Be More Agile in 2016

As we embark on a shiny new year, many of us are resolving to be more of the people we know we can be and bring more of our best selves to our families, friends, communities and organizations. While the studies show a steep drop off in resolution success after the first week, and even more so after the first month, there is still value in taking the time to set new and aspirational goals.

One to the biggest values, in this annual ritual is that it is an invitation to take some time out to reflect on the year that was and notice when we felt most engaged, effective and fulfilled. These prompt questions may get you started:

• What were you doing during your peak experiences?
• How did you set yourself up for success? What support did you tap?
• How did you persevere through obstacles?
• How did you celebrate your successes and share the glory with others?
• And perhaps most important, what lessons did you learn that can guide your success in the year ahead?

If being more agile is one of your goals for the coming year, here are a few lessons from my own recent experience and reflections:

Be Intentional: Your best chance of success comes with making a conscious commitment to the practices that support agility. I outline many of these practices in my book, and find that I need to recommit to them myself each day. One of my coaches at a recent ski racing camp I participated in this fall regularly reminded us to set an intention or goal each time through the race course. The intention could be something we wanted to work on, do differently Julia Mancusoor experiment with. I noticed that this level of intentionality made a huge difference in my progress. The same carries over into our life and work practices. Set a new intention for agility as you walk into your next client meeting, idea generation session or learning experience, and see how much more effective you are.

Make a Mindset Shift (again and again): Agility is not simply a set of practices. These will have little sustained impact without first, second and last making the mindset shift to be open to new perspectives and learning for responsive action. This shift includes embracing your current context as fluid and preparing to be effective in the midst of change, rather than planning for the mythical stable future.

Cate cycling through Vietnam

Cate cycling through Vietnam

Seek out New Experiences and Perspectives. The best way to keep your resolution to be more agile this year is to leave your comfort zone and intentionally put yourself in new and unfamiliar situations that call on you to do, think and see things differently. This might be as big as traveling solo to an unfamiliar land, as my friend Cate Creede did (and beautifully described) recently. It could mean seeking out a stretch assignment, or new responsibility, or developing a new skill, language or perspective.

Notice. As you enjoy on your new, more agile year, you will gain the most from it, by noticing what you are experiencing as you experience it. When are you at your best? What new capacities and competencies are you developing? How is your confidence growing to think on your feet and tap your past experience in new and unfamiliar contexts? You might choose to jot your notes in an old fashioned notebook, like the one I kept during my racing camp, or use any number of apps, such as Evernote to record your insights on the fly.

Assess. One of the best ways to ensure your reflection leads to new insights and action, is to be thorough in assessing your agility in relation to your current context. To help people who are committed to making THE AGILITY SHIFT I developed the AGILITY SHIFT INVENTORY (ASI). I invite you to take it today (it is complimentary and only takes about 5 minutes) and receive a free Agility Shift Conversation and Catalyst Guide along with your results.

These are just a few suggestions to get you started. I will share more lessons learned and suggestions in future posts and encourage you to share your experiences, trials, tribulations and insights here, as well.

Here’s to your agile New Year!

Giving (and Receiving) the Gift of Agility

This holiday season as you begin to transition from the year that is wrapping up to the shiny new one that is about to begin, you will likely be making time for celebration. Hopefully you are also making some time for reflection, regrouping, restoration and re-energizing.

In the spirit of the season and all of the above activities, I offer you a few gifts you may want to consider giving to yourself and others. Each will go a long way in helping you and your friends, colleagues and loved ones stay agile and energized in your life and work:

  • Give the gift of a new experience or adventure. It might be as simple as a membership to the local art museum, botanical garden, experimental theater company
  • Or as grand as a hot air balloon ride, cross-cultural travel, or an outdoor adventure

Give the Gift of Adventure

  • Write a note of appreciation highlighting the ways your colleagues responded to the unexpected and unplanned or turned a challenge into an opportunity.

