In my professional communities a lot of advice on business agility is pitched at big departments and transformation programmes, as that’s where multiple teams are found, where layers of corporate hierarchy form and where processes ossify, their intentions captured like fossils in the digital strata of old Powerpoint slides.
It’s fertile ground for offering intervention.
Here though, I’ll give attention solely to the 90% of UK businesses that operate with a handful of people, or just one person.
So this will be a short article because smaller enterprises are naturally agile. The owners often are the business, there are no layers, and the processes are instinctive common sense. This agility thing doesn’t apply, right?
Well, let’s see. Techniques for scaling multiple teams around a portfolio of work or dealing with departmental cultural chasms won’t be useful here, but we can definitely map the same principles. Let’s have a look at some.
Customer centricity
Personal passion and belief in a product are an attractive USP, as customers often resonate with the brand and the ethos, but think of all the passion-fuelled hopefuls on Dragons’ Den that don’t survive first contact with a business plan.
Perhaps a micro business has to be even more sharp and deliberate about customer centricity as a bigger company does, because a micro can’t saturate the market until the customers have little other choice. (Windows or Mac anyone?)
Deep, continuous understanding and empathy with the consumer will embed customer centricity in any business; add the sense of association and shared values that a micro can leverage and it can make for a powerful coupling.
Defer commitment
Keep options open and decide only when it would be damaging to delay any longer. Sounds a bit scary maybe, a bit too loose? That’s OK, committing to something is a positive thing to strive for: a focus, a lock-in and removal of distraction.
But done too early it provides a psychological barrier to valuable feedback which could lead to a more appropriate product decision.
Keep a light backlog of alternative ideas to stay adaptive. Sketch out the options, test a couple in parallel at small scale to learn more, and watch for conflating early excitement with proof of result.
It’s easy to forget this one, as the box of 500 brochures I ordered last year which I now realise are pitched at the wrong audience reminds me.
Deferring commitment is a classic Lean/Agile principle which helps agility whatever the scale of operation.
Limit work in progress
This applies equally to individuals working in a team, a pair or one person alone.
Every context switch adds a ‘change-over’ overhead, this is well known now.
When there are many tasks on the go, to finish them sooner, faster and with higher quality, actively put a limit on the amount of things that are in some state of progress.
Stick with this number long enough to see what happens before adjusting it.
Arguably this should be easier in a micro business as there are no pressures from ‘higher up’ or a corporate expectation to be always productive.
It’s easy to start: visualise all your work and its state either with paper and sticky notes or a free digital tool.
Then with the visualisation there as your constant dashboard, practice the discipline to finish what’s under way before starting something new.
Keep some slack
…and treat it as deliberate resilience.
I hear that many micro businesses run flat out, but having some elasticity will allow a response when a problem (or even better, an opportunity) shows up.
I would advise this: Book some slack time in the schedule to protect it.
Monitor how it gets used over say a week or a month.
If the buffer’s not needed to genuinely assist the current work then don’t just absorb it but put it to named use for an improvement, some research or a reward that lifts you. Resilience includes personal energy renewal, essential when you are your business.
Beware of legacy thinking
Even small start-ups can inherit habits from previous jobs or industries, such as thinking primarily in projects rather than ongoing value flow.
Be intentional about how you structure, plan and review your work. As a micro you’re naturally nimble, so be careful not to weigh this down with processes in a loose desire to be more ‘professional.’ You’re already doing great, so hold onto the essence of that.
Ultimately, business agility isn’t about size but the mindset and practices that help with value delivery and a readiness to respond to whatever happens.
Big corporates will need to use different techniques to micros, but the principles are equally applicable.
If you’d like to explore more on any of this, I’d love to chat – reach me via www.agiliqui.com
About Martin Lambert
The business is Agiliqui Consulting. It rhymes with ‘agility’, which describes the core service offering: increasing the agility of how an enterprise achieves its outcomes.
Martin is a consultant-coach who helps solve the internal and potentially controllable problems that when attended to will improve ways of working and delivery effectiveness.
The USP – and complementary difference – to other business consultants, is expertise in adapting the principles of ‘agile’ as it was named in software to any context where something unique and emergent is being tackled.
In this fast changing and unpredictable world, responsiveness and adaptability means survival.
I partner with teams and leaders as needed to provide mentoring, training, advice and hands-on help tailoring the appropriate practices to increase this agility in your unique context.
The ideas, goals and strategies are yours; I partner in guidance on how to get there more effectively.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mclambert/
