I’ve always felt a little different from my other C-suite executive colleagues and in fact, I have had many a conversation with my executive coach about imposter syndrome (take a listen to Tara Nolan’s Game of Teams podcast episode with me).

I thought that maybe it had something to do with my nomadic IT career in Europe, the US and Argentina, where I tried to soak up the culture and then adapt to their context.

To do this, one needs to be more open and available to your wider team. Indeed, I have always said that it’s the leader’s role is to get the work done and not to do it all themselves.

And while my team members tended to respect my openness, my peers labelled me quirky and some of my bosses called me a maverick (hence the title of our first book).

But whatever style you choose, curiosity, communication and personal learning can take you a long way.

The Art of Continuous Learning

I used to think that I was lucky in my professional life but in reality, it’s more about the combination of three key factors that have changed my career significantly:

1. Learning to counsel, coach and mentor.

I’ve always been a social person and I genuinely believe that leaders need to be connective and supportive. And I learned that by working for a number of bosses who were the complete opposite to me; aggressive, machiavellian, control freaks who became successful by crushing everyone else (you know who you are). A bit of a sad existence which will feature in penance one day.

But I’ll be forever grateful for one (female) boss of mine who encouraged me to learn real counselling, coaching & mentoring skills and then let me take the lead in teaching her and the executive team how we could change the culture in the organisation for the good of the business.

Leaders need to be responsible for the professional and mental health of their people. Full stop.

2. Learning to be “agile” and not to buy agile

Even though I was leading agile teams, I wasn’t really part of the club. There is very little information about agile leadership apart from the so-called experts telling you that it’s your job to get out of the way. How sad!

You see, we don’t have agile badges and certifications at the C-level. And I’ll let you into a secret, we wouldn’t be very good at the exams anyway.

But I guessed that there had to be more for us and I figured that learning on the job would be my route to gaining agile skills. So I decided to go to stand-ups, retrospectives, sprint planning etc.

At first, there was suspicion and why not, here is the person that leads thousands of staff standing at a whiteboard looking like a fish out of water. But when I personally took action to remove blockers, change bureaucratic processes, coached people to create solutions and made funds available to the teams to help them, I became part of the team and in the process learned visualisation skills that would help me to create new techniques and assets for other leaders.

3. Learning that agile isn’t enough

I started getting a reputation as a CIO/CTO talking about agile at conferences in terms of it being dead or calling Scrum mini-waterfall (by the way, my wife is a Scrum Master). I even went as far as to say that Scaled Frameworks are a Ponzi scheme driven by consultants where there is no finishing line (by the way, those frameworks are for leadership control and not team agility).

It might seem a bit harsh maybe, but what I was doing as a senior IT professional was calling out that agile needed to evolve. Mainly because it had become too IT-centric and the “business” was still unhappy about the pace and quality of delivery to the market.

Now the IT teams were obsessed with pace but when coupled with product failures this became one step forward and two steps backwards. Mainly because no one knew how to deliver value.

Going back to point 1, what continued to happen is that people were not happy; Dev vs Ops vs Testers. IT vs Product vs Marketing. CxO vs CxO. Security vs everyone etc.

Change was needed and I personally needed to do something about it. And in 2013, that’s how we started to develop Flow.

The Business as a Value Chain

I don’t want to talk about agile methodologies in a bad way. They, like me, should be the culmination of lessons learned in the face of needing to improve.

But it’s not happening. And I believe that IT or more specifically many “agilists” don’t want it to (another harsh statement). Giving up the badges, certifications or titles gives rise to a defence mechanism and SAFe experts can be the most aggressive.

In my own agile journey, I studied lean practices and quickly saw the inefficiencies in branching code or big room planning (too many people in a room multitasking whilst waiting for their 15 minutes of story fame). Waste became my mantra or indeed the removal of said waste.

I was also fascinated by value chains. This made sense but I couldn’t see the source of value creation. My job was to deliver value. But also, I saw the biggest impediment to value streams being the entire business itself.

And while IT wrestled against some silos with DevOps, Business/IT multi-disciplinary teams seemed and still seem a long way off (perhaps hampered by a lack of agile skills in HR).

So it seemed obvious to me that if the entire business could become agile, then value could be derived and delivered with ease.

I Lied About Three Key Factors, There’s a Fourth

And that fourth factor was meeting Haydn Shaughnessy back in 2013. He had developed the techniques for value discovery which are much wider than just product development and he had the successes to prove it.

We went about making Flow end-to-end, business plus IT and then make our practices a reality with great social interaction, visualisation, collective intelligence and collaboration. We focused on every aspect of a business, including those teams that are not normally interfacing every day with agile teams.

We also developed the Transformation Sprint (the topic of our latest book) to help us implement Flow for our clients and to help them to transform their businesses.

And what we are now discovering more and more, is that agile has become the thing that is now creating a divide between IT and the Business in some companies. And that’s why we designed Flow for everyone — even leaders!

Flow Academy (flowacademy.io) is a leading advisory and implementation practice specialising in transformation. Our tools help companies make the best use of their existing assets while reshaping their business to meet new demands.

Fin Goulding is a top 100 CTO/CIO who in the past five years has transformed into a business agility expert having worked for organisations like Visa, RBS, HSBC and digital startups such as lastminute.com and paddypower.com. Fin also coaches executives through the challenges of transformation.

Haydn Shaughnessy is a business economist and innovation expert who has consulted to some of the world’s leading organisations helping senior executives to plan the next-generation enterprise.

Transformation Sprint (thetransformationsprint.com) is their new book, now available on Amazon, which builds upon their best selling business books Flow: A Handbook for Changemakers and 12 Steps to Flow.

Flow is for everyone, agile is not was originally published in Flow: The Transformation Sprint on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m delighted to share with you the news that our new book Transformation Sprint is now available on Amazon:

https://geni.us/transformationsprint

Our goal was to share our time-boxed approach to transformation with as many people as possible, especially as COVID will force numerous companies into “having” to transform in the coming weeks and months.

The kindle version will be available in a couple of weeks but I recommend the paperback as we’ve added a flipbook style moving cheetah to the header of each page!

More info can be found here: https://thetransformationsprint.com/

What we have also been doing is using our Flow Value Discovery tools to test and learn what resonates the most amongst our network and within the agile community in general.

And we are glad to report that the feedback has been excellent!

So, how does all of this relate to Flow? For those of you who have been following us for a while, you’ll know that Flow is an end-to-end thought process, beginning with how value is discovered through customer insight to how value is actually delivered. Then in between, it focuses on how value is managed. All this adds up to an agile business opportunity for clients, especially when you combine it with our new thinking on generative operating models.

Here are some of the key tools which we use.

