2023 0405 AJC Executagility Model®

You know, people will talk these days about impact. I've heard a lot of conversation around impact. How do we know that what we're doing is having the biggest impact on our business? This has always been an issue in business, except for I have been hearing it quite a bit more. I did a webinar, actually it was a podcast with a client or a colleague the other day, and he really glommed onto the impact thing and talking to clients and they really want to make sure what they're working on has high impact in the organization. And I'm wondering, why is it that impact seems to be a bigger trend now or a bigger concern? And part of it, I believe, is we're coming off of an interesting time economically. We had this pandemic, there was a lot of money pumped into the economy and people were spending quite a bit. Interestingly, some segments, of course, did suffered greatly, and I don't want to diminish that, but some segments were going crazy. Supply chain, you couldn't get anything. Prices are going up. Now we're in this period of inflation and possible recession, but there's still strong hiring. So it's very uncertain times, and I think businesses are starting to put a bit of brakes on, put a bit of brakes on their spend. They're hiring, but they're maybe making more strategic hires. There's a tech bunch of layoffs, so there may be some more talent in the marketplace out there, and it's not an area or a time where we can spend indiscriminately. Not that you ever could, but you really can't now, and you can't just hire a whole bunch of people. So you have to be even more mindful of doing work that has the highest and broadest impact on your organization or the goals you're trying to accomplish with the limited personnel. time and budget that you have. That, I believe, is why there's such a focus these days on impact. So how do people even know that what they are doing does have an impact on the organization? And I wanna share my screen. I put together a very brief slideshow for this. I researched some of these things, 'cause what I hear often is, We actually don't prioritize, or it takes us so long. We're talking, talking, talking, talking. And this is quoted out of an HBR article, and it's been years. But the problem I see more often is that leaders don't make decisions at all. They don't prioritize. So here we are in this area of time where we know we need to have impact, and unfortunately, there is a tendency in the market not to prioritize and not to decide what is that highly impactful thing or group of things our organization needs to do. Well, let's say that we've gotten past the impact and we've gotten past the prioritization and we've actually managed to prioritize. And I'm going to talk about how AJC's model helps with this. But if we have gotten past that and we do want to implement something, there's another problem. Which is that we do actually need to execute. And the apparently number 2 focus of CEOs, according to a Vistage recent CEO study, is the ability to execute easier. CEOs want to make sure that when they decide on something, it is going to happen. And again, I don't want to diminish the amount of effort it takes to get work executed. It's not like those old Office Depot Commercials where you push that big red easy button and it just miraculously happens. But from a leadership standpoint, what easy means is they don't have to micromanage. They know what people are working on, and they don't have to worry that it will get done. Maybe they know it's gonna take time and it takes effort, but they're not worried that it will get done. They're confident the work will happen. And you can see this statistic that we pulled, 70% of large projects don't meet their goals. And this is not an ERP conversation, but that is a really notorious area where budgets and time and impact isn't always realized in the timeframe that leadership would like. All right, so we've gotten through the problem of impact and prioritization. Now we're talking about execution and the confidence that something can happen. Well, let's say that we did manage to execute whatever our goals were, and we've gotten through that. What's the next concern that leaders will have? Well, it's the concern of repeatability. This is another quote. Projects are often done by the heroics of individuals with no standard methodology. We did it once, we muscled through it, we defeated the serpents. You can see This image from a statue— I took this picture, by the way, my spring break. We were in Rome. This is not something I found on the internet. But this is how things happen. It's just done by magic, almost by heroes. And it's not repeatable. And then I still don't have confidence. OK, so we've got quite a few problems we're trying to resolve as leaders in our organization today. So this is our Execute Agility model, and I'm going to walk you through the steps and how come I believe these steps address all 3 of the concerns we're seeing in the market. I'm going to stop sharing and just talk about that. So this issue of prioritization, again, we aren't going to spend a ton of time in analysis paralysis. There are common issues with people saying the loudest voice in the room makes a decision, the most persistent voice in the room makes a decision, the voices who are in the room represented make a decision. We found a way to standardize decision-making and have it be quick and simple, and I'm gonna share an example here in a moment. So that's the first step, prioritization. Now that we've prioritized, we run focused