business agility

Say No to GenAI solution-first thinking

MIT’s recent The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 report states that “The 95% failure rate for enterprise AI solutions represents the clearest manifestation of the GenAI Divide”. It says this is caused not by the quality of the tools, but rather the “learning gap” for both the tool and organisation, and flaws in enterprise integration.

In an attempt to gain efficiencies and innovate, I’ve seen organisations excited to roll out GenAI tools. As the MIT report indicates, they should first fundamentally understanding the systems and people such initiatives are purportedly trying to support.

I believe they ought to do this by first asking leaders to align on the most critical customer & colleagues challenge to overcome, and the business outcomes that are most pressing. Those leaders should then learn how systems, processes and incentives may need to change. Such changes should be explored and measured by trialing different approaches, some of which may utilise technologies such as GenAI.

Such a strategy aligns to the principle of People, Process, Tooling, in That Order. This is one of the Better Value Sooner Safer Happier principles for business agility.

One reason to start with People is that any technological system will not have the tacit knowledge that exists within and between individuals (thank you John Abram for bringing this to my attention). Tacit knowledge is the practical “know-how” that’s difficult to articulate and rarely written-down. It’s often expressed in an unanticipated manner, and only at the time of application.

For example, consider an experienced salesperson teaching a junior employee. During a sales meeting, the latter will learn through observation, imitation, studying body language, and through anecdotal storytelling. These are too ineffable to be derived through studying employee handbooks, process documentation or through GenAI systems.

So, without adopting this outcome-first and customer & colleague centric approach, I fear many GenAI-led initiatives will be fundamentally flawed. They’ll add to the sorry litany of failed technology-focused transformations. The MIT report bares this out.

So, say no to GenAI solution-first thinking. Instead align on the problem to be solved and give colleagues the right freedoms to improve how they serve their customers, which may utilise technologies such as GenAI.

Don’t create pain by rolling out GenAI tooling based on poorly tested assumptions and expect colleagues to use it. Many will suffer in silence, and use the tool begrudgingly. Ironically it’ll likely add to inefficiencies, not reduce them.

Finally, consider employing visual tools such as Agendashift’s Changeban to place a strong emphasis on knowledge discovery and organisational learning. Collectively learn and measure, rather than assuming then integrating!

Contact me if you’d like to learn more.

The Cone-shaped Backlog

Here’s an approach I’ve found successful when helping teams ensure their backlog supports optionality, handles uncertainty and continuously adjusts so their goals and strategies are aligned to their vision.

A backlog should have these qualities

The backlog is made-up of backlog items. Each item represents a business goal, which when delivered by the team, will provide a beneficial outcome to the business and its customers/stakeholders.

Qualities of the backlog:

Easy to update by the product owner
Should be available to everyone in the business
Shows the backlog items for the next sprint
Conveys a vision of the future with a tangible path to the present
Reflects vagueness and options
- If a distant backlog item is too vague to describe in words, consider drawing a picture, as shown in the photo below
Self-explanatory to anyone in the business

The cone-shaped

I often encourage teams to visualise the backlog in a cone-shape in this manner:

The neck of the cone shows the current sprint goals
The widest point of the cone shows the furthest goals which may be months or years from now.
The centre of the cone shows the goals for the intervening time periods. This area can be divided into sprints, months, quarters and half-year intervals.

Backlog visualised as a cone, like the cone-of-uncertainty

Reason for the cone-shape

It reflects the cone of uncertainty, where the further out the team considers, the less certain they are of the future environment.
The narrow neck of the cone reflects the fact the team can only sustainably deliver a small number of goals. Invariably there is more demand than the team can supply, so the team should gradually constrain the number of goals as the time nears the current sprint.
The further into the future, the more the team can consider a wide number of options. This optionality allows the team to consider many possibilities and scenarios without having to commit earlier than necessary. However, as time draws nearer, and as the cone gets narrower, the team will need to reduce the number of options based on the insights they have gathered.