Transformation Sprint

We use the Transformation Sprint when we work with a new client in order to help them fix or start a new transformation. But in the spirit of Flow, we have decided to share our method in our forthcoming book on the subject. Because we believe that it’s now essential, in a COVID disrupted world, that organisations have a new way to remodel their approach to markets, grow their businesses and provide meaningful work for everyone.

Lighthouse Thinking

It has always been our mantra that in order to solve a complex challenge you must simplify it by breaking it down into manageable units of work. Be that software development batch sizes in Value Delivery or launching a new project to test and learn during Value Discovery. In fact, a Lighthouse Project is such a simple concept that it flies in the face of the complexity theorists. We believe in simplification! And we have been developing a lot of material in this area which we hope to publish before the end of the year.

Operating Models

An operating model in itself doesn’t seem very exciting and perhaps that’s because it sounds like a topic from an MBA that you have to study, rather than one you would want to.

We think the lack of interest in operating models arises because there has been relatively little progress over the years in defining the operating model of modern businesses, which is strange because, in order to transform, you need to know what your current model is and the future model you want to arrive at.

Go back to the 1990s though, before the big boom in business models and innovation literature, and companies were primarily concerned with the Operating Model, with good reason.

Flow Is An Operating Model

When we published our first book “Flow” in 2017 and it had been 5 years in the making but it’s just as relevant today as it has ever been. What we have done since is to evolve the tools and our understanding of Flow as an Operating Model.

Flow incorporates agile software development methods, continuous delivery, DevOps and cloud (which we call Value Delivery) but we also realised that every company is at a different stage in their operating model evolution, especially in terms of core capabilities, so a one size fits all context doesn’t make sense.

Flow also includes Value Discovery and Value Management tools that we wrote about in our first book which allow you to build new products/services, find new customers, expand your ecosystem and get the very best value out of your portfolio of work.

We tend to favour kanban as a working practice for Flow because it’s much more about the conversation than the actual technique of coding or marketing. But sometimes, the terminology used by IT teams can create a disconnect with Business teams. That’s why when we created the Executive Portfolio Wall, we kept jargon to a minimum and focused on creating a venue for a conversation with the leadership team.

Awakening the leaders to the challenges of core platforms, core capabilities, learning mechanisms and cyber agility puts into context the effort required to transform. These are all conversations that we can stimulate at the Wall.

And balancing your strategic, tactical and maintenance work, gives an organisation the tools to prioritise transformation and operating model regeneration without overloading the business. That’s why we called it Value Management.

The Transformation Sprint has the critical role of keeping people focused and making rapid progress towards solving big transformational problems in just four weeks.

The key is to all this is to make sure that conversations are happening, social interaction between teams is given priority and that the older techniques for managing work are deprecated. You see, transformation is much more about changing the way you work than it is about changing the technology.

Entrepreneurs focus on the “Who not How”

Our initial focus for Flow was and still is to some degree IT but we used to bang on a lot about kanban, automation and cloud etc and whilst these things are all important topics, as we previously mentioned, your context and where you are in the journey is just as important.

There are many CIO’s and CTO’s out there who baulk at the idea of having to swap out their current agile methods or frameworks. And who are we to be prescriptive when we talk about creativity, innovation and regeneration!

In fact, it makes more sense to improve what’s in place and regenerate step by step. Eventually, everyone will want to use Flow end-to-end but right now it’s about continuous improvement.

Plus, we believe that no one person or organisation should ever dictate all the components of Flow.

So, we reached out to Dr Mik Kersten to learn more about what he is doing with the Flow Framework for Value Stream Management because it’s super popular amongst our Clients and also Daniel Vacanti because we love his work around Flow Metrics and his ActionableAgile analytics tool which the agile community can’t get enough of.

Then there are also some great people working in the Flow agile data and probabilistic forecasting space such as Troy Magennis who has real solutions to improve outcomes. Plus others delivering some really snazzy online collaboration tools and virtual Executive Portfolios Walls, like Holger Gelhausen.

And everyone knows that we love DevOps and it’s been a pleasure to work with Gene Kim and his community.

The list goes on.

However, our specialism has evolved more upstream within businesses thanks to the Transformation Sprint, Lighthouse Thinking and Value Discovery and we collaborate or use the tools and methods from others wherever it makes sense.

But most of all, we celebrate all those who are working to make Flow even better.

Magpie’s don’t steal shiny objects

European folklore says that the Magpie bird steals shiny objects. But in fact, they don’t. It is a myth because they are nervous about such items.

However, there are people in the world trying to monopolise Flow, including some very big well-known organisations.

Which is a real shame because most of us in this space just want some recognition for our years of practical work as employees or entrepreneurs.

We believe that there is a lot of room within the Flow Operating Model for people to work together and not to get dragged into the kind of turf wars that we are seeing in the scrum space. In fact, “Scrum” has reached the courts! Can you believe it?

In Flow, we have pioneered the idea of flexible tools that let people interact in intelligent ways. We don’t have a rule book or a playbook for the end-to-end flow of value. We’ve always said, good social interaction leads to good decisions at work. And we are all for good social interaction and against rigidity. Flow is a naturally agile way to work.

A rigid methodology ages over time and becomes less relevant. Some ‘new’ variants of Flow have that feel of rigidity. But our vision continues to be that there is space for all types of tools, frameworks and ways of working in Flow.

The one thing that we have always talked about is the human side of Flow and giving people the space to interact and use their collective intelligence. So, we have some exciting news coming up very soon about a free service and it’s called The Agile Business Community (theagilebusiness.com) where we are going to donate/open-source all of our content and hope that you will join us to contribute some of your own ideas too — even if that means asking more questions of us!

More news soon!

Fin & Haydn — the Flow Academy

Fin Goulding is a CTO/CIO who in the past five years has transformed into a business agility expert having worked for organisations like Visa, RBS, HSBC and digital startups such as lastminute.com and paddypower.com. Fin also coaches executives through the challenges of transformation.

Haydn Shaughnessy is a business economist and innovation expert who has consulted to some of the world’s leading organisations helping senior executives to plan the next-generation enterprise.

Flow as an Operating Model can transform how you work was originally published in Flow: The Transformation Sprint on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What we have also been doing is using our Flow Value Discovery tools to test and learn what resonates the most amongst our network and within the agile community in general.

And we are glad to report that the feedback has been excellent!

So, how does all of this relate to Flow? For those of you who have been following us for a while, you’ll know that Flow is an end-to-end thought process, beginning with how value is discovered through customer insight to how value is actually delivered. Then in between, it focuses on how value is managed. All this adds up to an agile business opportunity for clients, especially when you combine it with our new thinking on generative operating models.

Here are some of the key tools which we use.

