At the start of 2012, who would have thought Kodak, the market leader in cameras, would become bankrupt before the end of the year? Or Nokia would soon lose 90% of its market share and become obsolete in the mobile phone market? There are numerous such examples. The common thread is the inability of these companies to cope with change. Kodak failed to understand the disruptive impact of digital cameras and continued with analogue cameras. Nokia could not see the coming of Android smartphones and continued to promote its legacy OS.

Industry 4.0 has increased the velocity and intensity of such disruptive changes. News that is just weeks old seems ancient. Recent developments such as digitalisation, remote work, and Artificial Intelligence make transformation inevitable.

Successful leaders visualise the changes made inevitable by external developments. They gather resources quickly to leverage emerging opportunities. Embracing agility enables them to cope with change effortlessly. 

Organisational agility identifies emerging threats and opportunities. It allows digital leaders to align resources quickly and streamline processes continuously. The continuous improvement approach co-opts change management as part of everyday work.

Embed change into the way of working

In today’s business world, change is constant, unpredictable, and non-linear. Businesses can no longer predict changes as before. The intensity makes traditional measures to cope with change unworkable. Enterprises have to alter their business and work models in double quick time to:

• respond to changed customer needs, 
• cope with talent availability, and 
• withstand other shocks the environment inflicts on the business. 

Successful leaders embrace change agility. They no longer consider change as a one-time project. Instead, change becomes a continuous and iterative design activity embedded in enterprise action. 

Conventional change is top-down and leadership driven and focuses on business goals. Change agility is bottom-up and driven by employees who focus on the effectiveness of the work. The leaders support such initiatives. Conventional change management follows a plan. It adopts a project management approach with few big changes. Change agility is iterative. The leaders make many small increment changes in real-time along the way. 

IT leaders who inculcate change agility always remain ready for change. They:

• Promote a learning organisation and set continuous improvement as the progress benchmark. Team members stay up-to-date on industry trends and emerging technologies and remain prepared to adapt to new changes.
• Build flexible frameworks that make changing work processes easy. 

Foster a culture of experimentation and innovation

Today, technology is a level playing field. The critical differentiator comes through innovation. Rapid external changes make companies scramble to innovate and gain first-mover advantage. But innovation involves a lot of trial and error. The process is lengthy and resource intensive. Also, nine of ten innovation initiatives fail. Such a resource-intensive and low-return classical innovation model is not viable today. 

Agile leaders promote better innovation. They:

• Enable agile innovation through optimal utilisation of assets. 
• Promote iterative development and testing of ideas to keep costs and resource consumption low. Quick prototyping of viable ideas adds value to the customers.
• Create a fail-safe environment that facilitates rapid innovation. 
• Promote a culture that celebrates risk-taking and considers failure as a learning opportunity.
• Establish a system for team members to document mistakes. The wider team can learn from these mistakes during future experiments and innovations.

Empowered teams

Enterprises devise systems to optimise their resources. But such systems may not create customer value, especially in today’s disruptive age. For instance, many customer support systems make customers go through hoops before connecting them to an agent. 

Optimisation of resources makes sense in self-contained stable systems with defined cause-effect relationships. Enterprises with stable systems are not resilient or adaptable to cope with today’s destabilising changes. By the time they reorient their systems to cope with the new realities, nimble competitors take the customer away. 

Agile leaders focus on optimising the value stream to ensure customers get products at the right time, with the desired quality. 

Agile places the central focus on the customer. For instance, in a customer support setting, the workflow design starts with what is most convenient for the customer. The process design works backwards from such an ideal state. 

Placing the customer first requires empowered teams to rise to the occasion and make quick decisions. Agile leaders empower their teams by: 

• Setting up systems that provide all stakeholders with an end-to-end view of the customer value stream.
• Offering autonomy and empowerment combined with peer accountability and sensible guardrails. Leaders establish trust by demonstrating confidence in the abilities of team members. Team members get autonomy to make decisions and take ownership of their work.
• Listening to team members. Often front-line and customer-facing staff have more insights into the practical nuances of things. Such insights are worth much more than the best conceptual understanding or theoretical models. A collaborative environment makes team members comfortable sharing ideas and solving problems. 
• Providing constructive feedback to help team members strive for continuous improvements.
• Ensure work teams have the tools, technologies, and training to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.

Overcome resistance to change

Resistance to change is one of the key drags that make digital transformation stillborn or a non-starter. About 70% of change initiatives fail outright due to employee resistance.

The rank-and-file employees, who must embrace the change, do not support it owing to the disruption they face. Even a few employees uncomfortable with doing something different can stonewall potential developments.

IT leaders who embrace agility can overcome resistance to change better. The agile approach focuses on getting the work done without waste. IT leaders who embrace agile:

• Identify and break up bureaucratic structures that prefer status-quos. Streamlining workflows reduces time-to-market and makes the work processes dependent on fewer individuals. 
• Introduce unfamiliar situations more frequently to make the workforce comfortable with uncertainty. Often resistance stems from unfamiliarity and shock, and constant exposure makes the workforce competent to deal with such situations.
• Set up cross-functional teams. Cross-functional teams promote transparency and collaboration and also end uncoordinated silos. Often, silos and lack of information drive resistance to change. 

Agility is much more than consulting and certifications such as Scrum or Kanban. Effective IT leaders inculcate agile as a culture and apply it in the proper context to make changes friction-free.