Agile values and principles – which ones can help you address the current crisis issues

Agile is defined as a set of values and principles. You may have heard that “being agile” is more important than “doing agile”, which means that it is important to first understand and truly live the agile values and principles before implementing any specific agile framework. Any well implemented and well-practiced Agile technique or framework is simply a practical application of the agile values and principles.

At Faster Horses, we put a lot of emphasis on helping others to understand the importance of the agile values and principles. We focus a lot on building an agile mindset before introducing any specific agile techniques and we believe that the correct agile journey starts with “being agile” before “doing agile”.

In this article, I reflect on the business agility values and principles (extended version of the agile values and principles which take into account the specific needs of the wider organization, not only software development) with the objective of sharing some specific examples of how these values and principles can be used in the real world to address your day to day challenges. I specifically thought about the challenges many organizations face right now during the covid-19 crisis.

From 6 values and 12 principles that we work with in our context, I picked 6 specific principles that I believe are the most relevant and practical to address some challenges and issues that many organizations face right now.

Our highest priority is to help our customers succeed

The customer or the end user defines the true purpose of our organizations. Keeping your customer in the centre of attention has always been important. Right now, it is even more important, because your customers’ needs have shifted (and most probably will be shifting) quite significantly due to covid-19 crisis. This means that our products and how we sell them need to evolve too. People purchase much more via online channels, cannot travel, are much more worried about their health, etc. All of these and many more factors impact how consumers make purchasing decisions.  

The best way to find out how your customers’ needs are shifting is by asking them directly. This can be done in many different forms – looking at customer purchasing and usage data; asking customers via online or phone surveys; reaching out to them via video calls, etc. Once you collect data from your customers, make sure you use it to adjust your products and services. It may require bringing in innovative solutions (ex. digitalizing your products) and thinking outside of the box (ex. testing a brand-new product or service you did not offer before). Adjusting yourself to your customers’ needs and showing ability to look for ways to remain relevant even during these challenging times is one of the ways to survive a crisis and bring in new successes.

We welcome change as a source of competitive advantage

This is a time of big changes – in all areas of our lives. And we still don’t know how exactly the “new” world will look once the biggest wave of change is over. There is literally no one who isn’t or won’t be facing some kind of change. That is why this principle is so crucial. We cannot ignore the change. We need to embrace it and accept it for what it is. That is the only way that we will be able to turn it into new opportunities which can bring us a competitive advantage or a new type of success.

One of the biggest changes most of us and many businesses face is that we have to stay and work from home. Many businesses – especially in retail, hospitality and many service providers – had to close their shops and facilities. That change is very impactful, and it is hard to see how it could potentially be used to one’s advantage. However, being forced to shut down and work from home allows us to use that time meaningfully and reinvent how we do things. We should be using this time to talk to our customers to understand how we can best serve them remotely (ex. many small shops started to sell their products online, family restaurants started to deliver food to people’s homes; hairdressers started to deliver hair products to their customers). We should also think about how our customer base may change and who we need to start attracting (ex. there will probably be more domestic tourism than international this year, so hotels may need to adjust their offers and prices to that). And there are many more aspects that every business needs to think about. However, we can only do that, we can only reinvent ourselves, if we embrace and accept the change for what it is and look for ways to turn it into opportunities.

Experiment and learn rapidly to deliver increments of value early and often

This principle and its importance are linked to the previous examples. Right now, there are many open questions and very few answers. Simply, there is no one who can say with certainty how the “new world” after covid-19 will look like. The importance and practicality of experimentation is huge. We don’t really know which one of our new ideas (e.g. introduction of new products, new services…) will actually work in the “new world” and it is very probable that many of them won’t work. The only simple and safe way to understand if these ideas will work without wasting a lot of time and resources is by experimentation and rapid learning.