Transformation Sprint

We use the Transformation Sprint when we work with a new client in order to help them fix or start a new transformation. But in the spirit of Flow, we have decided to share our method in our forthcoming book on the subject. Because we believe that it’s now essential, in a COVID disrupted world, that organisations have a new way to remodel their approach to markets, grow their businesses and provide meaningful work for everyone.

Lighthouse Thinking

It has always been our mantra that in order to solve a complex challenge you must simplify it by breaking it down into manageable units of work. Be that software development batch sizes in Value Delivery or launching a new project to test and learn during Value Discovery. In fact, a Lighthouse Project is such a simple concept that it flies in the face of the complexity theorists. We believe in simplification! And we have been developing a lot of material in this area which we hope to publish before the end of the year.

Operating Models

An operating model in itself doesn’t seem very exciting and perhaps that’s because it sounds like a topic from an MBA that you have to study, rather than one you would want to.

We think the lack of interest in operating models arises because there has been relatively little progress over the years in defining the operating model of modern businesses, which is strange because, in order to transform, you need to know what your current model is and the future model you want to arrive at.

Go back to the 1990s though, before the big boom in business models and innovation literature, and companies were primarily concerned with the Operating Model, with good reason.

Flow Is An Operating Model

When we published our first book “Flow” in 2017 and it had been 5 years in the making but it’s just as relevant today as it has ever been. What we have done since is to evolve the tools and our understanding of Flow as an Operating Model.

Flow incorporates agile software development methods, continuous delivery, DevOps and cloud (which we call Value Delivery) but we also realised that every company is at a different stage in their operating model evolution, especially in terms of core capabilities, so a one size fits all context doesn’t make sense.

Flow also includes Value Discovery and Value Management tools that we wrote about in our first book which allow you to build new products/services, find new customers, expand your ecosystem and get the very best value out of your portfolio of work.

We tend to favour kanban as a working practice for Flow because it’s much more about the conversation than the actual technique of coding or marketing. But sometimes, the terminology used by IT teams can create a disconnect with Business teams. That’s why when we created the Executive Portfolio Wall, we kept jargon to a minimum and focused on creating a venue for a conversation with the leadership team.

Awakening the leaders to the challenges of core platforms, core capabilities, learning mechanisms and cyber agility puts into context the effort required to transform. These are all conversations that we can stimulate at the Wall.

And balancing your strategic, tactical and maintenance work, gives an organisation the tools to prioritise transformation and operating model regeneration without overloading the business. That’s why we called it Value Management.

The Transformation Sprint has the critical role of keeping people focused and making rapid progress towards solving big transformational problems in just four weeks.

The key is to all this is to make sure that conversations are happening, social interaction between teams is given priority and that the older techniques for managing work are deprecated. You see, transformation is much more about changing the way you work than it is about changing the technology.

Entrepreneurs focus on the “Who not How”

Our initial focus for Flow was and still is to some degree IT but we used to bang on a lot about kanban, automation and cloud etc and whilst these things are all important topics, as we previously mentioned, your context and where you are in the journey is just as important.

There are many CIO’s and CTO’s out there who baulk at the idea of having to swap out their current agile methods or frameworks. And who are we to be prescriptive when we talk about creativity, innovation and regeneration!

In fact, it makes more sense to improve what’s in place and regenerate step by step. Eventually, everyone will want to use Flow end-to-end but right now it’s about continuous improvement.

Plus, we believe that no one person or organisation should ever dictate all the components of Flow.

So, we reached out to Dr Mik Kersten to learn more about what he is doing with the Flow Framework for Value Stream Management because it’s super popular amongst our Clients and also Daniel Vacanti because we love his work around Flow Metrics and his ActionableAgile analytics tool which the agile community can’t get enough of.

Then there are also some great people working in the Flow agile data and probabilistic forecasting space such as Troy Magennis who has real solutions to improve outcomes. Plus others delivering some really snazzy online collaboration tools and virtual Executive Portfolios Walls, like Holger Gelhausen.

And everyone knows that we love DevOps and it’s been a pleasure to work with Gene Kim and his community.

The list goes on.

However, our specialism has evolved more upstream within businesses thanks to the Transformation Sprint, Lighthouse Thinking and Value Discovery and we collaborate or use the tools and methods from others wherever it makes sense.

But most of all, we celebrate all those who are working to make Flow even better.

Magpie’s don’t steal shiny objects

European folklore says that the Magpie bird steals shiny objects. But in fact, they don’t. It is a myth because they are nervous about such items.

However, there are people in the world trying to monopolise Flow, including some very big well-known organisations.

Which is a real shame because most of us in this space just want some recognition for our years of practical work as employees or entrepreneurs.

We believe that there is a lot of room within the Flow Operating Model for people to work together and not to get dragged into the kind of turf wars that we are seeing in the scrum space. In fact, “Scrum” has reached the courts! Can you believe it?

In Flow, we have pioneered the idea of flexible tools that let people interact in intelligent ways. We don’t have a rule book or a playbook for the end-to-end flow of value. We’ve always said, good social interaction leads to good decisions at work. And we are all for good social interaction and against rigidity. Flow is a naturally agile way to work.

A rigid methodology ages over time and becomes less relevant. Some ‘new’ variants of Flow have that feel of rigidity. But our vision continues to be that there is space for all types of tools, frameworks and ways of working in Flow.

The one thing that we have always talked about is the human side of Flow and giving people the space to interact and use their collective intelligence. So, we have some exciting news coming up very soon about a free service and it’s called The Agile Business Community (theagilebusiness.com) where we are going to donate/open-source all of our content and hope that you will join us to contribute some of your own ideas too — even if that means asking more questions of us!

More news soon!

Fin & Haydn — the Flow Academy

Fin Goulding is a CTO/CIO who in the past five years has transformed into a business agility expert having worked for organisations like Visa, RBS, HSBC and digital startups such as lastminute.com and paddypower.com. Fin also coaches executives through the challenges of transformation.

Haydn Shaughnessy is a business economist and innovation expert who has consulted to some of the world’s leading organisations helping senior executives to plan the next-generation enterprise.

A question for you. What is your current leadership purpose right now?

Well maybe that’s too big a question but in the time we are living through, your purpose is going to come under constant pressure. As leaders, we need to rethink and reaffirm what we believe in and why we choose to do our jobs.

Flow Academy is a leading advisory and implementation practice specialising in business transformation. Our tools help companies make best use of their existing assets while reshaping their business to meet new demands.

I believe that you would go no wrong by focusing on these three key, related things:

1. Managing value
2. People and processes
3. The future of business

What’s that pressure you’re feeling?

By now you will have probably established your home office with an Aeron chair, a stand-up desk (which the family are obsessed with operating) and a new PC with a widescreen monitor.

