How agile leaders accelerate innovation

Agile leaders can accelerate action when needed, as they and their teams sense the opportunities and threats around them. This leads to entrepreneurial opportunism – making the right choices, understanding where to invest innovation efforts to meet current or future customer needs, quickly.

They appreciate the need to experiment, to fail fast if that is the result of the experiment, and to learn to improve the odds the next time. They obsess about getting better, about continuous improvement, with an intolerance of waste and a desire to minimise time to serve the customer.

In an era of big data, they practice the critical interpretation of data to see the patterns, to learn about what colleagues and customers want, and what motivates their behaviour. This focus on learning, getting better every day, and assimilating new ways of thinking, being and performing, is at the heart of the agile leader’s mindset.

A key benefit of agile leadership is to accelerate innovation and improvement. Whether it is the pace of new product development or the speed of process improvement, increasing velocity is a key goal of agile ways of working. At the heart of this acceleration of benefit is learning – without a deep-seated culture of learning it is difficult to find the ways to increase productivity or remove barriers to delivery.

A key benefit of agile leadership is to accelerate innovation and improvement. Whether it is the pace of new product development or the speed of process improvement, increasing velocity is a key goal of agile ways of working. At the heart of this acceleration of benefit is learning – without a deep-seated culture of learning it is difficult to find the ways to increase productivity or remove barriers to delivery.

If you can create an organisational culture where learning is front and centre, you will become more innovative. The key is to replace fear with a thirst for improvement. Review progress regularly and identify areas for improvement. This can help create a cycle of continuous improvement which fuels productivity and builds employee capability.

Agile working needs you to have a ‘growth mindset’ in your organisation. If you have team members with growth mindsets they will be more open to challenges and constructively critical feedback, more resilient in the face of obstacles and initial failure, convinced that effort makes a difference, able to learn well and from others and more likely to rise to the top, and stay there. You need to encourage your colleagues to adopt a growth mindset, as it helps create a learning culture which supports agile working.

If you want to drive innovation and improvement across the whole customer experience, you first need to create the climate where learning is valued more than avoiding mistakes. If this is in place, you need to increase the level of experimentation that is going on throughout the organisation. The quantum is more important than the absolute quality at this stage, as you want people to be seeking new ways to add value and taking small risks to find out if they work.

Key to all of this is having a culture which supports people in taking sensible risks, learning, and applying that learning to new opportunities and challenges. Teams of mixed capabilities are well placed to drive innovation based on their diverse experience and training, helping to refine the outcomes through open dialogue and shared decision making.

Innovative leaders are keen to learn from the outside. They enjoy meeting other business leaders, speakers, authors, and academics, and are seeking to learn something they can use in their own business. Many are hungry to learn, and you can almost see them linking someone else’s experience or insights to their own business, seeing how it can help them be more successful.

Innovation is a disruptive process, creating novelty and changing how things work. Through innovation, businesses can create new value for customers by adapting existing products and services or creating new ones that either revolutionise or disrupt existing markets.

For truly agile leaders, the priority for innovation is in making it customer-driven. Agile innovation is all about being focused on what your customers want most, and prioritising activity to concentrate on the activities that will meet that ‘want’ as fully as possible, as quickly as possible.

It is helpful to check if your organisation’s investment in learning and development shares this focus on customer needs. In terms of innovation, it is essential that this focus is clear, and it needs to be on both your products or services and on how you deliver these to the customer. Agile innovation is about starting without knowing necessarily the outcome, focusing on the highest priority customer problems to solve, and working intelligently to solve these together.

A helpful way to conceive introducing a more agile customer experience through innovation is to review the journey your customers take in dealing with your organisation. Customers have multiple touch points, and these create opportunities for innovation and improvement, either by re-engineering the process to reduce time or to increase customer enjoyment, or by reordering the touch points to create a more positive experience. Customers now expect from all suppliers the same kind of speed, personalisation, and convenience that they receive from leading online providers such as Google and Amazon.

Leaders are powerful role models. It is helpful for every leader to ask him or herself the following questions:

1. How open to learning am I?

2. Do I encourage people to experiment or avoid mistakes?

3. Do I welcome challenge and encourage debate?

If leaders are more open to learning and experimentation, they are more likely to boost innovation across entire organisations – which benefits both colleagues and customers.