Growing Agility ebook - Nokia - #SmarterEveryday

2 Introduction
4 Agility and change
6 Personal agility
8 Emotional agility
10 Acceptance and commitment therapy
12 Habits
14 Flexibility
18 Relationship agility
20 Resilience
22 Agility at scale
26 Organisational agility
27 Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity
28 Leadership agility
31 Strategic agility
34 Portfolio agility
35 IT Agility
36 BYOD and BMAD
38 Agile absoption
39 Innovating after failure
41 Spotting opportunities (and dangers)
44 Conclusion
45 Reading list
CONTENTS.

IntroductionGrowing Agility
In ancient Greece, people told stories
about a fantastical creature known
as a centaur: half-man, half-horse,
with the strength of both combined.
It’s thought that the myth was born
when people saw horseback riders
for the first time. Because they’d
never had the idea to tame, train and
ride a wild horse themselves, the
concept of a person on horseback was
inconceivable. The centaur was their
attempt to interpret what they saw.
Why are we talking about a Greek
myth? Well, the figure of the
centaur taps into the heart of
why agility is important. It’s about
recognising and seizing opportunities
that others simply can’t see.
INTRODUCTION.
In business, you can’t predict and plan for every eventuality. What you
do have control over is how you will respond. That’s what growing agility
is about: becoming more flexible in your behaviour, and developing
your ability to dodge, jump, tackle or even pick yourself up after being
hit by those curveballs that work throws, whether it’s getting feedback
that’s hard to swallow, losing out on a promotion, or a failed project.
2
The ancient Greeks in our story who
invented the myth of the centaur
weren’t agile. But the horseback
riders, the centaurs, were. They made
a mental leap and realised that they
could harness the strength, speed and
stamina of the horse for their own
needs, even though it hadn’t been
done before. And as a result, they
ended up being elevated to mythical
status by their less innovative peers.

1
Design Your Day, Nokia,
http://nokia.ly/DYDebook
2
Mobile Mastery, Nokia,
http://nokia.ly/MMebook,

3
Teams That Flow, Nokia,
http://nokia.ly/TTFebook
Centaurs reappeared many
years later in the 1990s, with the
invention of centaur chess, where
players brought their sport to new
heights by playing in partnership
with computers. Amateurs were
able to defeat grandmasters by
combining the analytical power and
vast memory of a machine with the
human capacity for creative decision-
making and mental dexterity.
Both kinds of centaurs show the
rewards that can be reaped by
being agile enough to spot the
opportunities offered by new ideas,
emerging technology or change,
and taking advantage of them
swiftly. In our working lives, we
should all aim for the kind of agility
exemplified by the centaurs.
Growing Agility is the fourth book
in Nokia’s Smarter Everyday series:
in Design Your Day1
we looked at
how to employ design thinking to
improve your productivity; Mobile
Mastery2
was about how to forge
a mindful, purposeful and playful
relationship with the technology
in your life; Teams That Flow 3
was
about how to collaborate more
efficiently; in Growing Agility we
will build on all these themes.
Over the course of this book, we’ll look
at how you can become more agile on
a personal and emotional level, and
also at how you can scale those ideas
up to teams and whole organisations.
Introduction3
Agile
For some, agility will always be
synonymous with agile software
development. While what we’re
talking about in Growing Agility
has plenty in common with
agile, it’s not the same thing.
While agile provides an approach
to project management and
team structure, here we’re
looking at ideas to increase your
personal agility, the agility of
your team, and the agility of the
organisation you work for.

4
Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

At present, the pace of change
feels relentless – new technology
has changed our working
lives beyond recognition and
disrupted whole industries.
Many of us like to think that change
is rare - we feel like it should be a
one-off event, with a beginning and
an end. The reality is that change
is a constant state - nothing stays
the same forever. If this seems
daunting, agility is your friend.
Knowing that you are agile - that
you can react quickly and accurately
- makes change less intimidating.
Agility is liberating and makes you
stronger. With agility, the things
you can’t see over the horizon,
the obstacle in your path, the
new discoveries, are sources
of opportunity and excitement,
rather than things to fear.
Agility and change.
Change is the catalyst for agility. Without change throwing obstacles in
our path, there’s no need to be nimble, light and able to react quickly.
4
Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the
term ‘antifragile’ to describe this
quality of being strengthened by
change. In his book Antifragile: Things
That Gain From Disorder he writes:
“Some things benefit from shocks;
they thrive and grow when
exposed to volatility, randomness,
disorder, and stressors, and love
adventure, risk, and uncertainty.
Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of
the phenomenon, there is no
word for the exact opposite of
fragile. Let us call it antifragile.
Antifragility is beyond resilience
or robustness. The resilient
resists shocks and stays the same;
the antifragile gets better.”4

5
Emily Lawson and Colin Price,
‘The psychology of change management’,
McKinsey Quarterly, http://nokia.ly/1guJceG
But becoming more agile is a
change in itself. So how can you
make change easier to swallow?
McKinsey suggests that the following
four things can make change
easier on a psychological level:
1. Purpose
When you act in a way that doesn’t
fit your beliefs, you experience
something called ‘cognitive
dissonance’. Cognitive dissonance
is an enemy of change, because
it means you don’t fully believe
in what you’re doing. To make
change stick, you need to have
a ‘story’ that rings true to you
about why you should change. In
this book, we’ll try and tell you a
story about why becoming more
agile is a change worth making.
2. Reinforcement and reward
You’re more likely to adopt a
new behaviour if it is rewarded
and reinforced through things
like goals, targets and rewards.
However, we like novelty too,
and over time rewards and
reinforcements get boring and
become less effective. Coming up
with new goals and rewards will help
you maintain a change over time.
3. Time and practice
We can’t change instantly, it takes
time and practice. To change, you
need to absorb new information in
chunks, test it out, and integrate
it with your existing behaviour.
4. Role models
Having role models around
you, particularly at work, can
help changes to stick, by
providing tangible proof
that change is possible.5
“In any moment of decision, the best
thing you can do is the right thing. The
worst thing you can do is nothing.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Introduction5