Give the Gift of Appreciation

  • Give the gift of an invitation to participate in a new volunteer experience that is aligned with your shared values

Give the Gift of a Volunteering

  • Give the gift of self care: a spa treatment, 10-pack yoga class card, gym membership

 

Give the Gift of Self Care

  • Give the gift of time and resources to:
    • join or form a community of practice
    • attend a conference or professional development opportunity
    • develop a new idea, business relationship, product or service prototype

 

These are just a few ideas to get your creative wheels turning. However you choose to celebrate and co-create the season and the year ahead, remember like fitness, your ability to stay agile and engaged requires the gift of your continuous and generous attention.

Visibility is Overrated

Top of Excelerator Lift, Copper Mountain - why visibility is overrated

Top of Excelerator Lift, Copper Mountain

This past week I had a new adventure as a first-time participant in the Peak Performance Ski Racing Camp run by top international coach Dave Gregory at Copper Mountain, Colorado. I’ll share the story of how and why I came back to ski racing in mid-life another time, but did not want to delay sharing a few of the cross-over lessons that stood out most as I get back to my life in Chicago.

Not surprisingly, with my attention laser focused on all things agility at the moment, skiing in general, and ski racing in particular, are proving to be a rich field (slope?) for new metaphors and fresh perspectives.

The skiing conditions during the first few weeks of November can be iffy in the mountains. Some years there is barely enough snow to open a few runs (and even then with liberal dustings of artificial snow). This year, aided by El Nino, we had several dumps of fresh snow—not the gentle atmospheric snow, but the piercing, side-ways blowing snow that makes you feel like you have landed on another planet when you get off the lift at the top.

 

Visibility is Overrated

As we camp participants gathered at the top of our Giant Slalom course a few days into the camp, a dense gust of falling snow swirled around us, obscuring all but the first gate or two of the course. One of Dave’s coaches, Shawn Smith, heartily called out “Visibility is overrated!” and without allowing for a shred of complaint or resistance, shifted to giving us each just the counsel we needed to focus our next run through the gates: “widen your stance,” “quiet upper body,” “steeper edge angles at the top of the turn,” “activate your ankles” and/or “get your legs out from under you.”

When it was my turn to slide into the makeshift starting gate, I realized the lack of visibility might actually be a gift. Of course, I couldn’t articulate much about that gift until I ran the course several times and had collapsed back in my condo, exhausted and exhilarated from a day of learning and stretching my physical limits at 11,000 feet. Here are a few thoughts.

When we can’t see very far ahead we are invited to, and perhaps have no choice but to, be present to our bodies. This means we can only attend to what is really going

The Author Skiing into the Abyss - why visibility is overrated

The Author Skiing into the Abyss

on right here in the present moment. And in that present moment, inside our bodies we respond with our whole body, being and heart.

I quickly realized what our coach meant. In reality, visibility (the ability to see) only gives us an illusion of control. The illusion that if we can see farther ahead we will be able to plan and not have to worry about what is happening in the present—our physical sensations, messy emotions, intimacy with ourselves and others, responding to the unexpectedly changing terrain, because we can simply just follow the plan.

Readiness is All

In ski racing, every racer is given the chance to (and virtually required to) inspect the course before taking their first run. Sometimes this involves “slipping the course” in a snowplow and/or slipping sideways through to smooth ruts and widen the brim of snow on the outside of the turns, at others it means skiing along side of the course on the outside. Some people have the ability to memorize the course after one inspection. This is not my strong suit. At best, I hope to remember where the trickiest turns and ice patches are. But every racer knows that by the time it comes to your run, the information you gathered during your inspection may well be old news. While the gates will be in the same place, a new rut or ice patch has developed where there wasn’t one before. Or you may become engulfed in a snow squall or wind gust in the midst of your run that no one can plan for. The good news is that when you are prepared, when you enter the starting gate with strength, flexibility, balance, and a reasonable level of skill and tactics, you only need to see as far as the next gate so that you can set up the arc of your next turn, sometimes while simultaneously recovering from a less than perfect turn on the previous gate.

