If you have read the previous articles about our Journey towards Change, you should have understood something by now: we took it very seriously.
It was an evolution that involved our entire organization, every person had to take part in it and make themselves advocates of Change: there was no space for the DOO (depends on others), only for DOM (depends on me).
We wanted to change, improve, make our company a better place to work and a more innovative solution provider for our clients and partners…
But how? What was our goal, what did we want to become?
Well, we had a pretty clear view of the future we wanted to embrace: our compass was pointing towards “agility” during the whole journey.
What is agility within a company?
Being agile as a Company is the same as for a person: it means that they are swift, flexible, ready to move.
They can jump, change direction, move faster or slower accordingly to the conditions ahead. And most importantly, they are able to quickly step back up when they fall, and to understand the reason that led to failure in order to avoid it in the future.
As Fabio Tognetti wrote us when he introduced the work we would do together during SPII Evolution:
- being agile means being ready for change, not just adapting to it but also riding it.
- It means eliminating relational ballast, made up of misunderstandings, distorted communications, unresolved conflicts, to work well together.
- To be agile means to stop complaining (DOO), and to transform criticism into constructive elements (DOM).
- Being agile means having a clear idea of what we want to achieve together, and having a clear role to play in this process, showing the necessary flexibility in times of crisis.
- Ultimately, it means putting the individual first, which is both a huge opportunity and a great responsibility. It means YOU count more, YOU have more influence in decisions; it means working with a purpose, becoming part of something much bigger.
It’s not something you have, it’s something you are: it’s an attitude we all have deep within us, something you can’t buy but you can work on to improve.
We wanted to achieve this kind of organizational model to better manage the complexity of our World. We just needed to understand how.
“How to make SPII agile?” This was the question
It actually was, from the very beginning: this was the title of the workshop we had with Fabio just before we started working in groups to brainstorm and ideate ways to improve the company.
The answer was for everyone to find. Really, everyone!
We only knew what we wanted to achieve:
- a distributed vision, where every person knows the direction the company is going to and how he or she can contribute;
- a distributed responsibility, so that everyone knows it is also THEIR job to get there.
SPII Evo is the disruptive medium we decided to use to pursue this evolution. It has been a long, complex and collective brainstorming, to ideate and give structure to projects that could achieve one (or both!) of the above goals.
And the funny thing is that, not only the implementation of the winning projects led to the change expected…it was also the process itself that did it!
Because when you want to become agile, the truth is that you have to start BEING agile. It’s a learning by doing process, where you start exercising the “muscles” you need and eventually realize that they are becoming stronger and stronger.
SPII Evo was designed just for that: starting a process of empowerment of every person, based on accountability and open-feedback, was the first step towards agility.
And once you begin that, it’s like a snowball rolling that starts an avalanche. You can’t stop it, and it will change everything. It affects the whole context of a company, both culture and process.
Is SPII an agile company?
Yes, we are. But it’s not because we have flexible working hours (which we do). Nor because we have a beautiful room dedicated to lunchtime, rest and chat with colleagues (which we have, and it’s one of the ideas born from SPII Evolution: the EVO Room!).
We are agile because we know how to embrace change. We don’t let things happen and then sort them out, we plan, we execute, and we adapt to ever-changing situations.
Our agility is based on our people, “bricks” that are made of responsibility about the result, expertise of what they are in charge of, and the necessary authority to make prompt decisions.
We have regulated what is inside of one’s “brick” and how to understand what is outside, so that we are fully autonomous but also fully interconnected.
This makes us fast and adaptable.
But what definitely makes us agile is the attitude: a mindset we grew day by day since we were born as a company, and especially since we started to purposefully work on it with SPII Evolution.
Would you consider yourself “agile” as well?
See you next time,
Ilaria Cazziol