Scrum to actually get work done. And what I mean by that, a lot of people have heard of Agile and Agile Scrum and sprints, and they think of it as the myth being, Well, maybe it's not a myth because it truly is what Agile Scrum does— full-time dedicated cross-functional teams spending all of their work or working hours on individual projects. In most organizations, that's not realistic. People need to keep the lights on in addition to doing incremental work. And so we've modified Scrum to run with cross-functional teams, yes, on the prioritized projects you want to do, but doing it with part-time hours. So once you've decided the project for impact, we'll create a cross-functional team. We'll have them list out the tasks and sequence them in order of how they need to be done, in what order to achieve the work. And we're not too worried about figuring out what they need to do indefinitely, but really in a reasonable timeframe, which is a sprint timeframe. We start with 2 weeks. So as long as you've got a decent list of things that you can get done in about 2 weeks, That's what you're going to do, and the team will commit to those things. They'll say, here's our sequence list, maybe there's 20 items, I, we can commit to the top 10 in 2 weeks. And then we run those in sprints every day. Our Agile project manager will sit in a scenario or a channel like this, a virtual channel, and just ask, 15-minute standup, what did you get done yesterday? What are you working on today? And what roadblocks did you encounter? Any help needed? And we go around the screen and everybody claims that. And just by virtue of keeping people accountable to each other and to a team for things they committed to doing in the first place, it's amazing the amount of results you can achieve. And how this is helpful for managers is every 2 weeks, first of all, we document the things they're doing. Every 2 weeks we'll have a review. So quick, again, virtual showcase of the work the team has accomplished. And this is nice for the team. They get to get credit for the work they completed. And what is pretty common is in the first couple of sprints, they might bite off more than they can chew, right? They thought they could get 10 things done, but it turns out they only got 5 done. So what we'll do is at the end of this quick review, where managers are invited and everyone is welcome to join, we dismiss everybody except for that team who did the work, and we'll ask them, we'll do a retrospective. What could have been better, right? What could we do better next time to meet the goals that we tried to have, or to try and be better in this process? And we'll talk about those things, and then we'll try to actually do those things in the next time around. And I led one of these once a couple of years ago now, where people were trying to close a backlog worth of work, and they consistently for that first sprint were overcommitting and under delivering to what they said they would do. It turned out every single one of them, 5 different locations, were experiencing— this was in 2021, so they were back in the office— experiencing people coming to their office and shutting them down in the middle of trying to get some of this backlog work done. But none of them had the courage to speak up and tell their managers. Sometimes it was the manager doing that. Hey, the reason I can't get my work done is because people keep bothering me in the middle of the day. So we highlighted that as an issue and we came up with ideas to mitigate that. We ran them by the managers and they agreed to them. And it turns out that over time they were able to be more productive. Something simple you wouldn't think of because it's not technical, right? It's very subjective, maybe soft, people barging in on them, but really had a material impact on their ability to deliver results. So that's how managers will get to see the work that's being done and how it will incrementally improve every time. And then the last piece, speaking to the repeatability. When you do cross-functional project and you have trained maybe one group of people, they know how the working norms are, they know how to work together, they know what's expected of them, and then their work is done. And now we move to the next thing that's the most impactful, and all of a sudden it's a new team. And they don't know how the work is done. They don't have the mechanics. So what we do is we use change management to get everyone at the organization On board with this program, this Execute Agility model. Tell them what it is. We tell them why the organization is doing it. We have them understand what's in it for them to do it, right? They're going to be able to get work done. Their managers will be able to see. They will feel good about their results, and we train them how to do it. What are the mechanics? Okay, we have these channels, these standups every day. What can you expect, right? And then when they do it and they adopt it, we'll help reinforce that over time and make sure it's consistent. And then at AJC, we will transition that entire body of knowledge, the whole model over time, to the client so that they can lead the prioritization, they can lead these sprints, and they can maintain the consistency and repeatability across the organization. So that is the model. I am going to run a little example with you guys. It's all very theoretical until you do it. And I'm going to use a real-world example. Right now, I am on the planning committee for my alumni program's alumni conference. So the conference is happening this