Illuminating Insights: Evan Leyborn on Business Agility and Value Creation

Illuminating Insights: Evan Leyborn on Business Agility and Value Creation 

In this inaugural episode of Illuminating Insights, host Trisha Hall engages in a captivating discussion with Evan Leyborn, co-founder of the Business Agility Institute. They delve into how companies can achieve genuine value by being agile and customer-focused. 

Evan shares real-world examples, including transforming a bank's lost credit card process and innovative citizen engagement in city budgeting. The conversation also explores the essential skills for leadership, the challenges of organizational structures, and strategies for effective change management. Tune in to gain insightful perspectives on driving business agility and creating value for customers.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction

01:43 Challenges in Achieving Customer Value

04:10 Case Study: Bank Transformation

06:18 Customer-Centric Strategies

07:53 Empathy and Community Engagement

12:22 Leadership and Management Skills

15:17 Change Management and Organizational Constraints

21:41 Path Changes and Business Agility

36:10 Final Thoughts and Conclusion

About Evan Leyborn
Evan is a thought leader and pioneer in the business agility space as well as the co-founder on the Business Agility Institute—a fiercely independent research & advocacy organization for the next generation of companies. 

As the Head of Advocacy and Thought Leadership at BAI - Evan leads research initiatives, collaborates with corporate members on their stickiest business challenges, and shares insights and aha's to accelerate business success - no matter what the future brings.

Evan is also the author of Directing the Agile Organisation (2012) and #noprojects; a culture of continuous value (2018), as well as numerous BAI publications.

Connect with AgilityHealth for more insights on how to accelerate value realization through high-performing teams. Find us at:

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Transcript

0:11

Hello, and thank you for joining us today for this episode of illuminating insights. I'm joined today by Evan LeBourne. Evan is the co founder of the Business Agility Institute, a fiercely independent research and advocacy organization for the next generation of companies. Companies that are agile, innovative, and dynamic, perfectly designed to thrive in today's unpredictable markets. As the head of advocacy and thought leadership at BAI, Evan leads research initiatives, collaborates with corporate members on their stickiest business challenges, and shares insights and ahas to accelerate business success, no matter what the future brings. Evan is also the author of Directing the Agile Organization, published in 2012, and Hashtag No Projects, A Culture of Continuous Value, published in 2018, as well as numerous BAI publications. Evan is also a personal friend of mine, so thank you so much, Evan, for making the time to join us today. Always, it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Tricia. And so, and Evan is joining us from down under, and so getting the time zones correct was always a dance, but it's always, always worth spending the time with Evan. Uh, well, it's always worth it. And, uh, I do love Australia, but, uh, we are in probably the worst of all possible time zones. Well, you know, I've had to coordinate calls with Singapore as well. So that, you know, Sometimes getting up in the middle of the night for us so that we can be in the daytime for friends in Singapore can be worth it. I live in Singapore. So I, I, I'll grant you that 1 to so Evan, um, I sent you some questions just to get us a little bit started. Because one of the things that we really want to talk about on our podcast is leadership, how we're helping our organizations achieve value. And the business agility Institute, you talk with leaders and help organizations all the time. So I'd love to hear your perspective on how companies are achieving value and well, actually, are they achieving value? Broadly speaking, yes, um, but the, the, the hesitation there is in what do you mean by value? Uh, organizations do and achieve what they believe is valuable. Organizations are generally designed to, uh, the, the systems, the, the, the dynamics of the organizations are designed to amplify the What is valuable to the founders or to the owners or to the shareholders? Now, where that becomes somewhat problematic is where that value is then disconnected from the customer and what the customer perceives as value. So it's, it's, Quite challenging. And we see this with a lot of organizations where the, um, how the customer engages with them, how the customer interacts with them, both from a product or from a service standpoint is, uh, is shaped by the internal bureaucracy of the organization, not shaped by how the customer actually wants to engage. And that causes tension and obviously customer dissatisfaction. Um, so. Broadly speaking, it's a big question, but yes, customers are creating value, but not as many companies are sorry. Yes, companies are creating value, but not as many companies are creating value for their customers as should. So how do we solve for this? What? What are the best organizations doing out there when you see them actually creating value for their customers? So in large part, it's about like fiercely championing the customers, about putting the customer at the center of your strategy. I know that sounds like a motherhood statement and in large part it is, but there are some very practical elements that show up here. So there was a large bank in Asia that, uh, I did work with over a lifetime, like 10 years ago now, and they had this, uh, this transformation that was that they were undertaking, and it was like a process reengineering. They wanted to improve their customer satisfaction scores because they were one of the lowest rated, uh, banks across Asia Pacific at the time, and they made, uh, they picked a singular process. The, the lost credit cards process. It was taking a week to get that replacement card out. So they, they took their time. They looked at the process and I won't go through all the details because that's a half hour story in its own right. But eventually they got it to the point where through changes to customer service, through changes to the internal processes, they could, uh, someone could call up and say, look, I've lost my wallet. Um, and they'll go great credit cards in the mail. You'll have it that day or the next day. Great service, great improvements. And as far as the, the, the bank numbers or the bank KPIs were concerned a huge success, but then they did something that they've never done before, and they actually called up a customer. And they said, so madam, you've been through our lost credit card process. What do you think? And they went, it's fantastic. It was great. Where's my debit card? Because she hadn't lost a credit card. She'd lost her wallet, but because of the way the banks were structured, you have all of these functional or like product silos, so you've got the credit card. You've got the core banking business. You've got the, uh, wealth business, the insurance business, or the life insurance business, the health, all of these lines of business. And they don't talk to each other, but from the customer's perspective, they don't care about your lines of business. They don't care about your structure. Right. She'd lost her wallet. And this, for this organization was, uh, uh, aha moment where they realized that. How the customers engaged was independent of how they were, or should be independent of how they were internally structured. So that triggered down a path of, like, building, uh, uh, structured around customer journeys and customer experiences. Um, but whilst that's an example, I think the, the, the lesson here is to be. Very deliberate around how the customer experience, the journey that you want to create and that you want to, uh, uh, incentivize or that you want to, uh, promote and make that the easy path. Make that the way that customers can engage with you rather than necessarily forcing your customers to engage. With the organization, the way the organization wants to be engaged with. Um, cause the truth is that your competitors are already doing the good part. Um, and, uh, if you want to stay in business in five to 