Recently I read an article by McKinsey titled The Journey to an Agile Organisation. The article steps you through how to transform an organisation from a “… static, siloed, structural hierarchy…” to an agile organisation “…characterized as a network of teams operating in rapid learning and decision-making cycles.”. As the article points out, the journey is a challenging one and is not to be taken without a very clear view on the end objective – the degree an agile organisation architecture will deliver value.

The Essence of Agile Decision Making

If you would like to be a more agile organisation but you are not ready for such a broad and game changing transformation, there is something you can do right now. Make your current organisation’s decision-making architecture work faster. 

The diagram to the right is the way forward. All significant decisions need information about the decision, and a conversation with others. 

If you want to make decision making more agile you need better:       

Discovery – You need great information and that means data discovery. Decision making is slowed down by a lack of information or when new information comes to hand late in the piece.

Collaboration – You need to use the information to facilitate collaboration during the conversation. That means, highly visual representation of the information. Not just numbers.

Execution – Once your decision is made, there are many, many decisions that usually follow to implement the decision. These decisions need tracking and that means choosing the right metrics to track and to feed back into more collaborative conversations.

My question is do you have a culture of data discovery, data display and data monitoring that accelerates decision making? If not, it is time to change the culture. Systems can help, so too can culture transformation workshops to change mind sets and to provide tools for staff to facilitate the culture shift.