ICAgile Business Agility Foundations (ICP-BAF)

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• Communicate the importance of aligning organizations around a crisp, believable, compelling, and inspiring vision
• Convey that the experience of Aligning teams and organizations around a vision or clear purposes provides a key source of inspiration, engagement, commitment, and organizational cohesion.
• Envision the future state of business agility, then learn ways to look backward from that future to craft a compelling path to attain it. Ways include new capabilities, skills, behaviors, and practices that must be acquired (and why).
• Participants will also understand why and how to use this activity with their teams.
• Explain the values, principles, tools, and techniques needed to develop empathy and improve customer and stakeholder context-awareness.
• Identify that everyone in the organization between them and the customer is an internal customer.

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• Describe the attributes of a growth mindset in contrast to the limitations of a fixed mindset in the Business Agility context.
• Introduce the concept of reframing failure as an opportunity to learn.
• Recognize that blind spots and mental biases exist and understand the role that our mental models play in shaping our perceptions and beliefs.
• Apply the skills needed to examine mental models and how individuals 'make meaning' by generating patterns filtered from experiences, beliefs, and values.
• Look at ways to slow down thinking processes to generate awareness, then form and reinforce new mental models.
• Provide an overview of the field of complex adaptive systems and complexity theory while providing practical awareness of relevant management models.
• 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.
• Practicing both/and thinking vs. the more traditional either/or thinking.
• Cultivate a both/and mindset to have deeper benefits with respect to collaboration and relationship-building.

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• Define high-performance questions, and give examples of the power they have towards enhancing organizational outcomes.
• Discuss techniques for using high-performance questions as often as possible in day-to-day conversations.
• 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.
• Convey that valuable learning occurs once a product or feature is in the hands of customers who can use it and provide feedback.
• Understand why and how to identify small, discrete opportunities, then craft hypotheses in order to frame relevant experiments.
• Understanding why and how rapid experimentation accelerates learning and business agility.
• Experience the complex dynamics involved when creating sustainable change and the reason why individuals and organizations (as systems) deeply resist it.
• Describe and discuss change frameworks, polarity management frameworks, and what makes them effective.
• Highlight how to reframe disruptive threats as strategic opportunities.

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• 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.
• Demonstrate how a Lean Systems Approach enables business agility and generates and sustains knowledge by focusing on strategic goals, measuring value, defining a practical course of action, exposing and eliminating waste, supporting teams, enabling rapid decisions, and learning with quantitative analysis and empirical data.
• Introduce concepts and applications of the "Build - Measure - Learn" framework for dealing with uncertainty.
• Apply the concepts of “a human-centered approach to innovation" and focus on new ways of thinking about elements of a product or solution that evolve around the customer: people, technology, and business.
• Provide an understanding of the key values and practices of kanban, along with ideas on why and how to apply these values.
• Understand and use iterative frameworks and how they accelerate learning and discovery.

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• Analyze what a business agility environment and learning ecosystem looks like and why it is vital in a VUCA world.
• Devise strategies to create an environment that enables value creation, rapid decision making, and optimized execution.
• Reflect on and synthesize key learnings in the unique context of each participant's experience, work structures, and challenges.
• Identify and explain ways in which you can make the ongoing application of business agility part of the habitual way of working in your organization.
• Communicate the importance of learning agility and how empirical data and relevant, actionable metrics support real learning.
• Understand the limitations of lagging indicators and excessive metrics that do not drive the right behaviors.
• Set adaptive and continuously improving measures of success based on leading indicators and "metrics that matter."