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Business Agility Foundation

ICP-BAF

Stay Ahead and Embrace Business Agility

Understanding business agility is essential to navigate today’s complex and fast-paced business environment. It enables organizations to adapt, innovate, and respond effectively to changes, maximizing their chances of success, growth, and sustainability.

Our Business Agility Foundations course can benefit your professional growth, leadership abilities, and competitiveness. It empowers you to drive organizational success, navigate uncertainty, foster collaboration, and elevate your career.

What You'll Learn:

  • Understand the importance of business agility in today’s dynamic and competitive business environment. Explore the drivers and benefits of adopting an agile approach for organizational success and adaptability.
  • Develop a growth mindset that fosters innovation, resilience, and continuous learning within your organization. Learn techniques to embrace challenges, value feedback, and seek opportunities for growth and improvement.
  • Acquire the knowledge and skills to implement and sustain business agility practices effectively. Explore agile methodologies, frameworks, and organizational structures that enable flexibility, collaboration, and responsiveness. Discover approaches to overcome challenges and promote a culture of adaptability.
  • Gain practical insights into developing action plans and using tools to accelerate business agility. Learn to identify and prioritize areas for improvement, create actionable strategies, and leverage tools and technologies that enhance agility.

Our course is a dynamic 2-day workshop or five engaging 3-hour online sessions, leading to a Professional Certification in Business Agility Foundations with Agile People and ICAgile.

Why Choose This Training

Embrace Business Agility to stay ahead and be current; you must be able to navigate the ever-changing business landscape no matter what level you work at. Gain new knowledge, capabilities, and a strong network while enjoying a stimulating learning experience.

Our interactive group sessions encourage sharing experiences, discussions, and hands-on learning through our Learning Management System (LMS).

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to update your knowledge. Sign up today and unlock new skills, practical tools, and possibilities for success!

Business Agility
Foundations
Other Courses Or Programs

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This course is part of these programs

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HR Program

Target Audience

Leaders

Leaders at all levels who see the value of growing a flexible, fast-paced organization that can quickly adjust to rapid changes in the Business Landscape.

Consultants

Consultants that want to deepen their agile understanding to support customers in agile transformations better.

Agile Coaches

Agile coaches want to learn about Business Agility to support the organization and grow team performance and delivery.

HR

HR professionals at all levels want to enhance Business Agility, provide a superior employee experience and use agile methods to meet the needs of their organization.

Agile People

Curious individuals who want to understand Busienss Agility to seek growth and new challenges and believe in people-centric organizations.

What Differentiates Our Courses & Training Programs

Interactive Learning

Our approach emphasizes interactive group work, enabling participants to learn from one another through shared experiences and knowledge during engaging group discussions.

Professional Certificate

The course leads to a Professional Certification with Agile People and ICAgile. To ensure top-quality learning experiences against proven Learning Outcomes, our courses are accredited by ICAgile, a leading global agile accreditation and certification body.

Agile People Campus

With both the online and in-person workshop, you will gain access to our Learning Management System (LMS), where you can delve into the theory and acquire in-depth knowledge of the subject matter at your phase.

Practical Tools And A New Network

The training will teach you new skills and practical tools while establishing valuable connections. As part of our commitment to your agile journey, we organize regular events to enrich your learning experience further.

Find A Business Agility Foundations Course Or Program

At Agile People, we consistently offer online training sessions and in-person workshops. Our dedication is to ensure that every participant gains the knowledge and skills they seek, whether they’re joining us virtually or in person.

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Across the globe, our licensed, experienced trainers deliver our training courses and programs with the same dedication, and we are proud to have this global footprint. They frequently offer instruction in their native languages for localized understanding and relevance.

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More Course Information

Course Description

The online and in-person workshops cover ten key topics and are described more in detail in our Course Description.

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Three Perspectives

The training covers three perspectives; Individual (you), team (we in our group), and organizational (all of us).

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Learning Outcomes

ICAgile accredits our courses and programs, and all our courses have a detailed learning outcome.

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e-mail: training@agilepeople.com

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Course Description

This course is divided into five engaging sessions. 

Business Agility Foundations

Session B1: The Need for Business Agility

In today’s Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) environment, business agility is increasingly critical for success. The new competitive edge is the new values and principles and self-organizing teams with the right mix of diverse people working close to the customers’ experience and empowered to make decisions.

Session B2: Emergent Strategy and Value Creation

Aligning teams around a vital purpose and focusing on generating a vision is essential to providing inspiration and creating high performance. It’s imperative to empathize with customers to maximize customer value and make it visible to focus on value creation.

