Enterprise agile: Changing the fundamental DNA of an organization

Agile at scale calls into question deeply entrenched wisdom around core processes such as budgeting, capital allocation, or people evaluation. Even a fairly uncontroversial organization norm—that annual people evaluations are done by “your boss”—doesn’t have to hold true when implementing enterprise-wide agile.

We have a clear approach to helping organizations make the transition to enterprise agility (Exhibit 1). Even before developing agility coaches (more on that later), companies need to align the top team’s aspirations, cocreate the agile organization blueprint, and test this via pilots that help the organization learn and adjust. In conjunction, companies need to create the road map to roll out agile across the organization, redesign core systems and processes to ensure stability, and build the new capabilities required to sustain agility.¹ In our experience, building up the right internal capabilities is one of the challenges companies most underestimate.

Introducing the agility coach

At its essence, the agility coach (or agile coach, as the role is sometimes called) is a change agent who helps leaders and teams adopt new ways of working via agile practices and mind-sets. The agility coach is a core element in transforming an organization toward a more modern way of working and a completely new operating model. After completing the first phase of a particularly ambitious enterprise-wide agile transformation, the CHRO at a national telecommunications company said, “If you have really good agility coaches, you might have a chance.”

The agility coach does the following:

• Creates a culture of high performance, psychological safety, and belonging across the enterprise
• Coaches people across all layers of the enterprise by changing their mind-sets (such as systems thinking) and behaviors (such as servant leadership) to help unlock their potential
• Applies a range of tools and practices from agile and lean to addresses enterprise-wide bottlenecks
• Continuously evolves the ways of working across the enterprise to ensure realization of business and customer value
• Supports scaled agile ceremonies (for example, big room planning² ) that enable cross-team prioritization, dependency management, and alignment with company strategy

The rule-of-thumb ratio is one agility coach to every three to five teams, especially for cross-functional teams. That said, the final ratio will depend on the maturity of the teams and the maturity of the agility coach, as well as the type of team in question (for example, call-center teams with homogeneous profiles and a loose application of agile principles may need less intensive coaching).

The role played by agility coaches highlights a significant departure from how companies have previously tried to scale agile. Until recently, organizations have almost exclusively focused on agile practices and what agile should look like when embedded across many teams. Very little emphasis has gone into how to make that happen. Even less attention has been paid to supporting agile mind-sets and new company-wide processes.

Simply scaling agile practices across more teams often meant that executives and leaders were untouched by agile. The rising need for the agility coach is an acknowledgment that, to truly scale agile, leaders also need to adapt their mind-sets and behaviors to lead across new ways of working.