Cash protection measures are in place and there’s a company-wide budget freeze coupled with a ban on recruitment. In fact, workforce reduction is now a reality and plans are in place for all departmental managers to hit their new headcount and cost-cutting targets.

The internal legal experts are pouring over 3rd party contracts looking for get-out clauses and the workforce planners are estimating the amount of commercial real estate required for a predominantly remote workforce.

Any leader out there with a decade or so of senior experience has been here before, at least once.

But now what? We have to lift ourselves above it and make sure the company and our peers do the right things.

Here are the key constraints:

On value management

What’s happening inside many companies right now is a reflex reaction. Leaders know how to cut and downsize and protect some resources ready for a rebound. The question you will be asking yourself is: Can we be more constructive than this? And the answer is you generally have to earn the right to swim against the tide in leadership teams.

On people and processes

The daily parade of meeting attendees outside your old office has now turned into back-to-back video conference calls which are becoming just as impotent as the face-to-face variety. You’ll be asking yourself how to move beyond the meetings impasse and start getting creative with teams again.

On the future of business

Closely related to value management, the future of business concerns have been about the basics over the past two months. Some companies will take the opportunity to mop up their smaller and weaker competitors but again you’ll be asking, can’t we do more to reposition ourselves for a changing business landscape and create more opportunities?

I think the creative leader who cares about the people working with him or her will have these questions in mind, knowing that they are also in a kind of holding position. The long term represents really significant change. But the holding position is bringing out the worst in some management teams, who will always revert to past practices. Here’s how to think differently.

Step 1: Value management and your sense of leadership purpose

An important area where leaders are blindsided is the lack of oversight of their portfolio of projects or product development initiatives. There is scope here for you to make savings that are rational and valuable to your company. It can also add to your capacity to manage value.

You are likely to be running multiple projects that are of very low value. And you probably don’t know it.

It might sound like an outrageous claim. After all, if leaders don’t know what projects are going on in their business, then are they even managing let alone leading?

But this is something Haydn and I have written about before. Lean startup and MVPs have flooded many companies with new projects and initiatives. There’s also always the pet project syndrome that lean has let run riot.

Of course, leaders are aware of the top ten projects or their current transformation portfolio but it’s at such a high-level that their role is often backwards-looking, progress in the past tense. They remember projects from when they gave the green light but have no active oversight thereafter until delivery dates are due.

The Project Management Office meanwhile is usually too busy reporting on project status rather than forensically examining the business value of every initiative.

The result is that projects are managed but the value is not.

In Flow, we created the first-ever visual Executive Portfolio Wall and have now implemented it in a number of companies. Its primary design is not for managing projects. It is for managing value.

Because the portfolio of work consumes the energy of a large chunk of your workforce, or impacts them in some way and is supposed to deliver value to your customers, why as a leader wouldn’t you be obsessed with it!

The best thing executives can do in this crisis is to examine the portfolio for real value and take out work that has no value rather than cutting the business back based upon a percentage basis. To do that you need to know how to run an Executive Portfolio Wall. We can help with that.

Step 2: Free your people from red tape and all forms of blockers

It’s time for leaders to face up to the cost of blockages, blockers and bureaucracy. In the current environment, they have become intolerable.

It’s time for us leaders to renew our sense of purpose by weeding out some of our outdated manager roles and redeploy people into value additive roles. It’s also time to review all sign-off procedures and to tackle the people who are the “signer-offers” as they make a profession out of inserting themselves into a process in order to block progress.

Talk to your people about which blockers exist or better still ask us to do it because we will deliver you a list as long as your arm. Every company we have worked in has them. But it takes a brave leader to rationalise creatively in this situation.

Step 3: Focus on the future of business with small steps

Right now you are probably feeling the real absence of new ideas or innovation within your organisation and it’s probably more apparent than ever before.

In our third article in series one, we looked at the concept of a Lighthouse project. How to take small steps to success.

However, you may think that your company has a great innovation agenda. But ask yourself, has it delivered anything of value that has gone on to be groundbreaking? Unfortunately, that’s what lean startup does to Companies….lots of Minimum Viable Products (aka requirement stripping) without any Maximum Valuable Propositions.

What you really need to learn is how to remodel a business so that it is aligned with the right opportunities. Point 1 above is about remodelling.

Introducing test and learn processes is one way to remodel. Lighthouse projects are essentially ways to test and learn about the future of business — both the market opportunities and the most appropriate operating model.

There is something very refreshing about a leader having a chance to do a Lighthouse. If you have executed on Point 1 then you’ve earned the right to propose Point 3, the Lighthouse. See our article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-steps-navigate-covid-change-curve-successfully-shaughnessy/

Your new purpose as a leader is to find a new way forward for your company and the Lighthouse concept is going to help.

We specialise in creating these so get in touch if you need advice.

I know that it’s not going to be easy. Learned behaviours never are. But it is our role as leaders to break these behaviours down and turn people in the direction of some creative and constructive remodelling. The future is not just about slash and burn. It’s about opportunity and growth.

Those of us who are leaders should be thinking, ok how do I lead my company out of this into something better?

Well, that’s your new purpose and the three steps we’ve outlined will help.

Fin Goulding is a world-class CTO/CIO who in the past five years has transformed into a business agility expert having worked for organisations like Visa, RBS, HSBC and digital startups such as lastminute.com and paddypower.com. Fin also coaches executives through the challenges of transformation.

Haydn Shaughnessy is a business economist and innovation expert who has consulted to some of the world’s leading organisations helping senior executives to plan the next-generation enterprise.

Therefore, we created this customer change curve to understand the stages of change we will see and to sit alongside our leadership change curve.

You’ve got your current situation under control but how will you develop a vision for the future, one that positions you to serve the dramatically different needs of customers post-lockdown?

Accelerating plans for becoming a more digital business is part of it but what if customer needs, taste and demand shift significantly?

If for no other reason than diligent risk mitigation you need to explore different scenarios against that backdrop. That’s what will help you to prosper.

Flow Academy is a leading advisory and implementation practice specialising in business transformation. Our tools help companies make the best use of their existing assets while reshaping their business to meet new demands.

Doing this in the company of a major consultancy gives you access to the consensus way of thinking. You can align with every other business served by the big firms. But we like to think differently. That’s why we’ve created the Flow Operating Model with associated value discovery tools.

COVID requires a thorough rethinking of how we will spend our time in future. What we consume, where we consume. Our desire for a return to normality; our acceptance of a different future.

You can tap into how that changes markets through our CATE value discovery workshops.