Session B3: Frameworks Tools and Techniques

Agile is about adapting to change. You adapt to the customers’ changing needs and work according to priorities to deliver the customer’s most significant value early. Using a Lean StartUp approach, you can test your hypothesis with a Minimum Viable Product. Using Scrum, Kanban, and Value Stream Mapping in the whole company differs from using them for Software development. What are examples, and how can you design your processes using agile working methods?

Session B4: New Ways of Thinking and Behaving

Recognizing and understanding complex adaptive system dynamics accelerates the path toward Business Agility. It is not only our organization’s dynamics that we should understand and manage with “Polarity Management” and “Cynefin Decision Making Model”; but also our thinking & behaving patterns by the concept of the “Ladder of Inference.”

Session B5: Business Agility as the New Normal

In today’s fast-moving and complex environments, we need to be more responsive and adaptable to navigate the complexity. To do that, we need to:

  • Understand how to make sense of business challenges when things keep changing
  • Be able to make decisions and act when we don’t have all the information we feel we need
  • Create the conditions to allow the right culture to grow for everyone to perform at their best. In this session, we will recap the impact on business.

Due to our VUCA world, we will explore what is needed in the business to embrace agility, deepen understanding about the structure/culture misfit, and why transformation can fail.

Talent Acqusition

Learning Outcomes - Business Agility Foundation

Setting The Scene For Business Agility

Awareness: The Need For Business Agility 

  • Business Agility: Drivers and Criticality   
    • In today’s environment of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA), business agility is more and more critical for success. Illustrate the core foundational concepts of Business Agility in relevant business contexts.
  • Business Agility: Values, Principles and Dimensions
    • Business agility requires an enduring foundation of new values and principles in order to be persistent.
    • Clarify values and principles and why they are important enablers of building organizational intelligence; Describe the role of these values and principles in cultivating new ways of thinking and working.
  • Case for Change: Empowering Teams
    • Self-organizing teams with the right mix of cognitively diverse people who are closest to the customer experience and empowered to make decisions are the new competitive edge. These teams are able to lead innovation and continuously learn how to better create value to delight customers and stakeholders.
    • Convey that critical success factors include trust, safety, collaboration, cohesion, autonomy, mastery and purpose as well as new levels of individual accountability and responsibility for collective team success and value creation.
  • Case for Change: Customer Value and Continuous Learning
    • Success requires the ability not only to understand your customers, but also to solve problems they might not even know they have. Delighting the customer is key in today’s hyperconnected world.
    • Grasp why and how to shift focus from “outputs” to outcomes by eliminating waste, doing less, and accelerating innovation. Communicate why creating disruptive outcomes in today’s volatile economy requires real-time knowledge generation as well as radical new ways of thinking and working.

Compelling Vision, Focus, And Clarity Of Purpose

  • Compelling Vision and Clarity of Purpose
    • Aligning teams and organizations around a vision and strong sense of purpose is essential to enable high-performance. It also provides a key source of inspiration, engagement, commitment, and organizational cohesion.
    • Communicate the importance of aligning organizations around a crisp, believable, compelling, and inspiring vision and to experience methods for creating such visions and clear purposes.
  • Focusing on the Big Picture and Emerging Future as an Agile Business
    • On the journey to business agility, focusing on the big picture and generating a vision of what the future will look like can help an organization plan backwards to identify the steps to make it happen. This includes the new skills and abilities necessary.
    • Envision the future state of business agility, then learn ways to look backwards from that future to craft a compelling path to attain it including new capabilities, skills, behaviors, practices, that need to be acquired (and why). Participants will also gain an understanding of why and how to use this activity with their teams.
  • Understanding Customers, Stakeholders, Businesses, and Emerging Markets
    • Fundamentally, value is subjective to each customer. Therefore, it is imperative that business agilists understand how to identify and empathize with their customers in order to deliver differentiating value and customer experiences.
    • Explain the values, principles, tools, and techniques needed to develop empathy and improve awareness of customer and stakeholder context. Customer Empathy is a vital capability grounded in customer focus. Tools such as persona maps, customer journey maps, empathy maps, customer value propositions, and business model canvas can be applied with an emphasis on “the why.” Also, participants should identify that everyone in the organization between them and the customer is an internal customer. It is important to focus on business value throughout this chain and cultivate the concept of “we all win together”, linking customer value, stakeholder value, and business value.

