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What's the fuss about autonomy?

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Gino Marckx
November 23, 2022
Reading time: 3 min

It’s one of those words that come back over and over again in context of modern delivery approaches and organizational structures. The word seems common enough to mean approximately the same in people’s minds, however I have found that it is often confused for something else. According to Merriamm-Webster, autonomy is the quality or state of being self-governing. This distinguishes it from the term empowerment, which is the state of being empowered to do something. In other words, autonomy is an internal property - it comes from within -, while empowerment comes from someone’s approval.

Autonomous teams make their own decisions, they do it based on their objectives and all the relevant information they have available about the world around them. Empowered teams also are told to do exactly that. However, the scope of their decision making power - sometimes explicit, more often implicit - limits their autonomy significantly and can even shrink should a decision be made that does not align...

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Every impression is a first impression

September 15, 2022
Reading time: 2 min

Almost daily I receive at least one phone call from some agency wanting to sell their website building services, triggered by domain registrar information. I have developed a way to quickly get to the point and waste less than 30 seconds of my or the caller's time. I understand the caller is doing their job, I try to do mine. All is professional and we can both go on with our work.

Just this morning though, I was triggered... As I pick up the phone, I was greeted by "Can I speak to the business owner over there?", in a way that clearly demonstrated disdain for those picking up the phone. I could only respond "Over there?" and annoyed I put the phone down. No opportunity to quickly align on the purpose of the call, share our expectations and go on with our day. No opportunity for the caller to learn and improve. Definitely no opportunity for this company to ever sell any service to us.

First impressions rarely make a relationship, but they can definitely break one.

Relationships are built...

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We made it! Over the past several weeks, we’ve discussed the benefits of improving business agility and the obstacles that can get in the way. What have we learned? In good business agility fashion, here is a summary of the topics we’ve covered:

  • Business agility practices encourage building a learning organization.

  • The sooner you learn from your customers, the quicker you can verify you are on the right track.

  • People come first as business agility is first and foremost a shift in mindset.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the benefits and obstacles and tie everything all together.

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In the first half of this series, we talked about five benefits you can get from your business agility journey. Now, as we introduced last week, we are switching topics to talk about the first of five aspects that support you in your journey or will be barriers if not overcome. In this article, we’ll be exploring feedback loops, an essential element to business agility.

Big changes come from a series of small changes. Large transformative programs are too disruptive and take too long to produce results. To see the results of your series of small changes, you need feedback loops. Without them, you won’t be able to see if you are going in the right direction and course-correct as you go.

Feedback loops inform you of what is happening in your system of work. They tell your developers the impact of their changes, inform your product team what your customers are looking for, and tell operations where to focus. 

So what makes a “good” feedback loop? 

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Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about five specific benefits that Business Agility can bring to your organization. Among them are:

While Business Agility brings many benefits, implementing it effectively is a challenge. When adopting Business Agility, businesses are bound to encounter both internal and external challenges.

These challenges must be addressed if you wish to get the most benefits from implementing business agility into your organization. Below we discuss five of these challenges. We have also discussed these on our Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast. Let us take a look at these obstacles, and how to work through them. 

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