Very few companies have yet invested in imagining a dramatically changed marketplace over the coming years. Yet COVID will accelerate climate concerns and carbon mitigation practices, the greening and pedestrianisation of cities, the prospect of abundant cheap property lying empty as firms stick with remote work. What could be stopping you from thinking these COVID consequences through?

Three challenges

Consultant dependency: We’ve seen just about everywhere that COVID has been good for large consultancies. Executives need intellectual firepower and this is on tap at places like Accenture.

So far we’ve observed that the advice coming from the big four is not massively different from the 2008–10 crisis. Restructure!

And of course that is necessary but in our previous series of articles we pointed out that a future of business unit can use the Flow lighthouse to remodel the enterprise and not just restructure through cost-cutting.

Consensus thinking: There is a natural tendency for executives to seek out common language and popular memes. To not be in the know is to appear as though we are left behind.

We’ve seen in the agile space how companies have set targets for the number of agile coaches as if crossing this threshold makes you more agile.

This is not a time for consensus thinking. Customers are going to want new experiences and they will redefine how they succeed with their lives.

Project overload: Many companies will find they have already struck peak project load and can’t take on any more new initiatives other than the inevitable restructure or without alienating key staff.

However, that is going to leave them exposed as the new demand curve takes shape.

What will change in consumer demand?

We see a number of changes that will impact demand. We have become aliens in our own world, conscious that we have been contributors to disturbing the natural balance between wild and civilised life.

How will people compensate for the feeling of strangeness and culpability?

Couple it to the stay at home life we are now living. Will it change aspirations away from periodic escapism (holidays, movies) to a new realism of permanent adaptation to the hidden power of nature to disrupt us?

Surely this will lead to us seeking more meaning over more consumption — the return of creative activities, and a redefinition of what success looks like.

COVID will also provide a major new momentum for climate change actions.

We are seeing it as cities are redrawn around the needs of pedestrians and cyclists, potentially a reaction against the car and especially luxury motoring.

But homes are being redrawn too, as sanctuaries for some, playgrounds for others. As we spend more time in our homes we will adapt them to express more of our overall needs, not just leisure or family but also work and creativity.

Travel has been rapidly redrawn — return of the road trip; the decline of hotels, holidays as luxury isolation.

There’s also a case for descaling industry, enterprises and society. New products will have to be simpler so that production facilities can use distancing; the economy can’t go back into full production because that’s how we interact with each other, so we have to determine which elements of production are essential to future needs.

Our relationship to society is also beginning to change. There has to be an expansion of school facilities, hospitals, and welfare beyond anything any government anywhere has been contemplating.

With it comes the return of worker power represented by trades unions and bolstered by safety issues. And there will be rising tensions between beneficiaries of pre-COVID and beneficiaries of post-COVID, those who want the old normal and those who see more success in a new one.

How can you create discipline around responding to those changes?

Senior leadership teams need a mix of creativity and discipline to address these issues. At Flow Academy, we think of this as a value discovery journey.

The difference with normal value discovery work is we would recommend working through the value discovery process with at least three scenarios. There is no way to have confidence in any single outcome of COVID.

So think in terms of those scenarios and use an approach like this:

The disruptive scenarios

What causes economic disruption is fairly well documented.

In a corporate sense it will be smaller companies or other competitors entering the market with what looks like a poor quality product. Your existing customers might not take it seriously but it will breach the market at the bottom end of spending.

Structurally, disruption is happening because companies with vision are not sticking to their core. Take an example in oil. Everybody so far is going with renewables and hanging onto the oil franchise.

The disruptive step is to move outside these confines and begin new areas of business that can benefit from the existing assets of an oil major.

That’s how Amazon and Alibaba think. How can I integrate new areas of business into what I already do well?

New entrants and powerful platforms that can move into any area of business where they can bring customer success will reshape the market around you unless you are quick out of the blocks.

Remember after 2008 some of today’s new behemoths began to make their mark: Whatsapp, Instagram, Uber, Pinterest, Slack, Square. Cloudera.

Value discovery

In an earlier article, we spelled out the steps towards new value discovery. The most important point we made is that, most likely, you already have all the ingredients needed to start creating new products for new demand. The challenge lies in taking one step out of your core business and one step into something new.

That challenge is really about leadership rather than anything technical or analytical.

But if you want to reach that step then we have the deep market segmentation techniques to help. Create the segmentation. Move on to asset discovery. Rethink your core assets and how to deploy them differently. Only innovate around ideas that are targeted at greater customer success. And finally explore who will make up a productive ecosystem to help you bring customer success closer, faster.

The generative operating model

In order to deliver on the new promises you will have to make to customers, you need to improve your skills at remodelling the business so that it can deliver.

Flow Academy’s upcoming Flowpedia spells out exactly how. As we said last time out, the Lighthouse Project is the new vehicle for innovation. You have to move beyond MVPs, pilots and prototypes to Lighthouse Projects because they carefully combine product or service innovation with insights into a remodelled organisation.

It helps you hit the right spot with customers and also educates your people on how to change the structure of delivery and the way they work. For more details see:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-steps-navigate-covid-change-curve-successfully-shaughnessy/

Given COVID has introduced us to the worst recession in centuries, leadership for change has to be braver than ever. Courage in lighthouse leaders is the subject of our next article where we’ll once again introduce three challenges and three answers. Stay tuned for Thursday!

Fin Goulding is a world-class CTO/CIO who in the past five years has transformed into a business agility expert having worked for organisations like Visa, RBS, HSBC and digital startups such as lastminute.com and paddypower.com. Fin also coaches executives through the challenges of transformation.

Haydn Shaughnessy is a business economist and innovation expert who has consulted to some of the world’s leading organisations helping senior executives to plan the next generation enterprise.

Traditional companies are at high risk of disruption, and many companies are deploying an organization-wide agile transformation of one kind or another in an attempt to compete in today’s digital marketplace.

However, these transformations are expensive and fail at an alarming rate. If your company is like so many others, efforts are complicated by the difficulty in seeing the end-to-end flow of work, diagnosing bottlenecks, and measuring the true value of work.

As companies search for the elusive silver bullet, one realization becomes crystal clear: Most applications of agile frameworks and methodologies are missing a fundamental prerequisite to support their success.

“Flow,” defined as the movement of business value from customer insight to product delivery, is an alternative framework to illustrate the challenges faced by companies. Surfacing and visualizing the end-to-end workflow is a foundational requirement for enabling companies to master software-based solutions at scale.

Traditionally, “end-to-end” has been interpreted as from requirement specification to software delivery, but in flow we believe the mission begins much further upstream. How we understand and interpret changes in market conditions and how products find a place in the value stream are critical to success. Without those steps, companies will continue to do good execution on bad projects.

