Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile can be combined to support the core values of Digital Transformation says Jutta Eckstein
Jutta Eckstein is an independent coach, consultant, and trainer from Braunschweig, Germany. Her focus is on enabling agile development on the organizational level. She has a unique experience in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects.
Jutta has published her experience through 4 books. She is currently co-writing (actually pair-writing) with John Buck a book on Company-wide Agility. This book focuses on synthesizing Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agility.
Jutta is also the Program Chair of the Agile India 2018 conference. She will be speaking on the Business Agility day on The Wizard of OSS: The Magic of Open Space and Sociocracy for Business Agility and on digital transformation day on Beyond Agile – Preparing for Digitalization. She will also be conducting a post-conference workshop at #AgileIndia2018 titled “Surviving and Creating Change”
To learn more about the talks and workshops at Agile India 2018 Conference please visit https://2021.agileindia.org/schedule/
Jutta spoke to the Agile India team on a wide variety of topics including how the conference is shaping up and her thoughts on digitization and change management.
How is this year’s conference shaping up? What are the focus areas?
I can report that we have this year an excellent speaker line-up. The program is really impressive and I’m looking forward to yet another excellent Agile India conference.This year’s conference focuses on Agile and beyond by addressing the main challenges companies face today. We decided this year to follow a theme-centered approach with excellent support by key experts in the respective fields. One example is the Design Innovation Day that is hosted by Cooper and keynoted by Alan Cooper and Jeff Patton.
What would be the biggest takeaways for attendees from this conference?
Next to networking with peers and experts, gaining new insights and inspirations from people who have faced similar challenges so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but can benefit from proven tools and techniques.
What is the impact of digitalization on organizations?
As Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape) so famously said “Software is eating the world,” that means that (nearly) every company -no matter the core product- is becoming a software company. The big problem is that most companies are not yet aware that this is happening and they still regard software (“IT”) as a cost center and not a value center.
What are some of the key challenges and How do organizations cope with digital transformation?
The digital age provides a so-called VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) situation for companies, because e.g. markets are changing rapidly or customers want their products individually personalized. Thus, organizations need to be able to deal with this VUCA situation by being flexible, responsive and fast which must lead to changes in the organizational strategies, structures, and processes.
What makes change difficult and how do we handle change successfully?
The main difficulty is that every change provides uncertainties – we don’t know if our expertise is still valid, we don’t know how long it will take till we will have a high(er) performance, we don’t know what kind of impediments lie ahead of us, etc. The key is to understand our need, willingness, and capabilities for the change and then address the head, hand, and heart with various change methods.
How does Agile help in this context and what are its limitations? What else can organizations do to thrive this digital disruption?
Mainly the core values as defined by the Agile Manifesto provide a great guide for surviving and thriving the digital disruption. The fundament of these values is rapid and frequent feedback (from the market, the customer, about the product, the strategy, our way of working, …) which allows a company to learn continuously and adapt to the changing conditions (if applied on the organizational level). However, Agile doesn’t provide any guidance e.g. for the legal structure of an organization, about inspiration and innovation, or the role of support departments such as finance or HR. The good news is that there are others who provide guidance for these different fields mainly Beyond Budgeting (addressing the financial and HR strategy), Open Space (focusing on inspiration and innovation), and Sociocracy (providing answers to the legal structure).
What are the key takeaways from your workshop/talk for the attendees? Is it something they can apply immediately to their work?
The attendees will gain an understanding what values are at the core for the digital transformation and how the different streams – Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile can be combined to support these values. In the workshop, attendees will take away concrete tools, methods, and techniques which they can use in when leading change.
To meet Jutta and attend her talk/workshop, register here.