10 years, you kinda have to listen to the customer. It's interesting. I'm listening to, um, a book by Daniel Pink and he actually just talked about this in the chat in the chapter is that, uh, some of the best companies. When they're having conversations and planning strategy, they're leaving an empty chair at the table to represent the customer. And I remember, um. An organization that I was at a decade and a half ago, we actually had a chair at the table, but it had a T shirt on it that said customer. Well, I'm going to go one step further and probably you bring the customer into that chair. Um, I know it's shocking. Um, there, there's a, uh, the city of San Jose, I think it was, forgive me if I'm getting the, the, forgive me if I'm slightly wrong there, but I think it was the city of Jose was doing what they called budget games where they were building out their city budget and they brought citizens into a thing that was like an aircraft hangar and from all walks of life. All socioeconomic backgrounds, all areas across the city, and they're sitting them together as a 100, 200 people. I forget the exact number and the citizens basically prioritize the city budget rather than the city going and figuring out themselves. And so you have these people in, like, high socioeconomic areas saying we need better footpaths, sidewalks in it. In America, um, uh, you have people in lower socioeconomic areas say we need better policing and, and, and protection and like, it ends with these two women sort of hugging each other, like, like learning and building empathy for each other, understanding what, where they're coming from. Now, the city didn't take the citizens. Budget plan and apply it is like that had to go through their own internal processes. They had to go through say, well, these are commitments that we've made. These are contracts that we've made, but these are fixed, but they could use this sort of budget prioritization coming from the citizens to actually say, here is where we are going to apply this. The city budget, and it was like, you, you want community consultation. It was the most consultative, the most engaged citizenry from a, from a, uh, uh, government, or certainly from a local government that I've seen. So, having an empty chair that represents the customer is good, but actually bringing the customer in is probably better. It takes a step beyond the focus group. Actually, that is a good point. It's it's it's what this city did wasn't a focus. Well, I mean, technically, it probably was it with classes of focus group, but it was at a scale beyond the yes, we're going to do a survey of 15 people kind of thing. These people created the budget. These people prioritized. This is where the city should spend their money. And as a collective, as a group, right? 100, 200, 300 people. I forget how many it was. They're the ones who were sort of saying. Here's the plan, um, which is more than just the, uh, a survey that goes out saying, what would you like? And sorry, that's actually a key point because it's about trade offs. Um, the, you send out a survey, a focus group saying, do you like this feature? It's like, yeah, I love that feature. Well, yes, I definitely want that feature. Um, but. As a business, you have to make trade off decisions. You can't create everything. You can't do everything. So if rather than having the citizens or the customers saying what they would like, like a focus group would do you like this? Do you want this? You're getting those customers to actually provide input into the tradeoffs themselves. And I think that's actually one of the critical pieces here. Well, that's what I was thinking. It probably created a great deal of empathy for the process. That's the leaders of that city had to go through as to how do we choose? How do we decide? What's more important? Is it more important to work on infrastructure for, you know, the, the sidewalks in the streets in the parks, or is it more important to provide police and fire and those types of things? Heavier in 1 part of the city than another, how, how do we justify both or what? And how do we balance it? Because it is a balancing act and companies have to face that as well as they're looking at how do we. Resource different parts of organization do we put more resources into potentially call centers to be able to answer customer questions or to be able to do training or those types of things? Or do we spend. More in building out our product and when buying features and those types of things, how, how do we balance all of that? Because we've got a finite amount of of resources in which to be able to invest in our company. And, and you spoke at the beginning about leadership, and I would say this is a very under invested in skill in leaders. So, uh, just to step back for a second, broadly speaking, and we do research, we're a research organization, um, uh, One of the studies that, that we have looked at, we didn't do this research, but one of the sites we looked at said that 56 percent of new managers receive no training. So there is, uh, globally, uh, sort of an underinvestment in developing the skills of leaders and developing the skills of managers and, and, and I'll use the word managers very explicitly. And I think we should be. Reclaiming the word manager, uh, it's, it's become a dirty word. It's it's the, the pointy head boss from Dilvert or Michael Scott from the office or, or William Lumberg from the office space, um, it's, it's, it's create the idea of a manager and popular culture is evil at worst incompetent at best, whereas reality is, and we know this, that, that the role of a manager is vital. People don't leave bad companies. People leave bad managers, your manager defines your experience. It is, or a large percentage of your experience in your employment. But one of the skills in management that is under. Uh, under trained is teaching managers how to create trade offs. Uh, it's, it's, it's, and, and quite often organizations, uh, have a culture where managers kind of abdicate or, or, or avoid, uh, These decisions, making these decisions, they will force decisions into committee or by consensus. They'll bring everyone into a room and say, let's just plan this out and so forth. And so get like, like 15 leaders in a room to make a trade off decisions. And it's important to get consultation. It's important to get those leaders inputs into it. But