To take agile forward, you first need visibility into flow with the incorporation of:

• Flow metrics to improve data-driven decisions
• A focus on value-based agility through upstream analytics

The Efficiency Problem

Many companies have made great strides in the delivery end of the software lifecycle. DevOps and continuous integration have resulted in companies delivering value to customers quickly and often.

However, these companies invest substantially in optimizing this small portion of the software delivery lifecycle during transformations, neglecting to optimize the entire end-to-end flow and increasing total lag time between idea and implementation.

Agility as a concept refers to the ability to adapt and pivot work and processes. But so often, companies focus only on speed or velocity. This loss of focus on adaptability is an unfortunate reality that can hasten decline in the digital age.

The Value Problem

To maintain competitive advantage in an increasingly uncertain and disrupted digital marketplace, successful companies continually refine their strategy and embrace uncovered opportunities. Companies lacking insight into their value chain increase their risk of being digitally disrupted because they are unable to properly strategize.

Without a strategic framework for assessing value, product managers struggle to know when to turn away work. The resulting clogged funnels and backlogs obscure work of value and drag the entire end-to-end flow of work into the mire.

Flow as a Value Discovery Method

Value discovery techniques are underdeveloped in many instances and are not focused on customer outcomes. Being customer-centric is a starting point for modern value discovery.

Value discovery in lean agile is more of an accounting technique. What the minimum viable product and lean iterations give us is an estimate of value, but that is not a discovery process. In fact, it has led to a very “unlean,” promiscuous form of innovation. Companies are encouraged to give things a try and find out if an idea has value downstream, rather than exploring value upstream.

An essential part of the value discovery process is to be able to spot emergent needs. Many startups are excellent at this for several potential reasons:

• Often the entrepreneur comes from a large company where they and their colleagues have been arguing the case for new products to serve uncovered segments for a long time
• Based on personal experience, an entrepreneur just knows there is an opportunity in front of them
• Entrepreneurs know by how they use technology that they can adapt it to serve the needs of new markets

This is how disruption happens, according to the late Clayton Christensen. A good value-discovery mechanism will also help companies discover potential disruptors early, before they get into the hands of a startup, and to be able to respond with new value propositions.

Flow uses deep market segmentation to get at emerging customer needs. You emphasize interpreting customer success factors in those segments, an idea borrowed from SaaS.

You also assess existing software, talent, and the IP asset base to ask if you need to build, innovate, or adapt existing assets. There are serious resource consequences when you choose to build or innovate as opposed to adapt.

Finally, we believe in highly targeted innovation that uses these assets for precise needs, addressing clear customer success factors. That way we keep pressure off the backlog.

Value discovery should contribute to a range of goals:

• Become a source of ideas that are highly relevant to existing customers or promote the acquisition of new customers
• Enable insight into what would make the customers more successful
• Decrease speculative projects and reduce pressure on the backlog
• State clear value that teams can leverage to pivot or cancel when the feature is unlikely to deliver
• Serve as frontline defence against other companies getting hold of that value sooner

Flow frameworks can help restore meaning to managing the full spectrum of product and software delivery in order to measure and optimize the flow of business value and provide a focus on outcome-based performance.

Specific tools can surface core flow metrics, like flow efficiency, that can provide insights to steer data-driven continuous improvement efforts within organizations. Data such as this can equip teams and leaders to make better decisions as they seek to transform their way of working and circumvent a flow efficiency nightmare. But the key is to align this information with strong upstream value discovery.

Uncover Valuable Metrics in Flow

Being value-driven and surfacing the end-to-end flow of business value are vital prerequisites for any agile transformation. Attempting to transform methodologies and frameworks without knowing how value flows from idea to implementation is a guessing game.

In a world where most transformations fail to deliver the expected value, the tools and metrics that are emerging in flow can help companies to deliver measurable and meaningful results fast.

Less than 48 hours after our first article in this series went out, we saw the loss of thousands of jobs. Airbnb, 25% of the workforce fired, Virgin Atlantic 3000 people and Uber 3700.

Companies will accelerate their way down the leadership curve over the coming weeks as Governments take away emergency support mechanisms. More people will lose jobs, and consumers will adopt a safety-first spending approach as they innovate their lifestyles.

Apart from the traditional techniques of cost reduction and shrinking the business, what can be done to deploy your assets more effectively rather than just retiring them?

We have been developing tools specifically for this purpose. Working with executives to get focus on their needs and vision, we can get companies up and running with new strategic solutions within four weeks.

Issues for the Corporate Transformation Journey

Transformation was already necessary prior to COVID and most companies were engaged in it. Three things we have observed recently, though:

Calling out partial success prematurely. The first is that leaders are moving fast to close transformation programs down by calling them a success. COVID has, for example, accelerated the move online and that’s a success.

Nothing wrong with calling out a success, of course, and some quick wins under COVID have been good for leadership morale. However, that takes us to our second point.

Missing out on the new operating model. All transformations aim at improving the existing operating model or to use the popular term, seeking a new Target Operating Model (TOM).

The operating model (OM) is the actual form of their company, how all the activities it engages in hang together in an efficient and yet creative way.

A lot of transformations, however, fail to bring these models into sufficient focus. Executives typically don’t know how to align new business opportunities and new operating design.

This was supposed to be the endpoint of the transformation journey and leaders are opting not to complete it.

Finding the right Operating Model for the right opportunities. The third point is that during the period of transformation, companies have done agile transformation without doing new value discovery and that’s why they are flailing around now. They’ve focused on agile without thinking “agile for what”?

What Do We Mean by an Operating Model?

Before addressing these issues, let’s look at what we mean by an operating model. Look back thirty years and you can see the beginning of a new operating model that put supply chain management at the heart of company operations.

Coupled to the supply chain were new software systems like ERP that enabled global supply procurement, tracking and payments.

That’s what we mean by new operating models. They are the arrangements, systems, partners, and propositions that define the way a business executes its day to day activities.

Around 1996 the new online world changed business operating models by enabling online sales and purchases, growing the use of external delivery partners in place of wholesale and retail.

These operating model innovations were relatively straightforward. They came with a clear destination. You pointed the ship and sailed towards them.

Today’s operating model changes have a less clear destination. But if they are unclear they are no less vital.

Seeking Rapid New Mechanisms for Viability

The context for OM change now is that COVID has also called into question the viability of some businesses models.

A few days ago, we published a table that shows the industries that will be most badly hit including, as we said in Wednesday’s article, all those industries that rely on attendance in specific venues.

Reflecting on that table, it is clear that to be viable, if you are threatened by Post-COVID retrenchment, means looking for new sources of value. But that has to be in the context of an improved operating model.

