Agility with a «Human Touch»

Agility with a «Human Touch»

More and more companies are turning to models like Scrum or Holacracy. But if you want to make your teams agile, you first have to dedicate yourself to the people and get them excited about it. I (Danica Zeier) therefore plead for rethinking our ideas about agility. Or better: to re-feel them. In this blogpost, I write about a personal and insightful experience.

Pandemic, virus mutations, war, inflation and energy crisis: the last three years have been VUCA in its purest form. VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity – the big challenges of today.

My vision was to develop a digital support – at best in the form of an app – that would help people cope better in this VUCA world. But neither my customers nor my team were interested in a purely digital product. And they were right.

Diversion instead of destination

While our B2B clients had a need for a eLearning tool for their teams, they also wanted to spare employees from even more screentime. Understandable in an time of home offices, Zoom meetings, and social media. After a wave of forced digitization during shutdowns, many longed to get back to real human interaction.

My team at artsnext also focused on face-to-face meetings. After all, face-to-face consultations, where we can truly feel our customers and address their individual needs, are our core competence. The team’s message was clear: It would be a risky challenge to invest additional mental as well as physical energy in the development of a visionary, but also one-sided digital project.

What would have happened if I had stuck to my original idea? I probably would have lost talented employees as well as potential customers. Therefore, I said goodbye to my target destination and took the left turn together with my team. We developed the eLearning tool, but supplemented it with physical on-site workshops.

People tick differently

Let’s take a closer look at the difference between companies and their employees:

• Companies tick rationally. They prefer to manage from the top down. Employees should be made agile.
• Employees tick emotionally. If they are to work together more agilely, they first want to be inspired to do so. That would be bottom-up.

Agile culture is only possible if tools are introduced and skills are trained – but also if every single team member sees a purpose in becoming more agile. Skill Shift is quick, but not enough. Mind Shift takes more time, but is essential for tomorrow’s agility.

Our result: Digital meets Analog

We have developed VUC^it, a successful app that offers team training for companies on the topics of resilience, self-leadership, collaboration and new work. Moreover, it supports employees in their personal development in order to cope better in this VUCA world and not lose touch with it. The digital tools are complemented by offline activities such as on-site workshops. VUC^it has enabled us to

• anchored new leadership principles with 100 SBB managers.
• Conducted resilience training for over 500 apprentices from 30 companies at the last Digital Days.
• Together with the city of Bern, we have developed an empowerment program on the topic of digital transformation for around 5,000 administration employees.

On that note, thank you to my team at artsnext and to our clients. We have rooted the “human touch” in our strategy and will continue to refine this important factor together in the future.