Without Focus, Agile teams are as helpful as Ashtrays on a bicycle.
Yet most Companies invest in:
More People
Working Faster
Motivating Employees
Coaching Delivery Teams
These don't help when you have the following:
10 executives with new ideas every all-hands
17 signoffs we need to change anything
Unknown results of previous projects
42 projects, all marked super urgent
No common goals across teams
Drowning in dependencies
Your ongoing restructure
200 maintenance tasks
7 change initiatives
Creating a MONUMENTAL lack of clarity.
Team Performance hardly matters when you're drowning in work.
As Senior leaders, only you have the influence and power to fix this initially.
Stop looking at the teams.
Instead: Zoom out
1. Use Flight Level 3 (Strategy) to create Focus on the key aspects of your Strategy.
2. Use Flight Level 2 (Coordination) to sequence your Initiatives. Create Focus that coherently deploys your Strategy, and leaves space for feedback and learning.
What are your company's main inhibitors of flow?
Which level would offer the most leverage to address them?
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PS, Understanding the need for Focus is usually easier than doing it in practice. That's where Habits are needed to sustain our efforts. We can nudge human behavior toward more effective patterns.
PSS, The image is what Midjourney thinks of "Bicycle with an Ashtray"