ultimately at one point, At some point a manager, someone in this organization has to make the decision. Are we gonna do A, or are we gonna do do B? Right? Or how much A and how much B.'cause you're not gonna get a hundred percent of both. And it's uh, it's a skill. It is a difficult skill to get right and this is where agility comes in.'cause you don't always get it right first time. You have to be able to inspect and adapt. But it is very much a skill that has to be developed in leaders worldwide. So how, how do we, how do we change this tide? Because, I mean, we've, we've talked in the agility world for years about the frozen middle. Uh, we've, With self organizing teams, we've taken away, you know, some of, some of their, um, prescribed, uh, jobs of they don't have to fight fires anymore. They don't have to do the day to day organization. So how, how do we, how do we start to change this tide of we've got managers that aren't trained and aren't sure how to do the work? So I'm going to give you two answers. So in the first part, when we look at managers themselves, I think it's, it's. Recognizing the reality of human nature quite often. Uh, uh, when, and let's talk about organizational transformations, we want to create a particular culture, a particular set of behaviors in managers, in leaders, in everybody. And we design this beautiful approach, but it would work wonderfully. If these pesky people weren't in the organization doing all the things that the pesky people want to do with all of their messy biases and preferences and everything else. Um, I like to say politics is the currency of human systems. We talk about reducing the cost of change. But if we don't reduce the political cost of change, change will never actually occur, not sustainably and not effectively. So it's, it's very much, or the first part of this is recognizing that there are That an organization is a collection of people with their own interests and biases and expectations and creating change approaches that are. Simultaneously highly personalizable, as well as obviously generalized because you do want some kind of collective movement. You want to, you want the mob of the company to move, but you're going to do so by moving individuals, which is difficult. And in fact, it is incredibly difficult, but it About the only way you're going to get any kind of sustainable change, but that's kind of where the second point is, um, one of the things that we've been doing a lot as the business agility Institute is to look into change management and change leadership practices, modern change leadership practices. And one of the ones that we've kind of hooked into is from a paper by heights in 2006 and popularized by the Heath brothers in 20. 12, I think, forgive me, uh, the book called switch, um, and it's called the elephant rider path. Now, as a model of change, it primarily looks at, um, human change, um, uh, habituation, like creating, uh, like, like, like you want to go to the gym every day. You want to lose weight. You need to change your behaviors. We've kind of taken this and applied it at an organizational construct. And so the way that I think of it broadly, um, is think of the, Body of your organization as the elephant, right? It's big. It's emotional. It follows its needs and it wants, um, it's not necessarily rational, um, in, in the purely logical sense of the word, but it acts towards its own, uh, protection and its own survival as well as acting towards the, the goals that, that it wants. The executive function is the rider. That's what makes the decision. That's what says, um, we want to go left. This is where we want to steer the organization, but I don't know how many people that have actually ridden an elephant, but that's a very hard thing to do. Elephants very much go where they want to do. If there are two paths ahead of you, right? The rider can say, go left. That's fine. All right, but the elephant is not going to follow the instructions of the rider if it is uncomfortable. If it is difficult, or if it's not what the elephant wants to do, which is where the path comes into play. And so, uh, one of the things that we are very, um, uh, uh, focused on is the importance of path changes. Yes. There are ways to, to change the elephant. Yes, there are ways to change the rider and those are relevant and those are both relevant and important. But if you're going to create. Uh, effective behavioral change across an organizational system. The only way you're going to do that is by creating a new path ahead of the elephant. Uh, Laura Powers, the CEO of the Business Agility Institute. talks about using the judicious use of friction. You want to make the thing that you want to happen easy and you want to make the thing that you don't want to happen hard. And unfortunately, most organizations, the governance, the operations, the procedures, um, create, uh, apply friction on the things that we do want, right? The, the, it makes it difficult to, to make decisions. It makes it difficult to do your job. Because most organizations are over governed, over restricted, the bureaucracy is too great. Bureaucracy in governance is good, just it has to be balanced with what it is that you want to try and achieve. So, this path making is, I would say, one of the most important perspectives, or, sorry, the most important skills that you need. Organizations have to develop if they want to create new behaviors, new ways of working, new ways of thinking, and they actually want to bring like value to their customers effectively. Such a great perspective. And when an organization decides that's something that they want to do, how could they get started? See, that's where it's challenging because each organization is slightly different. Um, we don't talk about a framework for business agility, mostly because that's not possible. Uh, I can create a framework for a process because a process is simple or complicated. I can document it. I can describe it. I can then copy someone else's. process and apply it to my organization, change the interface points and adapt certain things necessarily. But I can do that. Your budgeting process looks probably somewhat similar to our budgeting process, your software development process. Probably looks somewhat similar to our software development process. Your marketing process is probably much better than our marketing process. I, and we could