Most organisations recognise the need to be more customer-obsessed, however few understand what is required to become customer-obsessed.

It was now almost fifty years ago that Peter Drucker said “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence.”

However most internal practices within an organisation do not have line of sight to an end customer and often service internal needs.

If you are able to create alignment within a team about who the customer is, what matters to them and why you are trying to serve them – that is a good start.

Having a mechanism to measure what matters to your customers and your organisation is important.

While the commercial drivers that support running any business (revenue, cost, compliance, etc.) are important, setting short to medium term goals focussed on changing customer behaviours as a leading indicator is critical.

Set goals that promote introducing small changes directly to customers, to validate if you are doing the right thing. This naturally favours a more hypothesis-driven approach to validating customer needs.

Being able to quickly shift or respond to customer behaviour, will support longer-term decision making about where and how to invest time, effort and money.

The role of a leader in an adaptive organisation often represents a shift in how they would have lead organisations to-date. There is a noticeable change from the Leader as the expert, to the Leader as a servant.

Without proper support and coaching, they may struggle to adapt to the changing nature of what their teams need from them. To best support these leaders, be specific and measured about what they do and do not need to do.

Have conversations about their role in:

• Decision making – what they can now take away vs. what they need to hold onto
• Empowering teams – stepping into support vs. stepping away
• Sign-offs – signing-up to outcomes delivered vs. signing-off on each change

There is no cookie-cutter playbook or method for successful agile adoption. The context in which each organisation plays in will also vary (the same as every individual team).

Enter into this change with an understanding of the current parameters, constraints or deliberate choices about what matters to the organisation and what can or cannot be shifted.

Openly discussing and assessing on a sliding scale where your organisation currently sits and where they would like to be, across a range of dimensions (example below), will help shape what your adoption or change might look like.

Having agreement on what dimensions can be impacted and to what benefit is incredibly powerful in order to gain alignment to the common goal and purpose, and useful to manage perceptions and communications of the direction the organisation is heading.

Rather than creating a prescriptive approach or method, telling individuals and teams exactly how to do their work, establish a set of principles or descriptive parameters. Then encourage the right behaviours and provide freedom in how people work.

Create alignment within a team to sign-up to these principles and make them contextual to how you plan, communicate, execute and celebrate.

Examples of things to consider building principles around could include:

• Do we need to keep alignment in purpose and cadence across our organisation?
• How we handle initiatives when they are not delivering the desired outcome?
• How do we want to collaborate and work together?
• How transparent do we want to be?