agile transformation – Visual collaboration lab

At the annual conference of La Fabrique de l’Agilité, we presented our last developments of our research in Agile Transformation: “Demystifying the Road to Agility with the Agile Culture Transformation Canvas”. The main purpose is to help people develop collectively and visually their agile culture.

Our key takeaways:

➡ Initiate a change of mindset where culture is no longer seen as a problem -a broad and nebulous catch-all term – but rather an essential and accessible constituent part of the agile transformation: it is its backbone.

➡ Acting on culture is possible

➡ Acting on culture is a way to counter the unwanted collateral damages of agile transformation

➡ There is no ONE and ONLY ONE agile culture: agile culture is co-constructed collectively and is specific to each group.

➡ Before acting on culture, it is essential to identify and understand the current culture.

🛠 To help people carry out an agile transformation, we have developed the ACTC : a tool that guides and supports teams to act visually and collaboratively on their culture 💡 .

“By now, agility in the company is no longer viewed as just hype or a trend; rather, it is considered an essential basis for future growth. This is particularly true during the COVID-19 crisis”.

This is the first key statement included in the 2020 Future Organisation Report (Peters et al., 2020, p. 36)

Agility is now being brought beyond the borders of IT, to an organisational level. This is what we call an agile transformation. An important barrier to such a transformation is the organisation’s current culture. In particular if it is « traditional ».

In a few weeks time we, as in Alicia Roschnik and Stéphanie Missonier, will be presenting a first paper (in a long series) concerning the building of crossable bridge, from a traditional to an agile culture. The paper will be presented at the Association Information and Management (AIM) conference. The bridge is being build in the design science research paradigm and follows the design theory for visual inquiry tools (Avdiji et al., 2020).