learn from that and we could bring it to our organization, right? With appropriate context setting, but an organization is a complex adaptive system, right? You cannot document it. By the time you finish documenting it, it's changed. And in fact, the act of documenting it changes it. And so the idea of creating a framework for business agility in this complex adaptive space is just, it just doesn't make sense. So, um, What's important here is that you can learn from other organizations and learn what other organizations are doing, but your organization is fundamentally unique in its configuration, and it's unique in time as well, because your organization tomorrow is different to the organization today. That's the complex adaptive system elements of it. Now, uh, that makes the question, where do you start difficult to answer? Because the answer is Honestly, um, it doesn't, your organization is going to have some constraint to agility. And it is that constraint that is, I think the most important, uh, factor here. And if we think about, uh, theory of constraints, Eli Goldratt, which says that in any process, There's a constraint. And the corollary is that there's always a constraint. So if you release one constraint, a new constraint will emerge. So if you're building cars and it takes five minutes to install the engine, four minutes to install the wheels, no amount of transformation on the engine team is going to improve the throughput of that engine. of those cars off the production line. The corollary says that if you do transform the engine team, get that down to three minutes, then cars are going to roll off once every four minutes, because the constraint has moved from the engine to the wheels. With apologies to Eli Goldratt, Evan's Theory of Agile Constraints, an organization is only as agile as its least agile part. And this is where a lot of organizational transformations fail, because they focus on the constraint. Great, fantastic, they put all this investment, transformational investment, in transforming technology. Brilliant. They've got all that in place and it's working really well. And three years later, they're still transforming technology, right? And then executives change, right? They go out, transformation ends. A couple of years later, new execs come in. Oh, we need to improve technology or we need to improve agility. They transform technology again, but the constraint moved away from technology probably within the first 12 months. And so the transformation reaches this point of diminishing returns and we see this all the time. So the where to start question is you start at the constraint today, being mindful that the constraint will move and that you need to move with it. Now, whether that constraint is. Your, your software development processes or your marketing processes. Maybe the constraint is how, uh, it's around the psychological safety of the organization. Maybe the constraint is in the leadership capabilities. There's going to be a constraint to agility. Somewhere and that's where you've got to start and it's very difficult for anyone who's not you in your organization to say that's the constraint we study companies like we do behavioral profiles specifically to help organizations understand where their constraint is. That's why we do research. That's why we study companies, but it's it's ultimately when we study a company, it's your insights. Transcribed That tell us, or that let us tell you where the constraint is. Uh, we just make that a little bit easier, but ultimately nobody knows. You cannot copy verbatim what another organization is doing or where they started and assume that that's going to work. It might work, but that's going to be. Luck rather than anything else. And that makes a lot of sense. I mean, when we were doing full scale transformations, we could say, okay, here's, here's where we can start based on experience and with other. Organizations in your industry, but we're going to have to create a custom pathway for you based on your particular organization, your goals, where you are today. And what you want to accomplish because no transformation is the same. The 1 thing that I would add, and this sort of goes back to what I was talking about in terms of elephant rider path is that path changes tend to be relatively simple. Um, they do not require, uh. Huge, huge transformational effort. Um, sometimes they do, but things like changing from approval based governance to audit based governance, changing how you define measures, right? So that you have outcome or impact measures rather than just purely output or work measures. Uh, it's, it's, it doesn't require restructuring into squads and tribes. First, sometimes that will come because obviously one of the other, uh, elements is, is like handoffs, how many handoffs within the system. And so sometimes your structure is actually your structure becomes the constraint, but it is very rare for structure to be the first constraint. Um, which is why when a lot of organizations start with this organizational restructure, um, The problem is that because they haven't released the current constraint, they restructure, right? It doesn't really make a big difference and maybe it makes a small one, but by the time they do release the constraint, The design principle behind the structure is no longer valid, or perhaps was never valid, um, but that was hidden because the structure was not the constraint in the first place. It's not the first thing you should have done. So it's, it's, I think the one piece of advice here is think about what is the smallest Biggest change that you can make that will create that sort of, uh, path change to the organization. So the elephant changes itself, uh, or, or follows the path that you want them to follow. Um, but yes, your point around like, like you can learn from others and, and you customize what you call the, the, the transformational pathways absolutely spot on. Well, and your comment about organizations changing their structure. That's 1 of the things that that I'm hearing a lot about, and I'd like to get your perspective on, because it seems like every time I get on the phone with a company or an organization, um. 75 to 80 percent of the time. Lately, I'm hearing about some sort of restructure and I don't think that we can keep up with this rate of change and still see positive effects from it. And I'd love to hear