobody gets this right.
Bad news – most young children would get it right.
Happens because over time we lose our ability to view objects from different perspectives.
We’ve become habituated to seeing things in a linear, right-side up position.
This contributes to what we call the anchored mindset and it limits our ability to be agile.
This is just one example, but now David is going to take us through another bias and a strategy to mitigate that bias.
David
David
David
Casey
This technique is very effective because it overcomes our unrealistic optimism about a project or plan.
It forces us to step outside our own skin and take on an outsider’s perspective, like a novelist.
By doing this we recognize obstacles that we couldn’t see previously.
And of course this allows us to plan for those obstacles.