Action is only possible in the present moment.

                                                  —Christian Noss

In life and in our organizations we sometimes can’t even see as far ahead as the next gate, let alone know what lies around the next turn. We can, and often do, inspect the terrain and go ahead and make our plans, but we lock in on those plans at our peril. As soon as the plan becomes an invitation to become comfortable, to abandon our whole person experience in the present moment, we lose our ability to effectively respond to the unexpected and unplanned, and to learn continuously. We also lose our ability to expand our confidence and competence in our capacity to be effective when we can’t see around the next gate.

For me on the race course, this means inspecting the course, setting my intention (with a little help from my coaches), then trusting my readiness and ability to respond in the moment. It also means knowing that falling (we call it crashing in ski racing) is not the end of the world (more on that in a future post).

Agile Organizations are Fit Organizations

With the change of seasons from summer to fall, my attention shifts from the flatlands of Chicago that I call home to the mountains of Colorado and the start of ski season. I recently reclaimed this beloved sport from my youth after a few decades-long hiatus (first due to lack of funds while working in the arts, and later succumbing to the challenge of rustling up interested friends to join me on the adventure). Today, I not only have recruited my wife and a few hearty friends, but joined a local ski club that offers me many opportunities to ski all season.

Author Pamela Meyer

Author Pamela Meyer

Even more than the skiing, I have fallen back in love with Alpine racing, a sport that all but ruled my life as a teenager growing up in Iowa (yes, I was a ski racer from Iowa, and that is another story altogether). Returning to racing in mid-life I can confidently say that Lindsay Vonn’s records are safe. And while each race lasts only 30-45 seconds and, at most, a race day will include four races, reclaiming my identity as an amateur athlete has had a positive impact well beyond my success in any individual race, race day or ski season—To be prepared for those races and ski season, I am motivated to maintain my fitness and agility throughout the year to be competitive.

Life-long physical fitness is characterized by strength, mobility, flexibility, stamina and balance (Nagasaki, Itoh, & Furuna, 1995), of course, with a healthy mix of rest and recovery. While, for me, those short races are a blip on the wider landscape of the ski season, not to mention my day-to-day life, to be able to negotiate the literal twists and turns of the race course, the unexpected patches of ice, the rut that wasn’t there the last run, I must arrive in the starting gate fit and agile. The same holds true for your business. While many of your day-to-day responsibilities or operations may be routine, you must always be prepared for the unexpected and unplanned, as well as constantly scanning the environment for new opportunities and challenges. To do so, consider how the characteristics of fitness translate to your organization. Could your organization pass a fitness test in each of these areas?

  • Strength (do you know your strengths and consistently build on and leverage them?)
  • Mobility: Are you and your workforce able to move with the needs of the market?
  • Flexibility: Have you developed the competence and capacity to adapt when things don’t go as planned?
  • Stamina: Have you built systems, processes and a culture that supports sustained success?
  • Balance: Does your organization have access to a diverse network of skills, knowledge, talent and resources to respond to opportunities and challenges as they arise?

Just as physical fitness is not attained simply by purchasing a gym membership, or working out with a trainer for a few months, organizational fitness requires a sustained commitment in each of these areas.

•••••

Nagasaki, H., Itoh, H., & Furuna, T. (1995). A physical fitness model of older adults. Aging, 7(5), 392-397.

Learning Agility: What? So What? And Now What?

In the 21st century we find ourselves in the midst of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty Complexity and Ambiguity). The term was originally coined by the United States Army War College to describe changing conditions on the battlefield. It is now widely used as the acronym for the reality of everyday life and work.

To be effective in changing contexts, we need to develop new capacities and competencies. Perhaps the most important of these is Learning Agility. In this short blog post, I will introduce the concept (What?), comment on its importance (So What?) and share a few ideas for how you can begin to develop your own and others Learning Agility (Now What?).