Additional information which supports the backlog

As shown in the photo above, to enable continuous alignment across the business, there is additional information I advise teams to use:

Vision Statement: This is a short easy-to-understand statement which describes what the team intends to achieve. It’s written by the team, with their sponsor and stakeholders. The vision statement ensures alignment for the team with those they serve and with those whom the team may rely upon.
Strategies: These are the current set of approaches the team have reasonable confidence in that, if delivered successfully, will help fulfil the vision statement.
KPIs: These Key Performance Indicators are a small selection of measures which indicate whether the team’s strategies and sprint goals are achieving the team’s vision.
Epics start and end dates: Epics are goals which span more than one sprint. On the backlog, the likely start time of an epic is positioned with a blue post-it note; the likely end time is positioned with a pink post-it note.

Implementing Governance talk

Implementing Governance

Implement means to execute. Governance means to rule and control. This suggests implementing governance is a top-down deterministic approach to management. Such approaches are no longer fit-for-purpose.

Leaders and delivery teams should co-create approaches to ensure alignment and synchronisation. This talk is about collaborative approaches which support teams to deliver value.

Slidedeck

Watch a previous presentation

Watch the 45-minute video of this talk presented at the 2020 Aginext conference.

Increasing your organisation’s competitiveness

Business Agility is a competitive capability to rapidly sense and respond to change with the right business initiatives that will benefit the organisation and its customers.

The following are prerequisite to enabling business agility:

Gain an awareness of the threats and opportunities from market, social, technological changes
Use the Envisioning workshop to close the gap between vision and execution.
Create an ambidextrous organisation. Create a flow of initiatives which balances these focuses: 1) continuously improve current offerings 2) retire non-viable offerings 3) innovate new offerings
Determine which initiatives provide a strategic fit with the vision
Mindset and ways of working. Push authority to individuals by encouraging them to demonstrate greater strategic clarity and competency
Co-evolve ways of working to reduce the delay between alignment effort, execution and ROI
Create light-weight governance which removes non-value add activities and reimagines the role of the PMO, HR, finance and the role of sponsors

Resource to download, print and share

Presentation slides

Contact me (dean@latchana.co.uk) if you’d like this presented in your organisation or business community.

Inter-team qualities for Business Agility

Business Agility is an enterprise-wide mechanism to rapidly sense, respond and deliver the right business initiatives that will benefit an organisation and its customers.

To increase business agility, an organisation needs to promote the qualities of collaboration, alignment and synchronisation amongst its teams and departments. This creates cohesion to the organisations strategic goals.

Governance processes should be built around these qualities since it affords individuals and teams a great degree of freedom to pursue the organisation’s goals and outcomes. It will also help close the gap between strategic direction and day-to-day team execution.

Consider scaling team frameworks such as Scrum to create ways of working that promote these qualities.

Collaboration

Regardless of background, seniority or specialism, teams and individuals from across the business should have the freedom to collaborate. Collaboration can extend beyond the business to include business partners and clients.

Managers should help the business to reorganise so that cross-functional teams of specialists, regardless of department, can work as single teams to rapidly experiment and deliver business outcomes.

Alignment

All individuals should understand and be aligned to the organisation’s mission, vision and strategic direction. Each team and department should have clarity of the business outcomes that are currently being sought.

Leaders should enthuse and align their colleagues; managers should create the environment and ways of working with their colleagues which reduces misalignment.

Synchronisation

Creating cross-functional and co-locate delivery teams can greatly improve business agility. However, despite this, often a single team cannot deliver products and services on their own. Often many teams need to be involved, which necessitates the synchronisation of effort across many teams.

To illustrate this Klaus Leopold gives a useful analogy which I’ve expressed as the following:

A customer wanting to have a letter written, where each team works independently by controlling a row of keys on a keyboard. Typing the letter would be uncoordinated, slow and frustrating.
To improve time to market, it’s inevitable that teams need to interact. So, rather than teams independently hitting their keys at speed, it’s better if each team slows down, coordinate and collectively hit the keys at the right time and sequence.