If the founders of the Toyota Production System (TPS) have been told that the practical, logical fundamentals of their work model would have led to a concept which would become an aspirational mantra for companies, several decades after its creation, they would have shrugged their shoulders and, using their common sense, they would have thought working differently is a silly, difficult, inefficient thing.
We can call it TPS, Lean, Agile, … We are basically talking about the same thing: a working methodology whose goal is to find the shortest, least expensive way between an idea (product or project) and its materialization. The quintessential agile environment is a start up, which, in the romantic dreams of a big organisation, is the ideal scenario where everybody is multitasking, with a low cost focus and practical mindset prevales, everybody knows each other and puts their ego to one side to build the organisation with purpose and passion, making it easier to overcome the usual issues we find in every creation process. A start up mindset is a skill that is always greatly desired in a big organisation which has forgotten that it used to be smaller once (even if the term “start up” didn’t exist then). In those good old days, the organisation had an enormous advantage which it struggles very hard to keep alive nowadays: it was naturally close to the client (both internal and external).
Several big organisations admit that, nowadays, their competitors are not similar sized companies, but much smaller ones. Companies which have fewer management levels, less structure, fewer costs, fewer validation channels, less management software, less corporate politics, less fear of failure. Closer to and willing to listen to the internal and external client, with a real, authentic story to tell, which is faster and more efficient, more agile. Just the way those big organisations used to be years ago, when they transformed the market and created new codes, products, roles or habits that never existed before and made the client fall in love with their product. And nowadays, the client, is different , with a new mindset, who recalls common sense and looks at new organisations having face to face relationship with their clients as the main value. At a time when retailing is affecting all industries (from cars to banks, from travelling to technology), it is an absolute competitive advantage.
Hierarchical levels create a distance between the client and the organisation. At the end, the distance between the golden chest where we store the history, culture and purpose of a company (i.e. its DNA, which makes an organisation unique) and the client is set by the ranks between them. One of the biggest desires of an over structured business is to have the chance to recover the perspective that it once had and which was gradually lost over the years. And here comes the sexy part of agile: It could help us to recover our face to face relationship with our client. This shift, though, goes beyond the introduction of a new methodology with a workshop or a training plan. If we want agile’s magic to work, we need to create a structural shortcut, that allows us to reach our beloved client (both internal and external) in a faster way. Every single project to implement an agile culture, but which doesn’t involve a positive shake up in the company’s structure will remain a project that will never get results. Only costs.