PERSONAL AGILITY.
Agility starts with you, and personal agility is your ability to react to
the world around you in a timely and appropriate way.
Being more agile on a personal level
has a number of advantages. It leaves
you better able to react to change,
take advantage of opportunities and
protect yourself from threats. It can
also make you feel happier and more
satisfied, because being agile is about
taking control of situations that might
otherwise leave you feeling powerless
and stressed.
In this section, we’re going to look at
how to achieve this. We’ll cover:
• Emotional agility
• Habits
• Flexibility
• Relationship agility
• Resilience

7
With greater emotional agility you
can maximise your confidence, turn
negative emotions into positive
thoughts and access humility that
you might not know you’re capable of.
Emotional agility isn’t just valuable in
your personal life though; it’s one of
the most valuable business skills that
you can possess.
Traditionally, a lot of people think of
the workplace as somewhere where
emotions shouldn’t come into play,
and some of us even pride ourselves
on being emotionless at work.
However, work is emotional - success
in business can feel just as great as it
does in your personal life, and failure
and disappointment can be just as
bitter. The answer isn’t to block out
these feelings - it’s to approach them
in an agile way.
Every decision you make throughout
the day is motivated not just by the
things you observe, but also by your
unique subconscious inclinations,
the so called ‘gut feelings’ that have
defined many great business leaders.
Sometimes gut feelings can be
trusted to point the way, and other
times the best course is to ignore
those feelings and focus on the facts.
That’s when emotional agility comes
into play.
At its core, emotional agility is about knowing yourself, and developing a greater
level of control over your feelings and reactions.
7Growing Agility Personal agility
Emotional agility.
9.00 18.00

6
Susan David and Christina Congleton,

‘Emotional Agility’, Harvard Business Review,
http://nokia.ly/18o3bc8
In an article for the Harvard Business Review, Susan David and Christina Congleton
outline a simple method for evaluating your level of emotional agility:
1. Choose a situation in your working day that would normally challenge you.
This could be anything from public speaking to negotiating contractual terms
- any task that makes you feel under pressure.

2. Identify the thoughts that come into your head in that situation -
for example ‘I’m going to make a mistake’ or ‘I’m not being respected’.

3. Identify the associated feelings that come with those thoughts -
for example ‘fear’ or ‘anger’.

4. Ask yourself how much you try to make that thought and the associated
feelings go away - a lot, or not all?

5. Ask yourself the extent to which you buy into and believe those thoughts
and feelings - a lot, or not at all?6

Personal agilityGrowing Agility 8

9 Personal agilityGrowing Agility 9
Look at your answers to these
questions. Are you trying to ignore
your thoughts and feelings? Are you
buying into them? If the answer is yes,
you could benefit from being more
emotionally agile.
Being more emotionally agile means
being mindful of your thoughts and
feelings, and addressing them in a
purposeful way, rather than ignoring
them, or obsessing over them. When
you achieve emotional agility, you’ll
find that it can help to cut your
levels of stress and improve your
performance at work.
The trick to being emotionally agile
is not to try and suppress your inner
thoughts and instincts, or to accept
them unquestioningly. Instead, when
we display emotional agility, we are
analytical, goal-focussed, and in
possession of total clarity - unclouded
by the inner monologue of ‘I’m not
good enough to do this’, or ‘my
colleagues are ignoring me’.
It’s normal and healthy to feel
emotions at work - trying to ignore
those feelings is counter-productive.
Emotions are the result of the
situations we find ourselves in; rather
than suppressing your emotions you
should make an effort to acknowledge
them instead. Take a brief pause to
listen to what your brain is telling you,
and then take action accordingly.
If negative thoughts dominate your
mind, rather than forcing yourself
to ignore them you may benefit
from a brief pause to realign your
perspective. Consider how much of
that emotion is based on objective
facts, rather than assumptions, and
how much of the matter is within your
control. Try to see the reality of the
issue more clearly, and approach it
with calm, assured logic.
Being able to take the reins of your
emotions and swiftly check any
negative patterns before they take
charge will allow you to be more
productive, driven, healthy, and above
all, happy in your daily life.

Personal agilityGrowing Agility
7
Robert Zettle,
ACT for Depression: A Clinician’s Guide to Using
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
One approach is through the use of
acceptance and commitment therapy
(ACT). ACT is a kind of behaviour
analysis that uses mindfulness,
acceptance and behaviour change to
try and teach people to better control
their thoughts and feelings, and aims
to promote psychological flexibility.
According to ACT, when we’re
emotionally distressed it’s the result
of being too rigid psychologically. If
we’re too unbending in our behaviour,
we get ‘cognitively entangled’ -
bogged down in negative emotions,
constantly revisiting our mistakes and
setbacks, unable to move forward.
Acceptance and
commitment therapy.
Let’s have a look at how we can put
emotional agility into practice.
10
According to the ACT model, most
problems are caused by mental
behaviours at a root level. These
mental behaviours are explained
by the acronym, FEAR:
• Fusion with your thoughts.
• Evaluation of experience.
• Avoidance of your experience.
• Reason-giving for your behaviour.7
The positive alternative to FEAR is ACT:
• Accept your reactions and be present.
• Choose a valued direction.
• Take action.

8
Dr Russell Harris,
‘Embracing Your Demons: an Overview of Acceptance
and Commitment Therapy’, Psychotherapy in Australia,
http://nokia.ly/18o2K1w
The six core principles of ACT which can help you develop the psychological
flexibility you need to be more agile in your working life are:
11
1. Cognitive defusion
Learning methods to reduce the
tendency of making abstract
thoughts, images, emotions,
and memories more real.
2. Acceptance
Allowing thoughts to come and
go without struggling with them.
3. Contact with the present moment
Awareness of the here and now,
experienced with openness,
interest, and receptiveness.
4. Observing the self
Accessing a transcendent
sense of self, a continuity of
consciousness that is unchanging.
5. Values
Discovering what is most
important to one’s true self.
6. Committed action
Setting goals according to values
and carrying them out responsibly.8
Being mindful about repetitive
mental behaviour that result
in unproductive loops is the
primary goal. It’s not about
ignoring setbacks or forcing
yourself to be cheerful in the
face of adversity, but rather
conditioning yourself to recognise
the way that you are feeling
(e.g. regretful or embarrassed),
rationally determining a path to
move beyond that feeling, and
then beginning the process of
doing what needs to be done.
In times of difficulty, the hardest
thing is often doing anything at
all, as problems can be like sticky
flypaper for the brain. The sooner
you can pick yourself up and begin
something anew, the sooner you
can leave past mistakes where they
belong - confined to the past.

