Managing change. Speed with stability leads to agility

Every company today is investing in transforming itself into an agile organisation to deal with uncertainties. However, it’s speed with stability that holds the key to agility, according to Michael Bazigos, Managing Director & Global Leader for Talent & Organisational Analytics, Accenture Strategy.

Speed without stability can lead to chaotic growth, according to Accenture’s quadrant on velocity and adaptiveness (see chart). Good examples are startups that move at break-neck speed but with no processes in place.

The other two positions on the quadrant are taken up by Plodders, who have structure minus the speed, and those with neither speed nor stability who are classified as “at risk”. The plodders have process and people maturity – but perhaps too much of it. “Another name for plodders is bureaucratic,” says Bazigos.

“We developed a 13-question survey – 11 are predictive – on how agile a company is in our classification system. It measures companies in values that may seem to be opposite of each other – speed versus stability,” explains Bazigos

Most people will go for speed. And say oh stability, I can’t have that if I am to be speedy. And yet, 48 per cent of the companies that Accenture surveyed (300 companies on the Fortune 1000 list) were placed on the top quadrant. The companies which had neither speed nor stability were 11 per cent.

“Agile organisations can master the art of having sufficient structure to have stability to move with incredible speed,” he says.

Prescriptive vs predictive

Accenture uses prescriptive analytics to help companies in their transformation journey towards agility.

The distinction between predictive vs prescriptive analytics, says Bazigos, is that predictive analytics answers the question “what will happen”. Prescriptive analytics answers the question “how will it happen”.

“For a long time we had an analytical capability that answers the first question but not the second,” says Bazigos. But now using special survey data, Accenture locates companies on a map with four performance zones – the higher north a company is, the higher the odds for better performance. Most of its clients ended up somewhere in the middle, with a few placing far south.

Not only were we able to show them where they were on the map, but also the conditional probability of their moving up and down and sideways, he says.

Asking the right questions

During the special survey, employees are asked all sorts of questions in areas that Accenture terms as “drivers of change” (there are 10 of these). These range from impressions about team leadership, structure, skills and staffing (whether sufficient), tools and so on.

“Some of the questions are about emotions. Most surveys do not ask about emotions. But we ask about fear and frustration. And we also collect data on passion and drive,” says Bazigos.

These may sound contradictory but they are related, he explains. For it is possible to be so passionate that you get frustrated when you cannot bring about the change you want. High performance is usually accompanied by high passion.

A call for action

“Nobody can survey the way to health. You have to survey to inform to action. And action is where it is at,” says Bazigos. So Accenture created an extra layer of algorithm based on all of its data.

“Now we have the ability to identify mathematically which of the ten drivers the companies can use, in which sequence and over what time periods to usher change,” says Bazigos.

According to him, it is quite tricky as there are over one trillion possible combinations . Each driver has 16 possibilities. So it is 16 raised to the power of ten permutations and combinations which total up to a trillion.

Of the over 250 companies it surveyed (many of them from India as well), only between 10 and 15 per cent were placed on the high north of high performance. “Eighty-five per cent companies have an opportunity to improve by taking advantage of prescriptive analytics,” says Bazigos. So how can they do that?

Diagnosis and cure

“Analytics give us a top-down diagnosis. Roughly what the shape of the problem is. Then we supplement that with rich ethno methodology to understand what exactly is going on in those organisations,” he says.

Engagement teams are sent to collect rich data on critical moments in an organisation that people identify with.

From the other survey work it did on agile organisations, Accenture had drawn up characteristics of agile firms which are probed.

For instance, an outcome of companies being agile is not just financial success, but that people are unwilling to leave. When this aspect was probed deeper, Accenture found that there were three things that led to high employee loyalty.

The first was the impression that an employee has of a manager. This corresponded with Gallup data that 43 per cent engagement is dictated by one’s manager.

The second one was the opportunity to grow in one’s career. And the third was the development of employees.

Quality of leadership also dictates how agile a company is. How much autonomy is given to employees, how high is the trust placed in them and so on.

And it takes very little to topple agile companies – a change in leadership could do that. So, achieving agility is not enough, it’s important to maintain it as well.

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