Let’s take one of the previous examples to explain better how the experimentation and rapid learning can look like in the real world. For instance, imagine you are a hairdresser who suddenly had to close their salon. You are open to reinventing your business and come up with a few innovative ideas – for instance that you will start selling vouchers directly to your current customers, and via your Facebook page. However, you are not sure what kind of vouchers and for how much to sell. You decide to test it. You prepare a first version of several different vouchers with several different price points and you send them to a group of your customers to ask them for feedback. You also start selling them via your Facebook page. You realize that you spent relatively little time and resources in developing this new idea, and now you are receiving rapid learnings from 2 different customer groups. You may find out that these vouchers sell well within your current customers base, but they are not attractive to customers that don’t know you yet. You experimented and learnt rapidly, you took a very small risk and now you can evolve your original idea or develop another one.

Build teams of motivated individuals. Create a safe environment, encourage risk taking, and trust them to get the job done. The best business results emerge from self-organizing teams.

From one day to another, most of the people had to completely change the ways they were used to working. Work from home has become the new standard – something that has been discussed and tried in different forms for years and something that many companies said “we would never do”. The pressure on the teams and their health is high. People are juggling many different personal and professional responsibilities these days.

If you are a manager or leader of any kind of team (or teams), you should think about how to pay more attention and spend more time making sure that your team(s) have the right support and environment to maintain good performance. It is possible that you as a leader don’t want to encourage risk taking right now, but you need to help your team(s) to feel that they can express their concerns freely (psychological safety), stay engaged and motivated and self-organize as much as possible.

My colleague Nick recently wrote a great article about the importance of psychological safety, where he included several practical tips on how to practice it.

Deciding what NOT to do is essential

We keep hearing and reading about the VUCA world (VUCA is an acronym that stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations; it is a theoretical concept that many say became reality during covid-19 crisis).

The “volatility” element of VUCA means that there are ongoing and quick changes all the time. The impact this has on our work is that we need to re-prioritize, and course correct frequently. It means that what was a high priority yesterday, might not be a priority today. One of the principles of good and quick prioritization is not only deciding which are the most valuable actions that we need to take, but also looking at the other extreme and deciding what not to do.

This principle can be practiced in any context, in any kind of organization of any size, and within any kind of team. When a new priority comes in, when you get together with your teams to look at what next priorities you need to be working on, you simply ask a question “Is there anything in our backlog / on our to-do list that can be removed? Are there any activities that we believe don’t or won’t bring any important value to what we need to focus on right now?” and then you decide together what it is that you won’t do. This discussion is also important when, as an individual or a team, you come up with 3 new ideas, but you only have time/resources to work on 1. In such case the questions you need to ask are “Out of these 3 ideas, which one we believe will not bring enough value to our end customer? Which one of these 3 ideas are not the most urgent or critical?”. These are simple ways that will make your prioritization process easier and smoother.

Reflect and adapt behaviors on a regular cadence to become more effective

This principle of continuous improvement is in a way pulling all the previous principles together. It provides good and necessary practice to ask for and reflect on our customers’ feedback and input. It becomes very crucial in experimentation and rapid learning. It is more than important in order to maintain and improve team health. It is the most important principle that provides us with a simple but very efficient way of improving and moving forward.

In order to reflect and adapt, one of the best tools in Agile is the use of Retrospectives. There are 2 important points about Retrospectives: (1) The objective of a Retrospective is to come out with at least 1 action that will lead to an improvement, (2) Hold them on a regular basis so that you as a business, an individual or a team have a platform that allows people who collaborate with one another to provide each other with feedback and suggest new ways of carrying out their work. Retrospectives follow a well-defined format and can be used to reflect on any kind of topic, challenge, or learning. You can use them to reflect on the experiment you just ran; on an issue that occurred within the team; or simply just to reflect on the past month and what learnings and improvements we can draw from it.

Are there other ways how these agile principles could be used to address current challenges? Is there any point in this article that you found particularly interesting and would like to discuss further? Make sure you let us know in the comments!