Habits.
Up to 40% of our actions are performed without conscious
decision on our part9
- they’re the result of habit.
In neurological terms, a habit
is a cycle of repetitive actions
created over time by consistent
reinforcement of patterns in
the brain. It’s a shorthand your
mind uses to repeat conditioned
tasks while conserving as much
mental energy as possible.
We can perform tasks like making
a cup of coffee or walking to work
without having to think too deeply
about what we’re doing, because
they’ve formed as habits. This
can be an advantage in many
situations - delegating easy tasks
to your subconscious frees up
mental capacity for other things.
But approaching some areas of
your work like this - just following
your normal course of action,
without thinking, without looking
for new ways of doing things - is
the opposite of being agile.
Agility is all about being ready
and willing to take an unexpected
course of action. It’s important to
think about times when following
your normal pattern has caused
you to miss out on an opportunity,
and what habits you need to break
(or at least be more aware of) so
that it doesn’t happen again.
5
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi,
Flow: The Psychology of the Optimal Experience
12
7
David Neal, Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn,
‘Habits - a repeat performance’, Current Directions in Psychological Science
http://nokia.ly/1d9JL8e

13 Personal agilityGrowing Agility
10
Charles Duhigg,
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life And Business
Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life
And Business, writes that habits are a loop made up of three steps:
1. The cue
The cue is a trigger that sparks
the ‘habit loop’. It could be a
location, a time of day, an action,
or a person or people, or a feeling.
2. The routine
This is the action that is triggered
by your brain responding to a cue.
3. The reward
The reward is the benefit you
get from your routine.10
Try to identify the habit loops that
stand between you and greater
agility. What are the cues that spark a
negative pattern of behaviour - being
challenged by a colleague, unexpected
changes, or your annual appraisal?
What is the routine you fall into - do
you feel angry, upset, do you criticise
or doubt yourself? It might seem like
there’s no reward to these negative
behaviour loops (there certainly
isn’t on a psychological level) but on
a physical level, there is a reward -
adrenaline. Your subconscious mind
experiences these threats in the same
way as it would if you were being
chased by a lion across the savannah,
and it gives your body a bump of
adrenaline to help it cope.
To break these negative habit loops,
try to respond to the cues with
a different routine. The six core
principles of ACT that we discussed
in the previous chapter may help
you approach a difficult situation
in a new way, and achieve a happier
outcome and a fitting resolution,
rather than just unpleasant emotions
and an ultimately unsatisfying jolt of
adrenaline.
“We are what we repeatedly
do. Excellence, then, is not
an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle

However, many of us are hooked on
the idea that we have a particular
personality type that dictates how we
act. This kind of thinking is the enemy
of flexibility and agility, and absolves
us of responsibility over our actions.
In their book Flex: Do Something
Different, Ben Fletcher and
Karen Pine suggest that we
have three kinds of habit:
1. Habits of perception
How we make sense of the world.
2. Habits of attitude
Our biases and prejudices.
3. Habits of behaviour
The things we do.
We go through many situations on
autopilot, relying on these three kinds
of habit and past behaviour patterns
to decide our course of action.
Flexibility.
Improving your emotional agility and changing your habits
both rely on developing flexibility in your behaviour.
14

So rather than our behaviour being the result of a personality type, it is more
the result of always doing things the same way.11
And that isn’t a good thing:
15
“On the face of it, it just doesn’t make
sense for a person to behave the
same way in all types of different
situations. The world is constantly
changing, families are dynamic,
people die, jobs change or are lost,
finances grow and shrink and these
changes call for adaptability and
different responses. The more fixed
a person’s personality is, the harder
they’ll find it to adapt to the new. The
more vulnerable they will be to stress.
Life is so varied and so changeable
that there isn’t one personality ‘type’
suited to it. How can a person make
the most of what life throws at them
if they have fixed ways of being? If
they approach today’s situations
with yesterday’s strategies?.” 12
Fletcher and Pine suggest that
the answer to this is to flex - to
try and make your behaviour less
predictable and more spontaneous.
The way they suggest doing this
couldn’t be easier: it’s as simple
as doing something different. It
can be something very small and
seemingly insignificant. Some
of their suggestions include:
• Don’t wear your watch for the day.
• Sit in place you’ve never
sat before.
• Tell a stranger a joke.
• Go for a walk and take pictures of
the things you see.
• Pick up some litter.13
The theory is that doing something
different, something that you
wouldn’t normally do, can help
spark change by making you more
flexible. Try one of the ideas above
and see what happens as a result.
11,12, 13
Ben Fletcher and Karen Pine,v
Flex: Do Something Different

DON’T WEAR YOUR
WATCH FOR THE DAY.
SIT IN PLACE YOU’VE
NEVER SAT BEFORE.
TELL A STRANGER A JOKE.

GO FOR A WALK AND
TAKE PICTURES OF
THE THINGS YOU SEE.
PICK UP SOME LITTER.

Your personal and emotional agility
play an important role in your
working relationships in two ways.
Firstly, if you have a high level of
personal agility you will find it easier
to work and collaborate with your
colleagues. This isn’t about always
giving way to others - that might
not always be the right course of
action. What it’s really about is being
able to be flexible in your behaviour
and reactions. Those unpleasant
thoughts and difficult emotions that
we discussed in the ‘Emotional agility’
chapter are often the result of our
interactions with others - if you can
be mindful of your reactions, move
beyond negative thoughts and find
a way out of a challenging situation
with a colleague it will help strengthen
your relationship with them.
Relationship agility.
Relationship agility refers your ability to be flexible
in your interactions with other people.
18
The second way personal agility
can help is in affecting the mood of
the whole team. Emotions can be
contagious - in the hive-mind of a
closely-knit group a bad mood can
spread quickly, affecting morale
and productivity. This is particularly
true if the negative thoughts and
feelings are coming from the leader
of the team - if the leader is feeling
good, then so does the rest of the
group, but when they let negative
emotions take over, it spreads like a
virus, affecting every aspect of the
group dynamic. This can happen
without us even realising it.

