So here was the vision. An agency that could embrace and thrive in a flexible, collaborative, self-organising, fast changing environment. The vision looked great on paper.

And here we were… an agency established nearly ten years ago, with great people and doing great things but it felt harder work than it should have done at times.

We had a traditional business structure; traditional reporting lines, smaller production teams, working in silos and a clear view on how business should be done.

As an organisation, we craved more cross-team collaboration, more rapid learning and quicker decision making but we knew that figuring out how to pull off what would be a significant business transformation was a whole different ball game.

So what did we do?

We did what many traditional businesses would do, we read a lot of books, got the management team together in a room and fleshed out the programme of organisational change we needed to make.

We then used pre-existing reporting lines to filter information to the rest of the team.

Yes, you guessed it, this didn’t work.

What we very quickly discovered is that when you are moving from a traditional organisational structure to a more agile way of working, your whole team needs to be onboard, moving in the same direction and singing from the same hymn sheet, every step of the way.

We also quickly realised that moving to a more agile way of working was less about changing our processes and systems and much more around a mindset change.

We used break-out sessions and team meetings to explore what it would mean to be ‘agile’. 

We used Belbin and Myers Briggs to aid people in better understanding themselves and those around them, and one of the most significant changes we made was to remove all hierarchy and departments, instead embracing the idea of working as one ‘whole’ team.

Everyone moved seats; client services sat with web dev, design mingled with strategists and we trialled the use of ‘scrums’. 

Was it all plain sailing?

Along this journey it’s fair to say we have trialled lots of things that haven’t worked but more things that have.

In the desire for everyone to be collaborators, we encouraged regular ‘scrums’ and even had designated ‘scrum masters’. We tried to provide a formal structure to team catch-ups but this often fell short of the mark because the reality is - YOU JUST CAN’T FORCE COLLABORATION.

A secondary challenge we found is that when you are hyper focused on team collaboration, you sometimes lose the ability to trust your own intuition and knowledge and suddenly it’s ridiculously difficult to make any real decisions on the fly without checking with everybody else first. The vision of agile and quicker decision making just goes out of the window.

We learnt that synergy is a very real thing. There are plenty of occasions we’ve seen where people do more together than they would alone, but it’s about having the confidence to make those rapid decisions where and when they are needed.

So where next?

It’s safe to say there is no destination to being an agile organisation. It’s continual improvements, baby step changes that better what you do every day as a business.

We are continuing to develop our systems and processes to support a more agile environment - these remain key as the framework underpinning our culture and values.

We are also all continuing to develop as individuals, recognising that being a team player is an attitude, not just a timestamp or checkbox of observable ‘must-do’ behaviours. 

If this has left you wanting to know more about working in an agile way, take a moment to read the blog here about what it means to be ‘T’ shaped - a really important piece of the agile organisational jigsaw puzzle.