Tips To Maintain Agility After The Crisis
This article was written by Dr. Steven Wolff, author of Inspired Teams, a team-based survey featured on Comparative Agility. The article was first published here.
Many organizations have “accidentally” become agile. Organizations that were slow to change before the pandemic rapidly adapted to the new business environment. I believe these accidentally agile organizations have always had the ability to be agile but unconsciously chose to lock it deep away and keep it closely guarded; the current crisis freed it. The pandemic has created a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn how, under normal conditions, your unconscious choices work against agility. Understanding this provides learning that will help you lead your organization to become more agile as well as maintain the agility you may have discovered as a result of the crisis. In this article, I explore: Why agility emerged in this crisis and how to sustain this newfound ability.
Organizations are forced to exercise agility
According to a 2019 survey by KPMG[1], 67% of executives are concerned with increasing the agility of their organization. They recognize that success in a volatile business environment requires the ability to be resilient and quickly adapt to changes. Although the desire to increase organizational agility is there, 79% of those surveyed indicated their company’s ability to become agile was lagging[2].
Despite the difficulty of increasing organizational agility under “normal” conditions, the current pandemic has shown that organizations are capable of agility under crisis conditions. One obvious shift we are seeing is the rapid adoption of virtual work. Organizations that once required employees to work in their corporate offices quickly pivoted and now allow employees to work remotely. Interviews for prospective employees, including executives, are now done online; workshops that were delivered face-to-face have shifted to a virtual format, and even gyms and yoga studios have shifted classes online. These and other innovative adaptations are happening quickly during the pandemic. Given the right circumstances, people in organizations have tapped into an innate ability for agility. Under normal conditions, this ability is difficult to access; it seems that organizations are designed in a way that results in people keeping this innate ability under lock and key. Why?
Why is the ability to be agile typically kept under lock and key?
A transformation to greater agility can evoke difficult emotions [3]. As an organization becomes agile, people may need new competencies, familiar and habitual routines are disrupted, and there is much uncertainty about the new direction. All of which can create strong emotions such as anxiety and fear. Unfortunately, the role of emotion is often not recognized because the organization’s emotional capability[3] is low. Emotional capability is “an organization’s ability to acknowledge, recognize, monitor, discriminate, and attend to its members’ emotions and it is manifested in the organization’s norms and routines related to feeling.[3]”
During normal times, people in organizations characterized by low emotional capability instinctively act to reduce anxiety associated with becoming more agile. There are many options to reduce anxiety, all of which are unconscious choices. For example, leaders can downplay the need for organizational agility, rationalize “it won’t work here,” go through the motions but not do the difficult work of changing the organization’s Being, try to adopt new practices alongside old routines, and many more. These options, called defensive avoidance, are selected because the organization’s emotional capability is low and in this context, human beings are driven to make decisions that reduce anxiety. These choices have a terrible side effect; they serve to keep the innate ability to be agile under lock and key.
When the pandemic hit, the options were reduced to one, change or die. This made the anxiety of doing nothing much greater than the anxiety of doing something. The least emotionally threatening choice was “we have to do something.” Notice, organizations that pivoted when there were no other options tapped into an ability that was previously dormant. If this sounds like your organization and you want to avoid putting that newfound ability back under lock and key as the pandemic subsides, the next section provides some tips.
How to maintain your newfound agility
There are two main things you can do to maintain your ability to be agile. First, build your organization’s emotional capability; second, lower the anxiety associated with change. The following 5 tips will help you do these.
Increase Emotional Capability
You have a terrific opportunity to examine your organization’s capability to encourage an understanding of the emotion involved with agility. The greater the understanding of the source and consequences of emotion in the organization, the more receptive people will be to making change and trying new things. Try having the following discussions. You might start with the leadership team and then each executive could have a discussion with his or her team.
1. Examine prior beliefs about the changes forced by the pandemic: Anticipating future consequences of a decision elicits emotion. Beliefs about the future cannot be verified in the present but when we act as though they are fact, it can lead to decisions that perpetuate the status quo; this is often the most comfortable choice. The pandemic provides a unique opportunity to examine beliefs in the organization; being forced by the pandemic to pivot, created a natural experiment that allows you to test your beliefs. Take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity. To build emotional capability, leaders need to hold discussions that examine the underlying beliefs that created anxiety and kept the organization from taking the action that the pandemic forced. Which of the beliefs provided accurate predictions; which did not? What emotions did the beliefs evoke? What decisions were driven by those emotions? How can you make sure that decisions in the future are not driven by untested beliefs?