It’s human nature to mirror the
feelings and behaviours of those
around us. If the person we’re talking
to smiles, so do we. If they are sad,
our own faces will shift to a frown
reflexively. If the members of the
team (and the leader in particular)
have a high level of emotional
agility, it can make a huge difference
in terms of keeping it happy and
productive, as everyone makes an
effort to keep their negative feelings
under control and be mindful of the
emotions of those around them.
Emotional agility is a key factor when
it’s time to join a new team. Starting
a new job can be daunting at the
best of times, and those who make
the smoothest transition and fit in
quickest will be those that have the
highest level of emotional agility.
19

14
Laurence Gonzales,
Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience
Resilience is another kind of agility -
it’s the speed with which you can
adapt to a setback, and return to
your normal level of productivity.
If a client gives you negative feedback,
does it throw you off for the rest of the
day? If your boss rejects one of your
ideas, how long will it be before you
have the courage to pitch another?
While you can’t always control your
circumstances, at the very least you
can strive to control your response,
and agile minds find it much easier
to climb back on the metaphorical
horse after being bucked off.
Laurence Gonzales, author of
Surviving Survival: The Art and
Science of Resilience writes about
a concept called the “locus of
control”. Gonzales claims that
people either view themselves as
having an internal locus of control,
which means they fundamentally
believe that they control their own
Resilience.
Even with a high level of personal agility, sometimes things will go
wrong - we won’t react in quite enough time, or we’ll choose the wrong
course of action. When things do go wrong and we’re blindsided,
it’s resilience that allows us to recover and thrive again.
20
destiny, or they have an external
locus of control, and believe that
events happen purely by chance.
According to Gonzales, those who
believe they can directly control their
experiences are better equipped
to deal with adversity, suffer less
stress, and respond better to
criticism. The self-assurance that you
are in control can result in a more
optimistic outlook - it means that your
problems are within your power to
solve, and nothing is set in stone.14
Resilience isn’t an inborn trait - it’s
a skill you can learn. A few small
cognitive adjustments can transform
a setback into an opportunity, and
a major dip in motivation into
a drive to better ourselves.
The first step is to simply acknowledge
what has happened, and carefully
allow yourself to recognise two
things about the situation:

1. The real consequences (and
not what you fear they might be).
2. How it has made you feel.
For example, let’s imagine that you
discover that piece of work for which
you are responsible is going to miss
its deadline. Firstly, try to mentally
separate your concerns (‘we’re going
to lose the client’, or ‘my colleagues
will think I’m unreliable’) from objective
certainties. Focus solely on what you
know, and what can be done next. In
our example, it is a certainty that the
client will need to be informed that the
piece will be late. It is also a certainty
that adjustments must be made to
speed up the schedule, and the wheels
should be set in motion to facilitate
those adjustments. By making these
facts overt, you arrive right away at
a set of clear actions for your next
steps. The greatest threat of failure
or misfortune is that it stuns us into
immobility - the paralysis of fear that
so many of us struggle to recover from.
This process is known as ‘strategic
acceptance’, and is an enormously
useful mental process for situations of
upheaval, difficulty, and unpredictability.
The key is to not think that a problem
means more problems are to come;
instead, a problem only means
that the way forward is clear.
Once the path forward has been
illuminated, spare a moment to be
mindful of your own wellbeing. Are you
suddenly nervous? Are you angry?
Any intrusive thoughts will distract
you and negatively affect your
performance, so hasty progress may
not be the best strategy. Being agile
isn’t a race; your decisions need to
be logically sound. Take a moment to
adjust your adrenaline level by taking
a walk around the office, or talking to
a colleague about an unrelated matter.
Set yourself a time frame so that you
aren’t avoiding the problem. After
fifteen minutes or so, consider if you
are calm enough to make an informed
choice, and if so, resume work. If not,
you may need to take a deeper look at
your fears and address the larger issue.
None of us look forward to obstacles,
but it is important to be prepared for
them, so that we aren’t left powerless
when things don’t go according to
plan. With the flexibly of agility and
the robustness of resilience, you
should have everything you need
to deal with any eventuality.
21

Agility at scaleGrowing Agility
One of the greatest challenges to
the agile mind-set is that agility
becomes harder to achieve the
larger your company or greater
your personal success.
Growth and success pose a challenge
to staying agile and being able
to react fast - there are more
connections and implications that
make you feel like you can’t move
quickly or make dramatic changes in
direction. When an obstacle appears
in your path, you can feel like a
juggernaut - your only option is to
slow down and hope the obstacle will
go away, or try to crush it in your path.
But the kinds of changes we’re
facing in our era aren’t likely to
just go away, and they’ve already
derailed plenty of businesses that
tried to carry on regardless.
It’s the time to learn how to be agile
at any size. It’s beneficial to make
agility part of your DNA and part of
that of your organisation - make sure
AGILITY AT SCALE.
An agile organisation begins with agile people. The measure of business agility is
how successfully personal agility can be scaled up to an organisation as a whole.
22
that your people feel that they have
the ability and freedom to be agile,
and that this attitude can scale up to
teams and the whole organisation.
It’s also time to start rating agility
as highly as growth; building your
ability to change and adapt should
be just as important as growing in
size or reaching business targets.
Nokia started as a paper mill, then
moved into rubber, then cable and
electronics, then radio telephones,
then mobile phones, following
changes in society, adapting to and
innovating new technologies over the
past 150 years. The former maker
of rubber galoshes, tires and TVs
introduced multitasking mobiles
with basic web-based functions
in 1999, and is poised to start a
new chapter, once the planned
acquisition by Microsoft of the
Devices and Service business (the
part of the business that develops,
manufactures, sells and supports
smartphones and mobile phones)
is completed, which is expected
in the first quarter of 2014..15
15
‘The Nokia Story’, Nokia,
http://nokia.ly/17mxiwT

Agility at scaleGrowing Agility 23
The ideal to strive for is an
organisation that’s agile through and
through - where each individual’s
personal agility combines to make
the whole organisation agile. Agility
gaps can occur at any and every
level of a company, from the
executives to the rank and file.
In the second half of this book, we’ll
look at how to build on the ideas
discussed in ‘Personal agility’ and
roll them out to an entire company.
“Whenever you see a successful
business, someone once made
a courageous decision.”
Peter Drucker
Twitter was the product of a hack
day at a podcasting platform called
Odeo - it became apparent that
actually this side project had more
potential than the primary product
did, so the company refocused and
started again, with huge success.
Blockbuster struggled because it
failed to adapt to the way people’s
viewing habits were changing due to
new technology. Meanwhile companies
like YouTube and later Netflix saw the
opportunity and took it. Netflix hasn’t
stopped there either - it’s now making
TV companies nervous by producing
its own content, and securing the
rights to show the kind of hot-ticket
programmes that would previously
have been reserved for big networks.