your feedback on that. Uh, okay. Rate of change is like, that's a. We could spend 30 minutes on that topic alone, because change fatigue and, and resilience is, is an important topic, but to just to stick with the structure part for a second. Um, I think there are 2 things to be mindful of. So the 1st is, uh, If an organization, if the goal for an organization is cost takeout, right. Which is a very politically sensitive way of saying we're going to fire 20 percent of our staff, right. Um, if that is the goal, right. And that can be a legit, like companies need to make some of these decisions that rubbish decisions, they're horrible. They suck people lose jobs, right. But companies sometimes have to make those decisions. Right. Okay, if that is what has to be done, wrapping that within a sort of an agile or a business agility wrapper is disingenuous. So, so let's separate those two concepts. If it's cost takeout, redundancies, then yes, sometimes you're going to need to do that, right? Move that to the side. If we are talking about operational effectiveness, if we're talking about productivity, if we're talking about flow, one of the, uh, what I would consider to be like the key or one of the, the, the, the most important measures. Of business agility is the number of handoffs in a system. So if the, if you measure or map out the flow of value, the number of times from idea to customer, it has to go between teams or go between silos or functions. Each of those is a, uh, uh, well, it's, it's a waste. It's a delay. It's, it's, it's, it's a, you're, you're leaving one queue and entering another, and there's all of these handoffs. There are. Quality issues. It's a, it's bad for a number of different reasons. The, the ultimate goal of a, of a good structure is to reduce the number of handoffs within the system. Now that requires a clear understanding of how value flows from ideation through to customer. And it also requires a little bit of creativity. In things like, uh, support functions, so compliance or security, are they on the critical path? Are they doing work? In which case, there may not be enough security or enough compliance people for a dedicated person in every, in every unit, tribe, squads, Sell team, whatever you want to call it. Um, so yeah, so there's still going to be some handoffs, but other organizations are looking at that going, well, they don't need to do the work. Maybe security is around education and audit. But the team is responsible for doing the work, in which case there's no handoff. It's an audit check rather than a, okay, now it's with you to do a piece of work and we have to wait for you to be ready. So there's a number of different ways or strategies that handoffs can be taken out of the system, um, not just purely putting everyone into a single team, but ultimately the goal should be to reduce handoffs. Um, or as many handoffs as possible. Well, that doesn't necessarily need to come with. I'm going to change your leader. I'm going to change all of these things around you. We're just going to. Look at how value flows through the system, but to your point, if the company is in a place where they need to do cost reductions, that should not be wrapped in to, uh, we're going to bring in a new way of working, regardless of what we're going to call it. Now, the argument, and there is some validity to this argument, is that if you have semi autonomous, empowered teams, you have the governance systems and structures that enable them to do the work as self contained as possible, then there are roles that are no longer required. Um, I, like, I call them mailmen, or postal workers. It's like, it's like If your job is to carry information from team A to team B, I, uh, like a project manager, for example, it's like your job is coordination and, and, and making sure that everyone knows what to do. If I have a semi autonomous team that, that owns a product or a thing, and we have very few handoffs, then those coordination information sharing roles are no longer, or not as many are required. So there is a legitimate. case to be made that some of these roles may change. Doesn't mean that someone has to get fired. I mean, the roles can, they could take on a different responsibility, but we don't necessarily need as many things like of a particular type of person or a type of role as we, as an organization has had in the past. Um, now organizations, make the mistake often by assuming we don't need as many means we don't need any. So they go and lay off an entire class, entire role, because again, secretly they're trying to reduce costs by 20%. But what happens is they realize, oh, we actually did need some of them. So they start hiring them back in, uh, 12 months later, um, but the leader who has made their KPIs because they reduced cost by 20%. So everyone was happy and the fact they had to rehire them. Well, that's just business. Sorry. That's next year's problem. That's future me's problem. Well, no, no, no. It's not future me's problem because me, I, as the executive who did this, I've probably already left. It's future. Whoever is in my roles problem. I, um, I've got my bonus. I'm, I'm doing something else now, probably doing the same thing to the next company. Um, But yes. Oh dear. Oh dear. But we're not cynical. We're not cynical. Evan, as we wrap up today, any, any final thoughts you'd like to leave our audience with? Uh, no, just be mindful that, uh, for those of you in, in organizational change roles, just be mindful of looking at the organization as a system, a complex adaptive system, and to not look at change as a predictable linear. Uh, we're going to do these big things and that's going to change everything. Think about it in terms of, Small path changes. And for those of you listening, who are leaders, just be very mindful of the skillsets and that you may not have been given, may not have learnt, and that's not a criticism of you as a leader, but rather the system in which you operate within is quite possibly not been effective at giving you the skills you need to be an effective leader, but it's on you to Uh, to improve those. So this is, this is an exciting time to be in. And, uh, I wish everyone the best of luck. Those are some great thoughts. Thank you, Evan, so much for spending some time with us in your morning. I appreciate it. And thank you all for listening to this episode of illuminating insights.