What?

Learning agility is the ability to learn and adapt in changing contexts (Mitchinson & Morris, 2012). In their study of more than 190 executives’ significant learning experiences, Management researchers McCall, Lombardo and Morrison (1988)identified the key to success within a complex organization: the ability to manage something new without having to master it first (p. 34). Learning agility is not simply the ability to think on your feet, it is the ability to access and apply lessons learned in one context to another.

So What?

It turns out that being competent, even excellent, in your current role is a weak predictor of your potential for success in a new, more challenging role. In fact, according to research published by the Corporate Leadership Council (2005), only 30% of an organization’s current high performers have the potential to rise to and succeed in broader, senior level, critical positions. A 2010 study by the Korn/Ferry Institute identified learning agility as the top ranking predictor of leadership success, while estimating that only 15% of the workforce is “highly learning agile” (De Meuse, Dai, & Hallenbeck). Perhaps most important for organizational leaders, learning agility is an essential component of organizational agility, which is proving to return significant bottom line benefits for those who make it a strategic priority (Glenn, 2009).

Now What?

Realizing that learning agility is essential to organizational success, managers and learning and development professionals are starting to make it a key strategic priority. Learning agility is not something easily acquired in a classroom, though formal learning that is particularly timely is more likely to be transferred into practice. A few steps you can take to maximize the value of formal training (for yourself and others) for learning agility include:

  • Think about your current work/life challenges and identify skills, knowledge and capacities that would help you be more effective.
  • Prior to formal learning experiences, identify your personal learning goals (these may differ from those described in the course materials). Ideally, share these goals with a colleague or supervisor before you participate in the formal learning.
  • Keep a learning log to make note of key insights and particularly relevant lessons, as well as questions and topics for future exploration.
  • Within a few days of the learning experience meet with your colleague or supervisor and share your learning and what progress you made toward your learning goals and discuss how you can implement/experiment with your new learning. If possible, create an opportunity to share your learning more broadly with colleagues via a brown bag lunch, company newsletter or blog post.
  • Experiment with putting your new learning into practice and reflect on your results.
  • Repeat.

We can all take more responsibility for seeking out new formal and informal learning opportunities that expand our skills and knowledge and increase our effectiveness in new roles and contexts. Not all learning opportunities are created equal. Research shows that learning experiences that have the most significant impact on learning agility are those that are “emotional, require risk-taking and have real-life consequences” (De Meuse, Dai, & Hallenbeck, 2010, p. 121). These can include:

  • Stretch assignments that challenge people to work outside of their comfort zone
  • New Leadership Roles, especially those that expand on the scope of prior experience
  • Living/working in a new culture
  • Reflecting on Lessons Learned from both Good and Bad Bosses
  • Mentoring/Coaching, to help people seek out new learning opportunities and mine those experiences for lessons learned

These are just a few places to start developing your own and others’ capacity for learning agility. As you think about your own work setting, consider ways in which you can take responsibility for your own learning and development, and help others do the same.

De Meuse, K. P., Dai, G., & Hallenbeck, G. S. (2010). Learning agility: A construct whose time has come. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 62(2), 119-130.

Glenn, M. (2009). Organisational agility: How business can survive and thrive in turbulent times: Economist Intelligence Unit.

McCall, M. W., Lombardo, M. M., & Morrison, A. M. (1988). Lessons of experience: How successful executives develop on the job. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Realizing the full potential of rising talent. (2005). Washington, DC: Corporate Executive Board: Corporate Leadership Council.

Four Keys to Creating an Agile Organization

Just because you can hit a tennis ball, doesn’t mean you can win a game.

four keys to creating an agile organization - Pamela Meyer - Agility Expert

Many of us weekend warriors know that our brilliant rallies with the backboard, don’t always translate to a stunning performance on the court. The same is true in our organizations; having the skills and knowledge (competence) for agility does not necessarily mean that you and your organization have the ability to put it into action in the midst of volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) situations (Stiehm and Townsend, 2002).