Nokia started as a paper mill, then moved into rubber,
then cable and electronics, then radio telephones, then
mobile phones, following changes in society, adapting to

Organisational agilityGrowing Agility 26
A McKinsey survey found that
nine out of ten executives ranked
organisational agility as being critical
to business success and as growing
in importance over time. The survey
also found that businesses that were
more agile had higher revenues, more
satisfied customers and employees,
and improved operational efficiency.16
In order to make your organisation
truly agile, as well as agile employees,
you need several different kinds of
agility to come together, and we
will look at each of the following
kinds of agility in more detail
in the rest of this section:
ORGANISATIONAL
AGILITY.
Organisational agility, also known as business agility, is the speed with
which a company can make decisions, take action, and operate internally.
• Leadership agility
• Strategic agility
• Portfolio agility
• IT agility
• Agile absorption
16 ‘
Building a nimble organisation’, McKinsey

Organisational agility
Originally derived from military
terminology, it is used in business
as a framework to analyse changes,
opportunities and challenges:
• Volatility
Is the change fast or slow? Are
there any external factors that
could speed it up or slow it down?
• Uncertainty
Is the situation predictable? How
likely is it that you’ll be surprised?
• Complexity
How many different factors
and forces have an impact
on the situation?
• Ambiguity
How clear cut is the situation?
Is it likely that you could misread it?
Volatility, uncertainty,
complexity, and
ambiguity.
VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
We mention it here, because times of
change, opportunity and challenge are
when agility really comes into play.
Remembering the acronym and
thinking about these four qualities can
help you to ask the right questions
and choose the right course of action.
You should also remember to use
it to analyse the risks associated
with not making a move, as well as
the risks that come with making it.
“If you are deliberately trying to create
a future that feels safe, you will
wilfully ignore the future that is likely.”
Seth Godin
Growing Agility 27

Growing Agility
17
David Wilkinson,
The Ambiguity Advantage: What Great Leaders Are Great At
If you want to thrive through change,
having a leader who exemplifies agility
is a huge advantage. An agile leader
will increase your chances of having
the kind of agile strategy you need.
(We’ll discuss strategic agility more in
the next chapter.) Leadership agility
really comes into its own when there’s
a change or obstacle on the horizon -
in the face of that ambiguity, knowing
that the person at the top has the
ability to react, adapt and choose the
right course of action is reassuring
and inspiring to everyone involved.
David Wilkinson, author of The
Ambiguity Advantage: What Great
Leaders Are Great At, writes that
there are four modes of leadership:
Leadership agility.
Leadership agility is the ability of a person to command and guide
a team or organisation through changes and challenges. It’s a
crucial bridge between being agile on a personal level and being
agile on an organisational level - the two halves of this book.
28
1. Technical leadership
These leaders are averse
to ambiguity and risk, and
attempt to create certainty
in the face of ambiguity.
2. Cooperative leadership
These leaders try to explain
uncertainty, and build teams
around them to mitigate risk.
3. Adaptive/collaborative
leadership
These leaders focus on making
sure there is agreement on
decisions, and get the group to
look at ambiguity together.
4. Generative leadership
These leaders use ambiguity
to find opportunity, and
tend to be life-long learners
and prolific innovators.17

The fourth mode - generative leadership - tends to be the
most agile mode, because the people who exemplify it welcome
change, are comfortable with ambiguity and thrive in the kind
of situations that leaders who fit the first mode fear.
Some people have an inclination
towards agility, and will naturally
fall into the fourth mode of
leadership. But if you’re not innately
that kind of leader, you shouldn’t
think that you’re locked into one
particular mode of leadership. You
can develop your leadership style
and grow your agility to meet the
needs of your organisation.
What will make the difference is a
commitment to growing your agility
and making it a part of your leadership
style. The following five traits are
all key to leadership agility - think
about how you can develop these
skills and characteristics in yourself:
1. Welcoming change and ambiguity
The most important attribute
is to teach yourself not to fear
change, and to look for the
opportunities that it offers.
2. Curiosity and love of learning
Most of us are curious in one way
or another, often the issue is that
we feel we don’t have the time to
dedicate to following that natural
curiosity and learning new things.
Make time in your day for learning
- even if it’s only reading that
interesting article you bookmarked
but never got around to looking at.
29

Organisational agilityGrowing Agility
18
19
30
3. Creativity and vision
Creativity isn’t inborn, we all have
the capacity to innovate. The key
is to create the right environment
- Design Your Day18
and Teams
That Flow19
are both full of tips
to help you accomplish this.
4. Emotional agility and
self-awareness
We explained the importance
of emotional agility and self-
awareness in the first section
of this book, and it is no less
important for leaders - it helps
you to understand the reasons
for your behaviour and decisions.
5. Courage and conviction
To make bold decisions, and make
them fast, you need no small
amount of courage and plenty
of conviction in your decisions.
To have courage and conviction,
you need belief in yourself
and the team around you.

