Agile or Fragile?

Where did the time go? What did you do with it? Where do we go from here?

No one can quite agree on what might come next, how long ‘this’ will go on for, or what the future may look like. But there’s one thing we all can agree on – digital is where it’s at. We have been around for a long time and we’ve been paying attention. What have we learnt? Now is the time for you to step up and be brave. Reassess the goals of your business, and make sure you’re focussing on the customer, in everything you do.

Consumers are rapidly changing and keeping up with them is becoming more and more difficult. Service first, excellence, and a user-centred approach are the core components needed to navigate the challenges ahead. It isn’t about weathering the storm, but about achieving the operational agility that will let you accelerate through it.

Sometimes small groups of devoted individuals (like at Brakes) spot an urgent need, re-evaluate priorities, and re-focus. At speed. This speed of decision making is a by-product of crisis, breaking with those pesky bureaucratic procedures in order to keep the pace needed for innovation.

But, once the imminent danger is gone, do you go back to the ‘old’ plan? The ‘old’ ways of working? We think not.

Empower your ‘deliverers of digital’ that live and breathe the values of innovation, and who focus relentlessly on improving customer experience. This goes a long way to discovering agile organically – and maintaining it. The end goal should always be to make the customer’s experience as enjoyable as possible. Shorten delivery times, encourage reviews and harness them, really pay attention and act on them. Agility requires a mindset where your team members fulfil a ‘part of the customer journey’, not a ‘departmental role’.

Why not create teams charged solely with generating innovations? A flexible approach such as this promotes operational agility, keeping the cadence of innovation high. Agile enterprises are always concerned with speed, not just during global pandemics.

We commonly see this measured by examining the time between noticing a problem rear its head, or an eye-catching opportunity appear, and the delivery of a solution. With the solution found, there are two main factors that determine the speed of the innovation – how long you work on it and the time spent twiddling your thumbs waiting for others. According to Harvard Business Review, most teams spend between 15-20% of their time working on innovation, and the rest waiting.

Knowing your customer better than ever allows you to be even pickier with your ecosystem. Having an e-commerce stack that promotes a best-of-breed approach lets you tailor your omni-channel solution to the best fit for your consumers. Anything that doesn’t work? Bin it and move on to the next potential solution. This is nothing new. Designing e-commerce around ideal omni-channel experiences always results in better commercial performance. The only way to keep up with the demand of the customers is to remain agile and adaptive.

The new normal might be daunting, but one thing is clear – it’s proving great for innovation. If you’re agile enough to keep up. Agile, or fragile. Which one are you?