Adesegun is an IT executive and business leader with two decades industry experience across various sectors. Robust professional experience over the years, leading and delivering digital transformation, enterprise agility, innovation, strategic business/technology alignment, and portfolio/ projects across multiple geographies and diverse cultural environments across the globe. Adesegun is an experienced and certified Enterprise Agile Coach and a thought leader who is passionate about the Organisational/ Commercial advantage of Agile & Digital Transformation, helping organisations and teams embark and progress on Agile/ Digital Transformation for organisational/ business impact. Speaker at multiple events and has received multiple awards, recognising his contribution and impact in Business Transformation. Awarded Chartered status by the British Computer Society (BCS), United Kingdom, and Canada’s Association of IT Professionals (CIPS). Actively involved in the coaching and mentoring of young professionals and a volunteer certification assessor of the British Computer Society. Adesegun is an MBA graduate of the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. He recently won the CIO & C-Suite Africa CIO Awards (2023) and the BAT Empowerment Award (2024) for Digital Transformation and Innovation Leadership.
The Case & Context
Many leaders agree that an important attribute they look out for when evaluating talents for senior leadership positions is emotional intelligence. While social and intelligence quotients are important, individuals with high emotional quotients have a higher chance of being successful in leading other individuals.
In today’s world, businesses and organisations seeking success now and into the future will have to focus more on their consumers, raising their consumer quotient in a similar way that the emotional quotient plays in the case of individual success. Of course, the product and people quotients are important, but consumers are now increasingly having more say in an organisation’s success and sustainability.
Delivering innovation with speed to ensure a two-way business-consumer value delivery, having the courage to do better than competition, being innovative, trying and failing safely, creating a psychologically safe space for people to feel comfortable bringing their ideas to the table, and having the right level of autonomy are all key ingredients to living an agile enterprise.
The industrial revolution, from mechanisation in the 18th century through the technological evolution of the 19th and 20th centuries to the DIGITAL AGE of the 21st century, compels organisations to become more agile, understand changing and fragmented consumer needs, and leverage technology and digital as one means to gain and sustain commercial advantage.
It’s a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world and as Jeff Bezos put it “the only sustainable advantage you can have over others is AGILITY. That’s it. Because nothing else is sustainable, everything else you create, somebody else will replicate”. This further underlines the need for enterprise agility.
Companies that have embarked and progressing on their agile transformation journey through an improved way of working (breaking silos, taking an economic view of products value etc), empowering their people and strongly using digital & technology as a means of agility and consumer focus have experienced exponential impact on business results.
Leadership; The Start Point
Leadership and a clear sense of purpose are key to success. Seeking agility or an agile transformation for the sake of it is a sure recipe for failure. Hence, the need for the leaders of an organisation to evaluate its current state and determine if the business will benefit from an agile transformation – a burning platform or visionary leadership. There are quite a number of tools that can help an organisation evaluate different aspects of the business to come to a position.
Once the need is established, it’ll be helpful to set up a Drive team and champions, consisting of members who are respected and influential across the different functions of the organisation, given the broad direction from the leadership, to take the transformation forward.
Engaging with a wider team, the drive team and champions define the focus areas for the transformation, creating a roadmap and sustaining the energy and engagement across the organisation through the journey.
Also important for leadership to empower the teams and commit to resources and funding the agile transformation.
Hit The Bull’s Eye!
Aligned to its strategy, every organisation/ business starting on its transformation journey will have to define the focus areas of most impact and benefits for agility. Not cast in stones, as achievements are being recorded in specific areas, the priorities can be recalibrated through the journey. The important thing is to ensure that the desired results are being achieved.
Commonly, the focus areas for Agility are seen across 4 themes: Customer Centricity, Speed to Market, Operational Efficiency/ Productivity, and People Empowerment/ Engagement. A closer look at each area below.
Consumer Centricity: Businesses look for opportunities to understand their consumers/ customers better and make better decisions on products and offerings for consumer and commercial advantage. It’s about driving meaningful engagement between brands and consumers, building and leveraging data assets, stimulating and delivering innovation and making consumers/ customers advocates of their brands.
Speed to Market: For many industries, time matters! It has been seen to be beneficial to organisations to go to the market with a minimum viable product for fast customer feedback and incremental product improvement over time. Taking the features with the most value first. Taking an economic view optimises value for the consumer/ customer and the business. Waiting to get all the facts right before going to market has been proven not to optimise value for businesses. Organisations that have embraced the ‘done is better than perfect’ and innovative mindset have created significant wins in the marketplace.
Operational Efficiency/ Productivity: It’ll be difficult for organisations that seek the previous two focus areas to attain a significant level of success without an adequate level of operational efficiency to create and sustain them. Organisations seek to make their business processes smarter through digital & automation for improved productivity and efficiency – minimising process length, reducing or eliminating bureaucracy, and minimising human errors that can impede the flow of work & value.
People Empowerment/ Engagement: Perhaps, the most important of the 4 focus areas, here mentioned. Organisations are as smart and innovative as their people. The need to ensure the right people understand and are empowered along the transformation journey cannot be over-emphasised. A clear people engagement & communication strategy, capability development plan and drive for actualisation are key to success.
Strategic Alignment & Delivery Across The Value Chain
For strategic agility and optimised value, the delivery across the focus areas can be managed through a synchronised planning and cadence, having cross-functional teams across each focus area, with a sponsor or product owner for each value stream.
The value stream approach offers the advantage of effective coordination, improved transparency and flow, effective management of risks and dependencies, predictability and flexibility on deliverables based on business dynamics as well as a clear line of funding and financial management. This provides the organisation/ business a clear view of its performance against its strategic objectives per time and the platform to drive great results, closing any gaps. Often, the CEO (or delegate) has an overall ownership of the value portfolio or program.
This approach de-emphasises functional silos and promotes collaboration, innovation, and speed to delivery.
Conclusion
In the digital era, organisations that are more consumer-focused will have a higher chance of being successful for now into the future. Consumer preferences are fast-changing and fragmented, partly because of the enormity of data available at their fingertips.
This requires organisations to become more agile in meeting consumer needs. Doing things in the old way is certainly not the way to be nimble as an organisation. Therefore, an organisational mindset shift in terms of being agile in the ways of working and people empowerment and capability building are essential in today’s business world.
Also, very crucial is gaining agility through the intelligent application of technology & digital for business advantage as we have seen many organisations amplify their agility and business outcomes through this means.