Strategy and agility might seem
incompatible at first glance.
Strategy is seen as slow, laborious,
monolithic, whereas agility is fast,
nimble, small. However, strategy
can be agile, and agility is actually
an advantageous strategic quality.
It gives you a greater chance of
“spotting and seizing game-changing
opportunities,”20
to quote Donald Sull,
a professor of management practice
at the London Business School.
In his book The Upside of Turbulence:
Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain
World, Sull explains the importance
of being able to make fast decisions
through the example of Mittal Steel.
Lakshmi Mittal, the founder of the
company, embraced turbulence and
grew a single steel mill in Indonesia
into one of the most valuable
companies in the world at a time
when other steel companies were
struggling. One of his seemingly most
risky but ultimately shrewd decisions
was the purchase of one of the largest
steel mills in the world in Kazakhstan,
Strategic agility.
Strategic agility means approaching your strategy in an
agile way, as well making agility a part of it.
despite the fact it was in a state of
disrepair, running at half capacity, was
susceptible to earthquakes, and came
with the responsibility of running an
orphanage, hospital, trams, schools
and a newspaper in the neighbouring
town. Despite all these potential
issues, and the fact that he had
little knowledge of Kazakhstan as a
country, Mittal acted fast and bought
it within a month, and it proved to
be a hugely successful endeavour.21
Growing Agility
20
Donald Sull,
‘Managing in uncertainty: competing through
organisational agility’, McKinsey Quarterly
http://nokia.ly/1kDcncQ
21
Donald Sull,
The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing
Opportunity in an Uncertain World
31

22,23
Professor Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen,
‘Fast Strategy: How Strategic Agility Will Help
You Stay Ahead of the Game

32
Nokia has also experienced success
by being strategically agile; in the
1990s everyone else saw mobile
phones as a professional service,
but Nokia correctly predicted that
mobile phones would be a consumer
product with near-universal
reach and acted accordingly.22
In their book Fast Strategy: How
Strategic Agility Will Help You Stay
Ahead of the Game, Yves Doz,
professor of strategic management,
and Mikko Kosonen, a former CIO
at Nokia, write that there are three
key dimensions of strategic agility:
1. Strategic sensitivity
Being aware of new trends
or developments (and their
implications) early on.
2. Collective commitment
The ability of leaders to
make bold decisions quickly.
3. Resource fluidity
Having the internal
ability to reconfigure and
redeploy resources fast.23
These three factors provide a good
framework within which strategic
agility can occur, because together
they mean that you have the
awareness of opportunities (and
risks), can make decisions about
what action to take quickly, and then
spring into action with equal speed.
“Truly successful decision-making
relies on a balance between
deliberate and instinctive thinking.”
Malcolm Gladwell

When an organisation has agility
hardwired into everything it does,
from the way it communicates, to
the decisions that it makes, it’s
only natural that the same logic
be applied to the business that
they do. Being confident that you
know your field inside and out is,
without question, the hallmark of
any market leader, but that doesn’t
mean your business should be
tethered to just one type of activity.
Involvement with a broad range of
interconnected yet independent
streams of business is a concept
known as ‘portfolio agility’. This is
most likely the domain of the most
senior managers in any company, but
being able to spot opportunities and
keep an open mind for diversification
is the true test of agile management.
Portfolio agility.
Portfolio agility is a company’s ability to move resources between
different areas of a business in a timely and efficient way.
Great ideas can come from just about
anywhere, so those at the top of
the chain need to be prepared to
spread attention across individual
departments, not just the grand
direction of the company as a whole.
Growing Agility 33

Organisational agilityGrowing Agility 34
Donald Sull writes that the way to
avoid running into difficulty with
portfolio agility is to systemise
executive power within each
department. Without the ability to
control their own fate, more isolated
departments can frequently be
neglected or starved of resources,
especially within larger corporations.
By granting more power at lower
levels, you reduce the strain
on higher-tier management by
removing the need for them to
pay attention to minutiae, and
you empower every branch of the
business with the opportunity
to grow their own success.24
20
Donald Sull,
‘Managing in uncertainty: competing through
organisational agility’, McKinsey Quarterly

IT agility is a valuable quality,
because having the right technology
helps people do their jobs better,
faster and more efficiently, and
also provides an opportunity to
get ahead of the competition.
VUCA (the acronym we introduced at
the start of this section) is particularly
relevant for IT agility, where the
rapid pace of technological change
can amplify volatility, uncertainty,
complexity and ambiguity.
Bearing VUCA in mind as a
risk assessment of sorts, the
following tips could help you
to boost your IT agility:
1. Look for new opportunities
In order to be truly agile, you need
to be ahead of the curve when
it comes to knowing what new
tools, devices, software, devices
and trends are emerging. (See the
chapter on ‘Spotting opportunities’
for ideas on how to do this.)
2. Make time for playtime
Make time to try things out and
experiment with new technology.
A small budget of time and
money to invest in new tech
IT agility.
IT agility is about is how quickly you are able to discover and
adopt new technologies into your working processes.
‘toys’ for your office could lead
to brilliant new discoveries.
3. Try a pilot scheme
If a new piece of technology
passes the play test, or if there’s
something that people are
clamouring for, but you’re not
ready (or able) to take the plunge
and roll it out full-scale, you could
try a pilot scheme to see how
viable the idea is, and highlight any
problems or benefits early on.
4. Work on your flexibility
Being reliant on one single tool
or piece of tech is a risk, and will
ultimately make it harder you to be
agile. Look for new opportunities
today to avoid being caught with all
your eggs in one basket tomorrow.
Growing Agility 35

A number of businesses have
introduced a BYOD (‘bring your own
device’) policy, where workers bring
their own smartphones, tablets, and
even laptops to the office. The BYOD
trend has grown rapidly over the
past years, and workplaces where
BYOD isn’t an official policy find
that it happens anyway, because
people notice that the tools they
use at home will also be useful at
work. (Although there may be an
element of wanting to show off the
latest must-have gadget too!)
One step further than BYOD is
BMAD (‘buy me a device’), where the
business takes requests and buys
staff the tools that they say they need.
With both BYOD and BMAD there are
advantages and disadvantages:
BYOD and BMAD.
Another way to increase your IT agility is to put your staff in charge.
36
Pros:
• Opportunities for agility
and innovation - you tap into
the opinions, knowledge and
ideas of more of your staff
through the tools they bring
to work or ask for.
• Productivity - making sure people
have the right tools for their
individual needs makes
them more productive.
• Satisfaction and trust -
showing that you trust your
employees enough to choose their
own tools can help to boost
employee satisfaction. It sends a
great message to the outside world,
and to potential employees who
are really passionate about
technology too.
• Cost-savings - allowing people
to bring their own devices rather
than buying them has obvious
cost benefits.