year in Boston in November. And we are trying to decide a theme. OK, there's a lot of us on this. We're all— we all have our own opinion about what the theme should be. But what we've figured out is, in order to get as many people as possible, that's our goal, to come to the conference. We need to have a theme that meets a few criteria. The first main criteria is employers of the people we want to have come, of our alumni, need to be willing to pay for this. It needs to be a topic or a theme that they think is important enough that they're willing to give somebody a couple days off to go do it in the middle of November, and hopefully pay for the flight and the hotel and the conference attendance fee and the meals and, you know, pay for it. Okay, so that's one thing. The second thing is it has to be interesting enough for the alumni themselves. The people need to care about the theme. Sometimes companies will care about things that people don't necessarily care about. All right, so those are pretty important. And the third thing is, I have discovered, because we had our first call yesterday, that we don't pay our speakers. And therefore, I need to be able to find speakers who are either local to the Boston area or part of the alumni who are gonna come anyway, right? Speakers who I might be able to pay a little bit, but basically are available and inexpensive. Let's just put it that way. All right, so I'm gonna share with you guys my execute agility model I have going for this. Okay, hopefully you can see this screen. Erin, if this is not visible, I'm gonna ask you to say something. No, it looks good. All right, great, thanks. Okay, so again, here's our criteria. Companies are willing to pay, people are interested in the topic, and speakers are available at low or no cost. And I've pre-populated this with some ideas. Now, when we do this with clients, They're the ones with their leadership team or steering committee, which is cross-functional, that populate this list of ideas. And the reason they do that is because even if we're going to be working in one department to start, or with one subset of, of an opportunity, it's important to balance those and prioritize them against the needs of the entire business. That is our primary recommendation for having a cross-functional leadership team participate in the prioritization process. All right, so what I did is I came up with some ideas on my own. I put on our WhatsApp group chat with my, my same class for some ideas, and here's a few that came out. People want to know how to leverage the new supply chain. Right now we are in this world where things are a little different, especially after the pandemic. Supply chain and transparency are more needed. We're in an operational area. People want to know. OK, the future of work is now. A few years ago, I guess there was a conference that was the future of work, period. And now it's— we're in that future. So that might be an interesting theme. The road to net zero carbon. This is huge for many organizations. A lot of companies have a roadmap they're trying to develop to get to net zero. Organizational health is most important. If you don't have a team that is cohesive and coherent, really doesn't matter what else you try to do, you're not going to accomplish it. Diversity, equity, inclusion in the modern era. There's a lot of, there's a lot of speak and a lot of buzz around this term right now. And what does that really mean for us? And then what I call the, the AI ROI. So the artificial intelligence ROI, ChatGPT, machine intelligence, automated learning, all of these things are happening and happening at a quick pace. It seems a little overwhelming. It's fairly nebulous. What does it really mean, and how can we use that in a practical way? All right, so we're going to score these things. And by the way, I've already— you can see that I have a weight up here of number 2 for the first one, because truly, for the most people to come, it really makes a huge difference if companies are willing to pay for it. So I'm going to double the weight. You don't have to double the weight, but you certainly can. All right, so let's say leveraging the new supply chain. Companies willing to pay. Yeah, maybe this might have been more relevant last year. I'm not going to give it a 5. I'm going to give it a 3. And the same thing with people who are interested. We have a ton of speakers though, because we have a lot of people in that area. OK, so you can see my score pop up. Future of work is now. Yeah, I mean, yes. A little bit more, but maybe not so much. Future of work is now. It seems like that's interesting, but you'll see, I think there's something more interesting. And by the way, I'm doing this on my own. You would do this with the team. There would be a lot of discussion. It usually leads to leadership teams getting a lot more aligned, just having this conversation. Speakers, maybe fewer. We aren't as good on that. We actually did a conference 2 years ago on sustainability and companies paid for that one. So I'm pretty sure it's going to be a tough sell right now to do that same conference again. So, and people were there again, I just don't think there's, there's tons of people willing to talk, but we've already done that. I would love to think everyone would pay for organizational health is most important, but the reality of my group, because we're focused on operations, is unfortunately they probably won't. So just gonna keep that one around 3s, and we don't have a ton of people who could speak on it either, because most of our