For an organization to be truly agile it must develop the capacity at all levels of the system to enhance and sustain agility. Leaders can assess their systems, processes and frameworks for their current capacity for agility, and enhance them for maximum responsiveness. Here are a few places to start, along with some provocative questions to ask:

  1. Systems and processes to convene a team of experts to respond effectively to an unexpected event or opportunity. Does your organization have a strategy to use existing technology to easily search for and assemble people based on their expertise and experience?
  2. Systems and processes that enable agile communication and collaboration. Do you have the capability to swiftly communicate with the right stakeholders in the midst of a fluid situation and/or high priority collaboration
  3. Frameworks to quickly develop new products and services (Rapid prototyping). Do your employees across job functions and business units know where to take a new product or service idea and how to move it smoothly from inception to execution? Does your organization have the capacity to rapidly prototype a new product or service in response to an emerging need or opportunity?
  4. Streamlined organizational structure and decision-making processes. Research shows that organizations that have minimal structure necessary for their specific business are more able to improvise (Moorman & Miner, 1998). Does your organizational structure and decision-making process enhance or impede agility?

With systems and processes that enable rather than impede responsiveness, organizations have a foundation for agility. This “agile infrastructure” alone will not ensure individuals, teams and the entire organizational system is agile, only that the infrastructure will not be part of the problem. Organizations that are confident that all of their employees can and will respond effectively to the unexpected and unplanned also invest in developing, reinforcing and rewarding individual and team capacity to improvise to meet the changing needs of the business and its customers.

 

Moorman, C., & Miner, A. S. (1998). Organizational improvisation and organizational memory. Academy of Management Review, 23(4), 698-723.

Stiehm, Judith Hicks, & Townsend, Nicholas W. (2002). The U.S. Army War College: Military education in a democracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

 

This post by Pamela Meyer originally appeared on meyercreativity.com/blog 

Three Lessons from and for Agile Teams

“If you want to understand organizations, study something else,” Karl Weick

SWAT Team_dreamstime_xs_18800265

 

An agile team is one that can learn, adapt and innovate in the midst of change, using available resources. And the best way to make the Agility Shift is by learning lessons directly from successful Agile Teams.

There is compelling research to support the business case for making agility a strategic organizational priority. A study of 649 firms by MIT’s Sloan Center for Systems Research found that agile firms grow revenue 37% faster and generated up to 30% more earnings per share (Business agility and IT portfolios, 2006). The reasons for increasing agility are clear, but most leaders are less clear on how to enhance agility in their own organizations.
Lessons learned from successful agile teams in high stress, high risk circumstances, such as SWAT teams, film crews (Bechky & Okhuysen, 2011) and fire fighters (Weick, 1993) show us that agile groups and organizations have both the required competence and capacity to thrive in a VUCA world.

Here are three lessons from and for agile teams that you can implement to improve your organization’s agility to respond to anything that comes your way.

 

1. Continuous Learning

The ability to quickly become aware of, assess (and often re-assess) new information in real time and regroup (including the capacity to drop prior plans, agendas and preconceptions as they become obsolete) and respond to the situation at hand is essential to agile teams.

2. Fluid Communication

Agile organizationsFilm Crew_dreamstime_xs_25247256 - three lessons from and for agile teams have open channels of communication across job functions and levels of authority. Critical new information can emerge at any level of the system at any time and those who receive or perceive the data must be have the confidence and competence to share it with the appropriate stakeholder.

3. Context

I have written extensively about the value of playspace (2010) in creating space for innovating, learning and changing. Playspace is the serious business of creating the context where people are free to play with new ideas, play new roles, create more play in the system and engage in improvised play to be effective in any situation. This is not the funny hats and games type of playspace; it is about creating a context where people do not feel constrained to respond in the moment to an urgent customer or business need because it is not in their job description.