2. Build empathy for feelings after the pivot:
Examine the emotions people are feeling after the pivot. When leaders empathize with feelings evoked by the change, it builds the organization’s emotional capability. For example, managers likely feel a loss of control; it is important to understand the emotions this evokes and the choices driven by these emotions. The pandemic provides a perfect opportunity to become aware of what people go through when they experience change. Understanding this can help ameliorate the anxiety associated with taking a risk to try new things. Building empathy within the organization will help people be more receptive to discarding old habits and more likely to create breakthroughs. Ask how people are feeling. Ask them to explain their experience as the organization pivoted.
3. Examine what is better, what had to be let go of, and what got worse:
After the organization pivoted, some things likely got better, some things had to be let go of, and some things likely got worse. For example, you might have found that allowing people to work at home increased productivity, required that the organization let go of the tradition of face-to-face meetings, and made the social aspect of being in the same location worse. Examining what unexpectedly got better is a way of testing your beliefs (see #1). Letting go is an important part of any change. Recognizing what has to be let go of supports the associated grieving process, which increases the emotional capability of the organization. Recognizing what got worse and taking action to ease the situation shows empathy (see #2) and increases employee receptivity to trying new things in the future. For example, some organizations realized that working at home severely reduced the social aspect of being co-located; in response, they created virtual pizza parties. This reduces the anxiety associated with change by sending the message that when things get worse the organization will learn and address the situation; as a result, employees will be less invested in the status quo.
Lower Anxiety
The second way you can help increase the likelihood your organization will maintain its newfound ability to be agile is to lower the anxiety of trying something new. The following two strategies will help you do this.
4. Create Stability:
Paradoxically, when facing change, you need to create a sense of stability. When being asked to change, people need something to anchor them, something that provides consistency. What remains stable is the organization’s purpose and identity. To remain agile when the crisis ends, you can strengthen the organization’s identity to create a heightened sense of what the organization stands for. You can also strengthen the culture so it better facilitates productive processing of emotion. Frameworks such as Team Emotional Intelligence[4] or its sister framework, Inspired Teams, can help you create such a culture. If you don’t currently have an inspiring mission statement, it is time to begin crafting it. Make sure the organization’s values are clear and used to inform decisions. Who are you as a company? The more the statement of who you are includes your ability to be resilient, learn, make mistakes, and create breakthroughs, the more you are likely to remain agile.
5. Experiment:
The organization has likely adopted practices that were previously thought unworkable; yet when forced to pivot, people found a way to make them work; a breakthrough was created. One powerful technique to elicit this innate ability and create breakthroughs is to use the word experiment. This is a “magic” word that reduces the emotional threat of a change, especially if at the same time, you make it OK to fail. When an idea is presented, no matter how unworkable it feels, allow people with energy to experiment and prove you wrong. An experiment implies that you are waiting to see the outcome. If the idea does prove unworkable, you will revert to the status quo. On the other hand, if the idea succeeds, you have just created a breakthrough; think sticky notes.
Conclusion
The pandemic has brought out the innate ability of organizations to be agile. Yet, many organizations have kept this ability under lock and key. The crisis limited choices to one, pivot, or die; this presents us with a once in a lifetime opportunity to explore the factors that, under normal conditions, lead to choices that reduce agility. Leaders who take this opportunity to hold discussions that foster reflection will build their organization’s emotional capability and consequently the ability of the organization to remain agile. Don’t miss this opportunity.
References
[1] KPMG (2019). Agile or Irrelevant: Redefining Resilience. https://home.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/br/pdf/2019/05/br-global-ceo-outlook-2019.pdf
[2] Business Agility Institute (2019). The Business Agility Report. https://businessagility.institute/download/2019-business-agility-report/?wpdmdl=4492&refresh=5ebafc63e76321589312611
[3] Huy, Q. N. (1999). Emotional capability, emotional intelligence, and radical change. Academy of Management Review, 24(2), 325–345.
[4] Druskat, V. U., & Wolff, S. B. (2001). Building the emotional intelligence of groups. Harvard Business Review, 79(3), 80–91.