Cons:
• Interoperability and compatibility-
devices from different makers
running on different operating
systems can represent a challenge
when it comes to editing, saving and
sharing documents between users.
• Security - allowing people to
use their own devices has obvious
ramifications for IT security due to
different operating system based
characteristics, which need to
be addressed.
• Support - the more different
devices and tools your company
is using, the harder the IT team will
have to work to support them all.
Ultimately, whether BYOD and BMAD
will work in your company depends
on its particular make up and
staff. Both ideas bear exploration
though, and could be worthy of a
pilot scheme to try them out.
Growing Agility 37

In the business world, failure is
sometimes seen as a dirty word, and
few executives would like to admit
publicly that they have failed. Yet
markets shift, favours are fickle, and
the economy is an unpredictable
beast. The strongest companies
are not those lucky enough to
have never been tested, but those
that are resilient, those that can
be pushed hard and still survive.
Nature shows us that the way to
survive troubled times is not through
stubbornness, but through adaptation
and evolution. Whoever is able to
adapt to suit their surroundings is
able to thrive in any environment,
and that requires a unique form of
agility, known as agile absorption.
Agile absorption is when the fluidity
of an agile mind-set combines with
the toughness of resilience, creating
what might be best described as
‘the ability to take a punch’, and
come back stronger. It has a lot
in common with Nassim Nicholas
Taleb’s concept of antifragility, which
we discussed in the chapter on
Agile absorption.
In our section on personal agility we looked at the importance of resilience
in circumstances where we are laid low by failure. Resilience is a valuable
quality for businesses too; many of the world’s biggest and most successful
businesses have had to weather a number of storms throughout their history;
the best will have come through those storms stronger than before.
38
‘Agility and change.’ Taleb writes:
“Antifragility is beyond resilience
or robustness. The resilient resists
shocks and stays the same; the
antifragile gets better.”25
Donald Sull writes that while agility
will allow a company to stake out
an early position, absorption will
mean it can secure an early lead
and reinforce its position against
competitors. But you don’t have to
choose between absorption and
agility - the former is not the sole
domain of established enterprises
and the latter doesn’t just belong
to start-ups. Agility and absorption
complement one another, and the
balance between them should shift
as circumstances change. Getting
the mix right, instead of relying
heavily on one or the other, increases
the effectiveness of these both
approaches during volatile times.26
“It is not the strongest of the species
that survives, nor the most intelligent
that survives. It is the one that is
the most adaptable to change.”
Charles Darwin
25
Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
26
Donald Sull,
‘How To Thrive In Turbulent Markets’,
Harvard Business Review, http://nokia.ly/1h3oAHP

Ford
It took Henry Ford several attempts to get his company off the ground. His
first venture, the Detroit Automobile Company, was founded in 1899 but
produced low-quality cars at a high price and was dissolved in 1901. His
next attempt, the Henry Ford Company, lasted for just a year thanks to
a dispute with his business partner. The third and final incarnation, Ford
Motor Co, almost failed too - it was close to bankruptcy, and was only
saved by a timely investment. After this last brush with failure, Ford went
on to become one of the biggest car manufacturers in the world.
Microsoft
In the 1970s when they were still in high school, Bill Gates and Paul Allen
started a company called Traf-O-Data, after finding a way to automate
reading the raw data from roadway traffic counters and creating reports
for traffic engineers for local governments in the US. The business was
initially successful, but ran into trouble when US central government
started reading the data and producing the reports for free for the local
governments. The company was rendered obsolete and folded. Building
on this early experience, Gates and Allen went on to form Microsoft.
Rovio
The Finnish company Rovio makes the wildly successful Angry Birds
games. But in at the start of 2009, it was close to bankruptcy. The
company had created 51 different games titles before Angry Birds, but
had been selling them on to publishers. At this point, Mikael and Niklas
Hed who ran the company realised that this model wasn’t working for
them financially, and also spotted the opportunity in mobile gaming. They
created Angry Birds, self-published and experienced huge success.
Innovating after failure.
It is possible for organisations to innovate and succeed after failure,
provided that they have the right level of agile absorption. Here are three
examples of companies that succeeded after experiencing failure:
Growing Agility 39

These examples have several
lessons to teach us about
being resilient to failure:
1. Always take learnings away
from a failure
The most important thing to
do after experiencing failure
is to learn something from
it. In all of the examples, early
failure provided learnings to
inform future successes.
2. Don’t let multiple failures
discourage you
Henry Ford suffered two failures
and came close to a third, before
finally becoming successful. As
long as you’re obeying lesson
one, failing more than once is
nothing to be ashamed of.
3. What you see as a failure now,
might not seem so bad with time
Traf-O-Data isn’t a blemish on
the record of Microsoft, and no
one thinks less of Ford because
it was a third try. Instead, these
examples are seen as an early
sign of promise.
40
4. Be prepared to take the
road less travelled
Sometimes recovering from failure
will mean taking a risk or making a big
change in direction. Rovio left behind
the prestigious and established
market of video gaming and took a
risk on the emerging field of mobile
games - the decision paid off.
“Remember the two benefits of
failure. First, if you do fail, you
learn what doesn’t work; and
second, the failure gives you the
opportunity to try a new approach.”
Roger Von Oech

