Interview with Alize Hofmeester: As a passionate People & Change Executive, I help organizations to stay relevant to their customers, by reshaping their future way of working and facilitating a fresh mindset that leads to companywide flow and business agility. Over the years I have gained unique insights on how to introduce and transform companies into becoming successful and sustainable business-agility entities.
We all know Peter Drucker’s famous quote ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’ and I transformed that into ‘Culture makes or breaks your agile transition’. For me this is reason number one why so many agile transitions fail. In this article I explain what I mean with culture, I make some references to books or articles explaining culture and I make a reference to my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest and elaborate on the, what I call, culture targeted frameworks or ways of working.
Agile working is developed to face complex problems in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) context. Agility helps to anticipate and adjust to changes while keeping the purpose ahead. The Agile way of working stimulates us to use all talents and perspectives in our team, which enables us to solve complex problems. When things go well, people experience work-energy and flow.
Fred Hoekstra is director of the department Social Medical Affairs (Sociaal Medische Zaken – SMZ) at UWV. Fred has been working for a while to make the organization more agile. This has accelerated due to the COVID-19 situation. From the start of COVID-19, UWV has contributed to help employees and employers in the Netherlands who ran into problems due to the sudden pandemic. With the foundations that had already been laid, Fred helped to bring out the best in the organization.
Ron Meyer and Ronald Meijers published an article on ‘Leaders Beware: Four Megatrends Shaping the Age of Agility’. Inspired by the article Vincent Snijder and Maarten Leeuw interviewed one of the authors. They reached out to Prof. dr. Ron Meyer, thought leader on strategy and leadership. The aim was to get a more specific and broader perspective on, amongst others, strategy development in agile companies.
Why should we suddenly care more about leadership agility than before? It is because there is definitely something new going on, at a very fundamental level – we have entered the age of agility, in which Darwinian survival of the fittest has been shifted up a gear.
The first BSF magazine has been released. It contains, among other, articles that were created in collaboration with representatives of Royal BAM group, The Diversity Company, Best-seller author Tim Wiegel.
So much has been said about agile. We thought it would also be good to show you the almighty myths of the corridor chat. Here are some statements that you should definitely question! Let us enlighten you why…
Imagine you are a manager of a support department. A manager leading 10-30 people. It is a collection of functions. Your biggest frustration? Definitely the fact that you have no control over the priorities of your department.
Change is always hard. But not changing, will be harder in the end. Although you should think big, it sometimes starts with small steps…
Valentine’s Day, every year it keeps many people busy. A large imaginary pink cloud is pouring out across the world for a euphoric peak around the thought that love overcomes everything.