At the very least that model will involve working remotely, seeking more agility and better ways to innovate, fast. But it may also embrace relocalisation, diversification of supply, creative ways to serve new customers and taking out unnecessary cost

Flow’s transformation tools offer solutions to value discovery and the operating model design, bringing you unique methods to balance operations and opportunity.

Pushing for real completion. A transformation is not complete until you can discover and deliver new sources of value.

On Wednesday, we looked at how to overcome the challenges of value discovery without getting bogged down in MVPs:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6664104796468858880/

Typically we create these new propositions in a very short space of time as we have already developed market segmentations in key areas of the economy such as financial services.

Learning the remodelling skills. So how do you use tools like these to continue your journey to the best operating model for your context? How do you make that model part of your growth and diversification story?

One tool for this is the Lighthouse Project we mentioned earlier. We find the best companies will initiate projects that have multiple internal and external impacts. And they will be a way to grow into the next phase of the OM.

Take for example the rationalisation of IT infrastructure at Amazon in the early 2000s. Amazon didn’t just embark on a refit of its IT systems. It set out to learn how to scale IT as its eCommerce business scaled exponentially.

In other words, a lighthouse project allowed it to radically improve scaling efficiency as well as build new business (AWS).

We design these Lighthouse Projects for clients as a way of scaling down their transformation programs so that they can skill up their capabilities in a new area that will become central to their operating model. They are also an opportunity to experiment with new ways to work.

The Lighthouse is not a pilot and nor is it a scrum project, prototype or an MVP. It is highly strategic.

That’s a very important point to take on board. We have seen MVPs create mayhem inside companies. Different parts of the business mean different things by minimum. And anyway, dozens of new projects are overwhelming.

Finding the right OM for the right sources of value. The Lighthouse is a tool for creating what we call a generative operating model.

OMs in the current climate have no fixed destination. You can’t convert your company to the Spotify Model or the ING model. You need to find out what works for you are each stage of change.

In other words, you need to generate an operating model through your value discovery and delivery activities. The Lighthouse is an important tool in doing this. It is a strategic design that encompasses your internal operations and ways of working, as well as your external face to the market.

What Flow teaches you is how to build up your remodelling skills by taking small steps with no great risk of project failure.

Flow codifies remodelling skills. It gives you the power to remodel an OM while creating new value. And doing those things quickly.

If you want to be ready for the Post-COVID world you need to speak to us.

Haydn Shaughnessy is a business economist and innovation expert who has consulted to some of the world’s leading organisations helping senior executives to plan the next-generation enterprise.

Fin Goulding is a world-class CTO/CIO who in the past five years has transformed into a business agility expert having worked for organisations like Visa, RBS, HSBC and digital startups such as lastminute.com and paddypower.com. Fin also coaches executives through the challenges of transformation.

Your first reaction to COVID might have been “it’s temporary”. But right now you need to figure out how to make permanent change happen fast. Here Haydn Shaughnessy looks at how Flow’s CATE Value Discovery methodology can be used as a tool for adapting to disruption.

Being in denial

Say you are managing a University or a sports’ club. What you have in common is attendance. People come to your campus or your stadium for some of the most important and uplifting events in their lives.

If you sell prestige cars, your showroom is where people conduct life affirming transactions. Showrooms are like stadiums, often on the periphery of cities, gleaming and important places to be seen. But car sales in the UK in April were down over 97%!

The value propositions of these systems of attendance have remained largely unchanged for decades.

We can see in these examples the industries that never quite made it to the digital table. The same goes for restaurants, cinemas, pubs and so on.

There are plenty of examples of slowly transforming companies. Can they discover new forms of value quickly? We believe Flow’s CATE value discovery method can help them do just that.

Systems of attendance

What many high value businesses have in common is scarcity value. 90,000 people can fit into the Bernabeu, but only 90,000. Good restaurants prosper by being able to turn people away. We know Harvard and Oxford are a ticket to a good career, that’s what makes restrictions on access a good revenue model.

The scarcity of strong reputation is what created high margins for businesses of attendance. Can you maintain scarcity when you take attendance away? Here’s the reason for asking.

Universities will have to put their businesses online but can they still charge reputationally high fees? Restaurants can do take-aways but can they maintain reputational pricing? Will soccer teams be able to charge premium broadcasting rates with atmosphere-free matches being played in half empty grounds?

These businesses and many more need to revisit the relationship between value, scarcity and price.

Coming out of denial

For the most part, a senior team believes it is on the only value journey suited to them, their culture and their products. But COVID’s impact is not going away.

To continue to survive, companies will have to transform to serve new customers with new needs. What does that mean in practice?

Satisfaction or success? In our experience, companies have often entered into a cosy relationship with core customers and while they will respond to their needs, they are not looking at new, emerging needs in the wider market. And while they want to do well by customers they don’t go to the next competitive level by figuring out how to bring them more success.

Broadening the asset base. They over-sweat their existing assets (University campuses, cinemas, restaurant kitchens, stadiums) with their existing customers and small adjacencies.

But they don’t look to the other assets they have, for example the wider market of people who want some engagement with them, the ones who don’t buy memorabilia or don’t pay for summer short courses or who get turned away on a Friday evening.

Innovation as gambling. When they innovate, they innovate for their existing customers not for the wider market. Or they innovate lamely by using lean iterations. Supposedly a fast way to test ideas, lean iterations usually mean too many projects get the green light without enough prior validation. It’s even been called making small bets..

Forgetting the ecosystem. Finally, how many of these businesses really look to an ecosystem? Ecosystem businesses look to integrate services across sector boundaries but also to do good for the community. They are not business as normal.

CATE Value Discovery

At Flow Academy, we’ve been working with this set of issues for over a decade. In our workshops we typically find people excited by a simple value wheel that they can engage with to think in new ways. It can help you now to ignite new value journeys.

There is a prerequisite for running CATE sessions. You need to segment the markets you are in or the markets you are interested in. We don’t validate innovation against our existing customers. We validate against the market. Markets change faster than our customers do.

Here’s a hypothetical case. Say you are a university with a marketable reputation. Your campus is now a liability because the normal levels of interaction that brings in profit is not going to be safe. What do you do?

Your first reaction is to say — we go online. But take that through the CATE cycle.

First, though, what is your market segmentation? Is it relatively wealthy parents with high aspirations for their children? Chances are you will now be competing for these with every university thinking of going online.

In fact your market segmentation will be deep and broad, encompassing a huge range of people who may want to access your assets for many different reasons, and at different price points.

With CATE, we encourage you to select a small number of these and work through the four points. How can I bring success to this (or these) segment(s)?