Agile organizations require leaders who understand that agility is a key competitive advantage and who align their learning, development and business practices to develop and sustain. Lessons from high-risk teams can inspire us to action. Sometimes it is helpful to raise the stakes by conducting a thought experiment and ask ourselves, “What if our lives depended on our organization’s ability to be agile?” When we raise the stakes, we often discover capacities we didn’t know we had.

 

Bechky, B. A., & Okhuysen, G. (2011). Expecting the unexpected? How SWAT officers and film crews handle surprises. Academy of Management Journal, 54(2), 239-261.

Business agility and IT portfolios. (2006). Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, Sloan Center for Systems Research.

Meyer, P. (2010). From workplace to playspace: Innovating, learning and changing through dynamic engagement. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4), 628-652.

 

This post by Pamela Meyer originally appeared on meyercreativity.com/blog 

Reclaiming Play (at Work)

[Reprinted with permission from DePaul Workplace Learning blog]

If you are like most of us, you likely got the idea along the way that work and play are incompatible. Work is serious, focused and productive while play is silly, unfocused and unproductive. This belief was socialized into us from a very early age with parents and caregivers who shooed us away when we attempted to recruit a playmate with “Not now, honey, can’t you see I’m working?”

Pamela talks about putting more play into work in this recent First Business Interview

As it turns out individuals and organizations that chose not to believe that work and play must live in separate domains are thriving. Google, one of the most successful businesses of all time, lists on its website one of the “Top Ten Reasons to Work at Google”: ‘‘Work and play are not mutually exclusive: It is possible to code and pass the puck at the same time.’’

Google and many other organizations embrace two forms of play:

—   Diversionary

—   Engaging

Diversionary play is when we take a short break to play a game, stretch, participate in a contest. This type of play refreshes and energizes us, while building social bonds that are crucial to getting work done. Research also shows that when people return from diversionary play or short warm-up activities they are more creative and engaged (Conti, Amabile, & Pollack, 1995).

Engaging Play is when the work itself becomes a form of play. People are playing with new ideas, enthusiastically playing new roles, creating more play (flexibility) in the system and developing the capacity for improvised play. This form of play can come to life in a committee meeting, over coffee with a colleague or even working solo. The most important thing is that you are giving yourself permission to explore new ideas and perspectives and doing so from a place of intrinsic motivation.

Each of these forms of play reinforces the other. When we regularly take play breaks we return refreshed and energized to approach our work more playfully and creatively. When our work is a form of play, we are likely to enjoy diversionary activities with our colleagues and continue to build a culture of innovation, learning and change.

Conti, R., Amabile, T. M., & Pollack, S. (1995). The positive impact of creative activity: Effects of creative task engagement and motivational focus on college students’ learning. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 1107-1116.

Reflections on the Co-creative Process: Giving, Getting & Taking Permission

Reprinted From SNL Writing News: Writing information for DePaul University’s School for New Learning faculty and staff

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

SNL faculty member & author, Pamela Meyer, discusses her latest book Permission: A Guide to Generating More Ideas, Being More of Yourself and Having More Fun at Work

1. What inspired you to write this book?

I discovered the power of permission during my research on adults’ experiences learning to improvise, and which I wrote about in my last book, From Workplace to Playspace (Jossey-Bass, 2010). Improvisation initially feels very risky for most people and when someone (or several people) help co-create a safe, dynamic space for risk-taking, the chances that real learning and transformation will happen greatly increase. When people feel they have permission via someone else taking a risk and not being ridiculed (or even receiving positive feedback), a wonderful shift starts to happen: people start generating more ideas, being more of themselves and having more fun (which is why we made this the subtitle of the book). This concept extends to all areas of adult life, especially at work, where we often gauge our behavior based on the social cues around us. We may hear people talking about the importance of risk-taking, playing around with ideas and being authentic, but unless people actually see the behavior in action, they may not feel they have actual permission to do so.