Spotting opportunities (and dangers)
1. Communicate and avoid striation
Communication is a particularly
important factor. Open and
agile communication enables
knowledge and ideas to move
freely within a business.
A common blocker to good
communication and organisational
agility is a phenomenon known as
‘striation’. This term, popularised by
Dan McQuillan, describes the way
in which knowledge and ideas move
through a business. Largely due to
geographic location and social culture,
ideas rarely trickle down the power-
ladder, and only very occasionally
do they get passed upwards.
Instead, the communication networks
of each department are compressed
into rigid horizontal layers like the
strata of the earth - information
moves easily from side-to-side
between people on the same layer,
but it takes tremendous effort
to communicate vertically.27
One solution to the striation problem
might be to implement a policy of
hot-desking, where workers regularly
move their workstation around the
office. This means that shoulder-to-
shoulder neighbours vary from day to
day, and new conversations are more
likely to spring up. Word of mouth will
pass the strongest ideas around, with
a minimum of effort. Creating more
break-out spaces around the office
where people can gather also helps,
as does creating opportunities in
the day for people to meet and talk.
Other ideas include company social
networks like Yammer - they allow
people at every level of the company
to share things they find interesting,
and also find out about things they
might not otherwise have seen.
Finally, making sure that management
regularly have time to talk to team
members is also vital. (See the
section on communication in Teams
That Flow28
for more ideas.)
Spotting opportunities
(and dangers).
A factor in achieving agility as an organisation is spotting opportunities
and dangers so that you can react to them, rather than collide with
them. Here are some ideas for building an early warning system
that keeps you up-to-date with the latest developments.
Growing Agility 41
27
Dan McQuillan,
’From Free Software to Artisan Science’, Journal of Peer
Production, http://nokia.ly/1jSXKV2
28

Spotting opportunities (and dangers)Growing Agility
2. Look outside your organisation
(and your industry)
Ideas don’t always come from obvious
places. It can be hugely beneficial
to keep an eye on successes and
failures in other companies and other
industries. You might just spot an
idea that could be applied to your own
organisation or industry in a new way.
It’s important to acknowledge
that you can’t know everything -
when you’ve realised that, you
can focus on building knowledge
networks so that you tap into other
people’s knowledge, and filter
out the things you don’t need.
Social networks can provide you
with great access to people and
ideas that you might not otherwise
have had. As we explained in Mobile
Mastery, sociology suggests that
weak social ties - your relationships
with acquaintances rather than
close friends - are responsible for
transmitting a lot of information,
far more than travels through the
strong ties you have with close
friends or family. This is because
your weak ties are likely to know
people that you don’t, which means
there is a greater chance of them
transmitting novel information to you.
42
Social networks like Twitter and
LinkedIn give you the ability
to make more of these weak
ties and enjoy the valuable
flow of information they afford.
You can make weak ties with
innovators and early adopters that
you might never meet in your daily
life through social networks, and tap
into their knowledge and connections.
3. Be playful
Being playful is one of the core
ideas in Mobile Mastery, and it’s
relevant for Growing Agility too.
Play has an essential role in the
processes of learning and innovation,
and it fosters creativity. Technology
is also inherently playful. We treat
new devices like a child treats a new
toy: we covet them; we get pleasure
from using them; we don’t look at
them and see functionality, we see
possibilities, novelty and excitement.
It’s important not to lose this
excitement and sense of fun, as play
can lead to clear benefits in terms of
business and personal development,
because of its interrelation with
innovation. Being playful gives you
the chance to make discoveries that
could give you the edge personally
and professionally, and also give
your business an advantage over
less innovative competitors.

Spotting opportunities (and dangers)
4. Allow time for experimentation
Sometimes people need time to
come up with new ideas, or space
to step back and see the bigger
picture. This often gets pushed
aside in the busy working day, so you
need to make an effort to find time
for creativity and experimentation.
A number of companies do this
by allowing their staff a set
amount of time for innovation
or to spend on new projects.
“Chance favours the connected mind.”
Steven Johnson
Growing Agility 43

ConclusionGrowing Agility
We wrote Growing Agility because
we wanted to make you think
about how you respond to changes,
challenges and opportunities.
If we accept that change is a constant,
rather than a stand-out event, we
have a choice of two courses of
action: we can ignore it, keep our
heads down and try to carry on as
normal; or we can take the agile
approach, welcome it and look
for the opportunities it offers.
Ultimately, growing agility is about
rejecting the idea of ‘business as
usual’ and acknowledging that
the world we live and work in
means this just isn’t possible.
Growing agility starts with you,
and making sure that you are agile
personally and in your emotions and
behaviours. And if you share your
ideas and discoveries (and perhaps
this book too) with those around you,
it will spread into every corner of the
organisation you work for, making
it better equipped to thrive, make
opportunities out of challenges, and
become a little smarter every day.
Conclusion.
Thanks for reading Growing Agility. We hope that you’ve found
it useful and that it’s given you some food for thought.
44
To find out more about Smarter
Everyday, take a look at:

@NokiaAtWork

www.linkedin.com/company/nokia
http://conversations.nokia.com/
category/nokiaatwork/
www.nokia.com/business
Other Smarter Everyday ebooks:
Design Your Day
Mobile Mastery
http://nokia.ly/MMebook
Teams That Flow

Reading listGrowing Agility 45
Susan David and Christina Congleton,
‘Emotional Agility’,
Harvard Business Review,
http://nokia.ly/18o3bc8
Professor Yves Doz
and Mikko Kosonen,
Fast Strategy: How Strategic Agility
Will Help You Stay Ahead of the Game
Charles Duhigg,
The Power of Habit: Why We Do
What We Do in Life And Business
Ben Fletcher and Karen Pine,
Flex: Do Something Different
Laurence Gonzales,
Surviving Survival: The Art
and Science of Resilience
Emily Lawson and Colin Price,
‘The psychology of change
management’, McKinsey Quarterly,
http://nokia.ly/1guJceG
Dan McQuillan,
‘From Free Software to Artisan
Science’, Journal of Peer Production,
http://nokia.ly/1jSXKV2
David Neal, Wendy
Wood, Jeffrey Quinn,
‘Habits - a repeat performance’, Current
Directions in Psychological Science,
http://nokia.ly/1d9JL8e
Donald Sull,
‘Competing through organisational
agility’, McKinsey Quarterly
Donald Sull,
The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing
Opportunity in an Uncertain World
Donald Sull,
‘How To Thrive In Turbulent
Markets’, Harvard Business
Review, http://nokia.ly/1h3oAHP
Antifragile: Things That
Gain From Disorder
David Wilkinson,
The Ambiguity Advantage: What
Great Leaders Are Great At
Robert Zettle,
ACT for Depression: A Clinician’s
Guide to Using Acceptance
and Commitment Therapy
‘Building a nimble organisation’,
McKinsey Quarterly
Reading list

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