1. The C in CATE stands for Customer Success — how can I bring new kinds of success to customers’ lives? Perhaps education in the form of courseware is less significant to one segment than helping those people transition to a real time learning mindset. How can I define this as a set of success factors for customers? What are their outcomes and how can I make these imperative to customers?
2. The A stands for assets. How can I make maximum use of my existing assets? Amazingly most companies we deal with simply do not exploit the assets they have. Asking what assets I already have can make innovation very fast. But you need to be committed to discovery rather than just launching a new project!
3. The T is targeted innovation. We aim for innovations that are targeted enough that they don’t need to go through lengthy iterations. They come validated. If you’ve assessed your assets and don’t have critical features, ask what very specific innovations you need to make to bring this success to this segment of customers? That’s where you can target your product development.
4. Finally E stands for ecosystem. Who in my networks, or on the periphery of my business, can help get my innovations right and help start delivering value to those customers fast?

CATE gives you a way to get your people focused on value that’s close by but not yet captured through thinking about successful outcomes for customers, using assets that are lying idle, validating ideas and working with partners and interested parties who can help.

The requirement you face is more than just your revenue streams, though of course revenues will be top of mind. Once you reduce the significance of today’s prime assets, however, a new operating model is hugely important. We’ll be writing about that on Friday.

CATE is the centre point of what we call Value Discovery. And Value Discovery is just a part of what we do in Flow.

However, the more clients we work with, the more we realise that they are missing the fundamental building blocks to effect real transformation. Their starting point is wrong (e.g. IT agile) and their destination can be thwarted by change-averse people.

CATE sessions are a quick and incredibly productive way to reshape your thinking. They help draw out the collective intelligence of your people and point it at all the ways you can remodel your business around new sources of growth. And with COVID, all bets are off. Now ‘s the time to remodel your business or die.

In a series of three articles, Haydn Shaughnessy and I explore how the leadership in companies can find new business opportunities during the pandemic crisis to enhance their organisations or indeed help it to survive the coming months.

Now more than ever, it is time for leaders to engage in some rapid reflection on their roles and the need for personal transformation in order to get their companies back to prosperity.

Article 1 of 3: The COVID Leadership Change Curve

I have been a senior leader for as long as I can remember (maybe too long) having worked in a wide range of industries and in some powerful C-suite executive leadership teams.

However, I find myself now wondering whether or not we, as leaders, are being truly candid enough about modern day leadership and the qualities we’ll need to ensure our companies’ future success.

Today’s COVID situation and indeed tomorrow’s post-COVID conditions are going to pose some serious challenges to our leadership abilities. We put this chart together to show the path many of us will take over the coming months.

The basic point is we need to get to a new operating model, in very challenging times. The big question it poses for us is this one, are we managers or are we real leaders? Are we managers who wait for reports showing how tough times are or can we be the leaders that remodel our companies for future success?

It is very difficult to manage a dispersed, remote workforce but I truly believe that it is possible to lead in new ways. So, let’s look at that.

Like many of you, I have attended my fair share of leadership workshops but to my mind, they have all been predominantly theoretical because they do not teach us about what actually happens in leadership teams or what skills that are most important in times of crisis.

Here’s my list of drag factors as we face, up to enormous, sudden change:

Firstly, the standout emotion for me when observing leadership teams (the ones that manage rather than lead) is that we’re often on guard, cautious, even nervous and second-guessing because our own personal wealth, progress and status are at stake.

There can be some symbiotic alliances but ultimately the dynamic of the leadership team will gravitate towards scapegoating and finding the weak links that can take the rap for poor performance.

This creates inward-looking teams who rarely ask big questions of each other or about the future. They ask questions about past business performance. What are our sales numbers? How can we drive them higher? Not, what are the big new opportunities out there or how are we all feeling right now.

A second characteristic is that we are really just managers who wait for reports and stats. We have direct reports whose job is to work hard on those documents about past performance and hand them over to us for sign off. This creates a very transactional mindset.

A third point I notice is that leadership culture makes it difficult to be personally authentic, especially if you are an authentically compassionate, connective kind of person. You can be an authentic autocrat of course! But you cannot be authentically compassionate.

A final point. We leaders are natural mimickers of other people’s behaviour. We know from experience that mirroring gets us what we want and if you don’t believe me, talk to your sales team who have learned NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). That means we tend to be overprimed to be part of a consensus and at worst, sycophantic.

COVID changes these dynamics. The new dynamics Haydn and I have been thinking more about lately are:

• Being Connective
• Being Persuasive
• Being Supportive

These attributes will be crucial in a pandemic world. They are the attributes of a relational leadership style.

Being a connective leader gives the team confidence that the boss is in touch and networking people creatively, but also cares about them, has an eye on morale, and yet is ensuring that the work gets done. That last point is very reassuring.

The new leader also needs to be persuasive…. Well, the old tools of persuasion were often bad for morale anyway. Now we can’t cajole or threaten, we need to persuade people that we have a strong vision for them and that they and the business are safe with us.

But it depends on them opening up too. A lot of leaders have spent too much time telling team members to “be” collaborative rather than showing the connective, persuasive behaviour that makes collaboration happen.

Leadership agility is also about being supportive. Yes, this is more of a caring position — and what’s wrong with that! That has always been my position and always will. People right now need your support.

In the past we have been asked to be authentic but because we mimic our peers we have really only been given the chance to be authentically micro-managing, autocratic, or aggressive about the cold hard facts.

These new characteristics though speak to the point I started off by making. Leadership teams have the knack of not being completely honest about the business or with each other. They have those introspective, distrustful, backward looking habits. That’s not sustainable in the COVID world.

By working on these new skills leaders can learn to be more open and honest. They can show compassion to each other too.

It is essential now that we are authentic about compassion. The people who work with us are at home, stressed, anxious, fearful for the future. Their families are listening in and observing us too. If we can’t show compassion we will lose their trust and cooperation. We have to be relational and understand the wider picture of their lives.

We also have an opportunity to be less consensual and more challenging so that we’re ready for what’s to come. For the first time, for some of us, we have to ask big questions. How can we create a whole new chunk of business to replace what we are going to lose? We have to be brave.

And to that point, where are you on my COVID Leadership Change curve? Some of you will be near the bottom and I feel for you. I’ve been there in other crises. However, we will talk in the next two articles about what it takes to climb the curve.

But finally, we have to be busy leaders in a different way. Our team members and direct reports will go crazy if they keep having to create reports to send to us.

In fact, we can start talking to those people as the decent, worried human beings they are and not just resources. We can get them together, virtually, and take advantage of their collective intelligence to figure out what big opportunities we can chase down, and how to explore them.

Many of the leadership teams which I’ve been a member of had the first three characteristics; anxious not to be the fall guy, inward-looking and backwards-looking, managing not really leading at all.

Now we have to be real, relational and we have to be brave. We can and must lead instead of managing.