The concept of permission and the role of the permission-giver resonated a lot with readers and workshop participants as I traveled the country talking about the book, as well as with, graphic facilitator, Brandy Agerbeck (with whom I have collaborated often over the years). Brandy is very interested in giving people permission to draw and to explore their capacity for visual thinking and communication. After an initial informal conversation to play around with the idea of the book, we decided to meet to brainstorm a long list of permissions we sometimes need to remind ourselves to give, take and get. These include permission to be silly, use our whole bodies, question, take a break and many more.

2. Permission was a collaborative effort with graphic facilitator Brandy Agerbeck. Can you tell us a little bit about the co-creation process?

After brainstorming our initial list of about 35 permissions, Brandy and I met a few times to discuss the dimensions of each permission and help each other think as playfully and expansively as possible about each of them. This served as inspiration for me to begin writing and Brandy to begin playing with various images that reflected and/or evoked each permission. While we each worked to our strengths (me, writing and Brandy, creating the images), we chose to call ourselves co-creators, rather than the more traditional titles of author and illustrator. We felt that separate titles didn’t fully honor how we worked together, which was very collaborative and co-creative. We soon discovered that Amazon does not have the option to list yourself as a “Co-creator”, so you will see us both listed as authors, which doesn’t accurately reflect our collaboration either. We are clearly breaking new ground here.

3. What was your process for writing, revising, and editing this book? For example, did you work with an outline, did you experience writer’s block, did you have outside reviewers, how long did it take, how many drafts, any major changes to organization/structure of the ideas/sections?

In terms of our individual processes, I call myself a “turtle” when it comes to writing. I like to write very first thing in the morning, at least five days a week, though often I only write for 30-45 minutes. I gave myself a quota over the summer of drafting three permissions a week. Every Friday I would send the week’s writing to Brandy, who would read the permissions, make notes to provide feedback, and begin working on the images. If I am a turtle, Brandy is more of a rabbit in her work process. She likes to work in bursts, so would often wait until she has 10 or 12 images to start working on and then hole up in her studio to work on her drafts. We would then meet in person go through our drafts, each giving the other feedback and continuing our brainstorming, which would send us back to work on the next iteration individually. Along the way we shared sections with trusted readers for feedback, and also decided to cut a few of the permissions that either seemed a bit redundant, or just didn’t excite us as much as the others.

I can’t say I experienced writer’s block per se, because of my discipline to write every morning. Just like exercising when we don’t feel like it, or going to work when we might rather be doing something else—writing is a discipline. I would sometimes move on to work on another section of the book, if nothing was coming to me thinking about the section in front of me, and I always wrote something each day. We continued this iterative process through to the end of the summer and by early September agreed that we had a solid draft of the book. At this stage we moved into production mode.

4. What made you decide to forgo the traditional publishing route and use self-publishing?

There were two main reasons we chose to self-publish this book 1) Speed to publication and 2) Creative control. My first two books were represented by agents and published by major publishers. These were generally good experiences and certainly useful in building my credibility as an expert in the field of creativity and organizational change. At the same time, with traditional publishing, there are a lot of other stakeholders in the process from the agent, who wants to choose a publisher who offers the biggest advance (not always the best choice for any given book) to the marketing department, who may have the final say on your title and cover design (which might have little to do with the actual contents of the book) and list price. Brandy and I had a very clear vision of what this book would look and feel like, as well as our target audience. We did not want to get caught up in convincing others of the value of our vision, nor did we want to slow the process down. If we had gone with a traditional publisher, we would likely be looking at a publication date of up to a year later than when we were actually able to get the book out. We both wanted to have it out quickly to build on the momentum of the Workplace to Playspace readership and also to have it out in time for holiday gift-giving. By self-publishing via Amazon’s CreateSpace service, we were able to control all of the creative choices, the cover price and the timing.