Enabling Business Agility

New Ways Of Thinking 

  • Developing a Growth Mindset
    • Adopting a growth mindset (the belief that talents and abilities are not static but can be developed and improved) is paramount for achieving Business Agility.
    • Describe the attributes of a growth mindset in contrast to the limitations of a fixed mindset in the Business Agility context. A growth mindset is important as a foundation for developing resilience and thriving in the face of uncertainty. Also, introduce the concept of reframing failure as an opportunity to learn
  • Blind Spots, Mental Models, Patterns, and Sense Making
    • Business Agility requires a whole new way of thinking about work and reducing the cost of value. When we recognize our organization as a complex system, many traditional management models no longer serve us but actually constrain our effectiveness. In the same way, as change agents, it is important to recognize how our own mental models may include blind spots that hold us back.
    • Recognize that blind spots and mental biases exist and understand the role that our mental models play in shaping our perceptions and beliefs. Change agents need to identify and understand these patterns of behavior in themselves before reframing them to better address our business needs. Participants can apply the skills needed to examine mental models and how individuals ‘make meaning’ by generating patterns filtered from experiences, beliefs, and values. It looks at ways to slow down thinking processes to generate awareness, then form and reinforce new mental models.
  • Relationship Between Complexity and Business Agility
    • The ability to recognize and understand complex system dynamics accelerate the change process and the path toward Business Agility. Provide an overview of the field of complex adaptive systems and complexity theory while providing practical awareness of relevant management models (e.g., systems dynamics [Peter Senge & Jay Forrester], Complex Adaptive Systems [Glenda Eoyang, Ralph Stacey, et al], Cynefin [Dave Snowden], Theory of Constraints [Eli Goldratt]).
  • Recognizing and Managing Dilemmas, Paradoxes, and Polarities
    • Many of the recurring problems in today’s volatile and complex business environments are actually unsolvable. Polarity Management provides a practical approach to effective resolution of dilemmas, paradoxes, and polarities to help us identify and manage these unsolvable problems. It stresses the importance of recognizing when situations don’t have solutions and uses both/and vs. either/or thinking.
    • Distinguish polarities (dilemmas, paradigms, and paradoxes) from traditional problems and learn to see the relationship between the poles with the goal of optimizing the wins and minimizing the losses. This is done by practicing both/ and thinking vs. the more traditional either/or thinking. In addition, cultivating a both/and mindset has deeper benefits with respect to collaboration and relationship-building.

New And Differentiating Behaviors 

  • Ask vs. Tell: High-Performance Questions
    • High Performance Questions are an effective tool for enabling Business Agility. They motivate fresh thinking and challenge outdated assumptions. A powerful question comes from a place of curiosity, stimulates reflective thinking, invites challenges to assumptions, invites creativity/insight and explores new possibilities.
    • Define high-performance questions, give examples of the power they have towards enhancing organizational outcomes and discuss techniques for using them as often as possible in day-to-day conversations.
  • Making Value Visible
    • Defining and generating value is at the heart of Business Agility. Effective value management requires identification of marginal, negative, and non-value value tasks. For optimal success, organizations need practices not only to define value clearly but also to make it visible.
    • Emphasize that value is only delivered through the completion of a new or improved functional slice of work that is implemented and delivered to a customer for use. Moreover, valuable learning occurs once a product or feature is in the hands of customers who can use it and provide feedback.
  • Experimenting and Hypothesis
    • Testing Business Agilists need to demonstrate a bias for action. Results need to be empirically measured to determine actual vs. planned benefits to inform pivot vs. persevere decisions.
    • Understand why and how to identify small, discrete opportunities, then craft hypotheses in order to frame relevant experiments. This requires comfort with quick action and forgoing traditional practices of upfront design that often create waste, extend cycle time, and contribute to “analysis paralysis.” Participants will come away understanding why and how rapid experimentation accelerates learning and business agility.
  • Complex Dynamics of Change, Polarities, Systemic Problems, and Disruptive Threats
    • Agile businesses thrive in changing environments. However, preconceptions about change and fear of loss can lead to significant tension and resistance. Learning how to engage individuals, teams, and the organization to embrace and co-create change is critical to an effective transformation and requires courage, resilience, and persistence.
    • Experience the complex dynamics involved when creating sustainable change and the reason why individuals and organizations (as systems) deeply resist it. It is also key to understanding lean change practices and why co-creating change is essential. Describe and discuss change frameworks, polarity management frameworks, and what makes them effective. Highlight how to reframe disruptive threats as strategic opportunities.

