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.
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.
Vincent Snijder and Henk Venema had the privilege to interview Joost Brouwer. Joost Brouwer is grid-owner for Corporate Credits at ABN AMRO. Interestingly is that he also experienced what it takes to start up a brand new initiative and scale that towards a high level of maturity. In his current position as well as in his previous role at New10 he explored various ways to implement scaled agile.
In a fast-changing world, organizations must be able to respond adequately to internal and external developments. Sustainable success depends on the speed with which adjustments in the strategy lead to an actual changed course. In other words: how long does it take for the organization to change course after turning the ‘strategy steering wheel’?
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 leadership purpose of one of the Inspinity partners is ‘leading the expedition into unchartered territories and enjoying the journey more than the destination’. This contains two important elements that characterize every agile journey; it will be different than planned and it must be pleasant.
The theme of this first issue of the Blue Striped Frog Magazine is transparency. Not the stifling Big Brother transparency from ‘The Circle’, but the trust- creating transparency that makes it possible to be agile and continuously improve. Read the editor’s Froggy Talk!