5. What specific publishing services did you use from Amazon? Would you self-publish again? If so, would you purchase any additional services, or do without any of the services you used this time?

We were lucky to have between us many of the competencies necessary to take the book from conception through to publication. I had a lot of knowledge about the overall production and distribution process and Brandy had the skills and talent to do the full layout with images, design our cover and properly prepare the pdf document for uploading. We did pay for light editorial services to catch typos, unintended word repetition, etc.

We would both definitely consider self-publishing again. If I were not working with someone with a design background, I would consider using their design services, and would definitely use the editorial services. Both were more cost-effective than hiring these separately from outside vendors, and we were happy with the overall quality and efficiency of the process.

6. Do you have any words of advice or tips for aspirant writers?

Writing Advice: Think of writing as a discipline. Don’t wait for inspiration or until you get the perfect writing space, your house is clean, or you get one more credential. Pick a topic and write.

My two cents on publishing: Before you decide whether or not to self-publish or to explore traditional publishing, you need to be able to answer the question: what do I hope to accomplish with this book? If your primary goal is to get something out quickly to a target audience with whom you already have a relationship, self-publishing may be your best option. If you really want the additional credibility and visibility that comes with a mainstream publisher, and are willing to let go of some control and are patient about the time it takes, consider an established traditional publisher.

As you make your decision, pay attention to how the publishing and bookselling industry is changing. More people are shopping for and buying their books online, as opposed to in bookstores than ever before. Many also prefer e-books, which is why we were sure to have our book converted to Kindle. Book buyers are making decisions based on word-of-mouth marketing, price and convenience, more than the name of the publisher. If you have a great marketing plan, strong social media presence and a good reputation in your field, self-publishing may be for you.

What Enables Organizations to be Agile?

what enables organizations to be agile

Agility is perhaps the most essential capacity for organizations today. A recent study by MIT showed that agile organizations grow revenue 37% faster and are 30% more profitable than non-agile companies (Glenn, 2009).

So what enables organizations to be agile?

The two most salient factors influencing organizational agility, according to a comprehensive review of research done in the field (Bottani, 2010) are:

1.    Employees role and competency in the company

2.    Technology: Virtual enterprise tools and metrics and the adoption of information technology systems

What does this mean for your learning and development strategies?

Confidence and Competence Development.  Every organization must have an explicit strategy to help individuals, workgroups and entire divisions develop the capacity to effectively improvise in response to the unexpected and unplanned, as well as to spot and respond to emerging opportunities and trends. This involves more than improving communication and resource sharing, though these are also key. It means providing significant experiential learning opportunities for individuals and groups across sectors to develop their competence and confidence in thinking on their feet, acting in the moment and effectively drawing on all available resources—human, material, technological and intuitive.

Technology Infrastructure. Agility also demands that all organizational participants have the tools and resources to quickly access the organization’s knowledge network and relationships. A simple knowledge management system is no longer sufficient for agility; individuals need to be able to quickly access the people and capacity of the organization, not simply search decontextualized bits of data.

Research also shows that people need more than just awareness and access to their knowledge networks; they need relational connections and context to effectively use the network (Cross and Parker, 2004). Learning and development approaches that combine the development of social capital, along with awareness of and access to the wisdom and experience of the network are thriving. Creating a technology infrastructure that provides the stability and flexibility for responding to emerging opportunities, along with enhanced confidence and competence in improvisation is an unbeatable strategy for creating the agile organization. New technology like Artificial Intelligence can go a long way in meaningfully contributing to building this learning and development infrastructure.

What strategies are you using to enhance agility in your organization?

Bottani, E. (2010). Profile and enablers of agile companies: An empirical investigation. International Journal of Production Economics, 125, 251-261.

Cross, R., & Parker, A. (2004). The hidden power of social networks: Understanding how work really gets done in organizations. Cambridge: Harvard Business School.

Glenn, M. (2009). Organisational agility: How business can survive and thrive in turbulent times: Economist Intelligence Unit.