What it takes to be agile.

Shortening the NUDE loop

Agile has become a bit of a business buzzword of late, no doubt because we’re recognising it's increasingly important for businesses to be able to act, and react, faster than the competition in a world of uncertainty and accelerating change. But along with the buzz has come a fair amount of confusion and misconception.

Being agile is essentially about four things: noticing something, understanding what it could signify, deciding how to respond, then changing what you do, whether that be the plans, the focus, the direction, or the shape and structure of the organisation itself, in order to make that response happen. Four stages: Notice, Understand, Decide, Execute. NUDE for short.

Agile software development works because each release provokes noticeable user reactions, the team analyse what they see to understand what it tells them about the latest changes, make decisions about what to do next, execute those changes and release the next version as quickly as they can. The speed of that NUDE loop, from one release to the next, is their measure of agility. And it’s exactly the same for the agility of your business.

Unfortunately, most of the emerging uses of the word “agile” in business have little to do with accelerating the NUDE loop. More often they’re just used to rebadge existing activities to make them sound better, sexier or more interesting. I’ve seen project phases renamed as “sprints”, meetings renamed “scrums” and flexible employment rebadged as “agile working”, with no discernible impact on the pace, sensitivity or responsiveness of the organisation as a whole.

Each of those things can have a part to play. A flexible workforce, especially if it’s comprised of people with multiple skill-sets, is an important ingredient in being able to act quickly on decisions that require the reallocation of teams to new tasks and projects. Breaking projects into phases so you can use the learning from each phase to shape the next, is eminently sensible, but in isolation, neither of these things will make much of a difference. Their value is only fully realised when they’re part of an integrated approach that runs through the organisation. Your organisation’s NUDE loop is only as fast as the slowest stage.

To find out how agile you are, and to understand where the brakes are within your loop, look at the last time you or your team noticed a competitor’s move, a consistency in customer complaints, or the advent of a trend or technological change that could affect your future. How long did it take for your organisation to assess the implications and understand the options, to decide on the best course of action, and to deliver it all the way through? Indeed, how long did it take to notice it in the first place?

Agility is not something you can import or buy in, nor is it a set of labels you can simply stick over what you’ve always done. It’s a set of four fundamental disciplines that need to be nurtured and developed from within, and the first step is to decide what great would look like in each of the areas, and how far you need to travel in order to get there.

Business environments and customer expectations are changing faster than ever. Barriers to entry for upstarts and adversaries are reducing all the time. In tomorrow’s marketplace, the winners and losers will be determined, not by their size or their historical victories, but by their ability of to sense, to rapidly interpret and to swiftly respond to the threats and opportunities as they emerge. Agility will become one of the few enduring competitive advantages in many markets.

How are you building yours?