team or our alumni are in operations. They could, but it would be harder to find them. DEI in the modern era, unfortunately, is gonna be the same. And maybe even fewer people able to speak on it. And I'm just being really harsh, but it's true. However, I think the AI ROI, I can't tell you, almost everybody has already put this one out there on their own with no prompting. It's all over the place. People are interested, companies are interested, and we have a lot of speakers who could do this. People have been telling me my company could, my company could help with this. So I've got my scores now. I'm gonna sort them. All right, so I have a pretty clear winner, the AI ROI. It'll be interesting to see when I go into the Teams meeting next week if everybody's scores are the same. So now if I know this is what I'm gonna work on, I wanna do some focused scrumming. I will say right now, when we work with clients, we use their technology. AJC is not a big proponent of forcing people to get in Jira or have to use Teams or whatever it is. If they're already in Office, we'll do this in spreadsheets. We'll find a way to do it that makes the most sense. If they have nothing, we usually start with spreadsheets until it gets a little more sophisticated. Because again, I don't want the barrier to entry to be, now we have to get everybody licenses in Jira. That doesn't make sense. So I've already started something here for this one. I'm the person who has to come up with the speakers. All right, so if it's the AI ROI, there's some areas within that. You know, is it an area around machine learning, an area around marketing, an area around internal organization or internal communications? So a few topics, need to figure that out. Love to put a submission form out to our alumni so that I can get interest in who's going to speak and send that all out. And then besides just soliciting, I want to review all the alumni who might be knowledgeable in this space, all the companies. We have partner companies for this program who might be knowledgeable in this space. especially those that are in Boston where we're going to be. Get an email template. I can start sending that out to the alumni, to the companies, follow up as needed, develop the agenda. You can see how it gets a little less clear because I'm not gonna do all of this in 2 weeks. I'm gonna probably do, I would say the first 2 in 2 weeks, honestly, with the time I've got available to me. And then after that, I'll, I'll maybe be able to hit, you know, all of these within the next 2 weeks, at least first pass. So I don't need to know today all the stuff I have to do after that, because every 2 weeks I will revisit this list. I'll see how it's going. I'll be working with my team of people that I'm on the board with creating this conference, and we'll be reevaluating. That is our real-world example. Now, I talked about the change management piece as well. In this particular example, I haven't given that. But if I had to do this alumni conference next year again with a different team, I can guarantee you it would be so much easier if we could just follow the same process because it does feel like every year we reinvent the wheel. So I will be trying to influence that with my team. The last thing I wanna leave you guys with before I open up for any more questions is why do people not do this? Why would you not prioritize with impact? Why would you not use logical criteria and make a decision and not spin forever? Why would you not stay transparent in the things you're trying to do? And why would you not pick things that are reasonable and decide how to improve the process? And why would you not do change management? Doesn't it make sense to have everyone aligned in the organization? A lot of reasons boil down to this one thing, which is we've always done it that way, that other way. It's really, really, really hard for people to break out of ruts. I recently read The Happiness Advantage, if anybody's read that book, and it said that people will get into this mindset that they are used to things being a certain way and they almost become helpless. And the example they gave, they did some sort of study where they had a group of people in 2 different rooms and an alarm was sounding in both rooms. And in one of the rooms, there was a panel where people touched a few buttons and they messed around with it for a little bit. The alarm went off. And in the other room, people could mess with the panel all they wanted. The alarm never went off. And then they brought the people— oh, so sorry, that was a mistake. We didn't mean to, you know, we're going to rerun this experiment. They did the same thing. And again, the first room messed with the panel, turns off. The second room messed with the panel, it doesn't turn off. Finally, the 3rd time they went in, mea culpa, did it one more time. We're going to run the experiment one more time. And this time they changed the panel. So that both panels would shut down if you mess with them. Turn on the alarm. The first room messes with it, turns off the pan— the siren. Second room just sat there. They listened to the alarm because they felt helpless. They refused to even try, right? And this happens in our psyche. We, we think we've tried and it's not worked before. For whatever reason, we're unwilling to try again. The way to get out of that is to get someone who's been there, done that. help you get out of that rut and develop some new ruts in some other way, right? Otherwise, you're going to be stuck in, we've always done it that way, indefinitely.