Implementing And Sustaining Business Agility

Frameworks, Tools, And Techniques 

  • Lean Systems Thinking
    • A lean systems perspective creates a direct, quantifiable link between the business goals and changes actions.
    • Learn why a lack of end-to-end systems thinking and a failure to focus on value throughout the organization leads to waste and ineffective outcomes. A Lean Systems Approach enables business agility by focusing on strategic goals, measuring value, defining a practical course of action, exposing and eliminating waste, enabling rapid decisions, learning with quantitative analysis and empirical data, and supporting teams to generate and sustain knowledge. The systems perspective of lean focuses on end-to-end value creation and ensures that every improvement action enhances overall business performance instead of isolated gains.
  • Lean Startup and Canvases
    • The Lean Startup framework and emerging body of canvases and templates provide a practical framework for rapidly validating innovative ideas for possible new business models or process improvements.
    • Introduce concepts and applications of the Build – Measure – Learn framework for dealing with uncertainty. Participants will also learn about minimal viable products, thin slices, and the benefits of “failing fast” to succeed sooner.
  • Design Thinking Approaches
    • Understanding why and how to apply design thinking can accelerate organizational effectiveness and business agility.
    • Apply the concepts of design thinking and focus on new ways of thinking about elements of a product or solution that evolve around the customer: people, technology, and business. Design thinking is “a human-centered approach to innovation” that draws from the designer’s toolkit to recognize and integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
  • Flow-based Values and Systems
    • “The kanban method is highly conducive to building learning organizations and is best understood through its values: understanding, agreement, respect, leadership, flow, customer focus, transparency, balance, and collaboration. This manifests in 4 key practices:
      1. visualize the workflow and display progress,
      2. lead using a team approach,
      3. reduce the Batch Size of your efforts and limit work-in-progress, and
      4. learn and improve continuously. ” Provide an understanding of the key values and practices of kanban, along with ideas on why and how to apply these values.
  • Iterative Framework and Sampling of Practices
    • Iterative frameworks promote discovery and delivery at frequent intervals, which accelerates learning and value creation. Understand and use iterative frameworks and how they accelerate learning and discovery.

 

Business Agility As The New Normal 

  • Creating Space for Optimal Engagement and Value Creation
    • Each person involved in an Agile organization works most effectively if the environment encourages a focus on what is really important. People need to feel safe enough to innovate, challenge outdated practices, experiment, and take ownership of continuous learning.
    • Analyze what a business agility environment and learning ecosystem look like and why it is vital in a VUCA world. Participants devise strategies to create an environment that enables value creation, rapid decision-making, and optimized execution.
  • Action Plans and Tools to Accelerate Business Agility
    • Reflecting on Business Agility capabilities and practices and synthesizing workshop learnings into actionable and practical workbooks, business agility toolkits, action plans, and personal development plans. This reinforces the importance of continuous and emergent learning, which is vital to sustainable Business Agility.
    • Reflect on and synthesize key learnings in the unique context of each participant’s experience, work structures, and challenges. The goal of this is to extend Business Agility mastery and learning beyond the course.
  • Continually Reinventing
    • Business Agility is a journey, not a destination. It requires ongoing and continual reinvention.
    • Identify and explain ways in which the participants can make the ongoing application of business agility part of the habitual way of working in their organizations.
  • Measures of Success
    • Being able to pivot quickly is essential to creating value. Having the right leading indicators and a value-based approach to metrics are incredibly useful in this pursuit.
    • Communicate the importance of learning agility and how empirical data and relevant, actionable metrics support real learning. Learners should also understand the limitations of lagging indicators and excessive metrics that do not drive the right behaviors. Setting adaptive and continuously improving measures of success based on leading indicators and “metrics that matter” is an important foundational business agility activity.
  •  

The Training Cover Three Perspectives:

 

Individual
Perspective​

You

  • Knowing yourself and why you do what you do.
  • Developing yourself and understanding biases, mind traps, and how to avoid judging.
  •  Communicating effectively using storytelling and visualization are powerful tools.
  • Coaching others to find their perfect place in the organization taking their personality, interests, and passions into account.

Team
Perspective

We
In Our Team

  • How to increase the pace from immature to mature high-performing teams, using skills for communication, leading, coaching, and conflict resolution.
  • How to grow and develop teams to be independent and empowered to make their own decisions, for example, about their contribution to the organization’s goals or salaries.

Organizatinal
Perspective

All
Of Us

  • How to balance an agile culture with an agile structure, providing enough support for emerging strategies where all people are involved in setting the direction.
  • How to work to change behaviors by removing limiting structures like annual budgets linked to fixed performance targets and individual bonuses.
  • Create conditions for a Learning organization where it’s ok to make mistakes and learn from them, which requires a platform of Psychological Safety.

Glad you want to learn more!

Hello! I am Ingela, and I work with the core team at Agile People. I’d love to connect woth you and explore potential solutions.

You can write me an email or schedule a meeting to discuss further!

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