{"id":1150,"date":"2020-10-19T11:51:50","date_gmt":"2020-10-19T11:51:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/?p=1150"},"modified":"2020-10-19T11:51:57","modified_gmt":"2020-10-19T11:51:57","slug":"its-up-to-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/2020\/10\/19\/its-up-to-you\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s up to you!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image by\u00a0Colin Behrens from Pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Last week, we had a strategy workshop at Software Center<\/a>, the public-private digital transformation acceleration partnership that I lead. During one of the breakout sessions, we had a fun discussion around business agility that illustrated a very recognizable pattern. In a discussion around how to realize business agility, the focus was on who could be considered to be responsible for it. And then more examples of various people and roles abdicating responsibility were shared than you can shake a stick at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways, it has been the journey of Software Center. We started \nto work with software engineers around Agile practices, but soon the \nengineers mentioned that the architects should be involved as agility \naffects architecture as well. Once we had the architects involved, soon \nthe requests came to involve development managers in the discussion as \nthose are line managers to both engineers and architects. The \ndevelopment managers of course soon asked to involve product managers \nbecause they were just telling their teams to build what product \nmanagement requests. It didn\u2019t take long after we got product managers \ninvolved until they started to complain that we needed to involve the \nsalespeople as whatever we were doing on the product development side \nhad to be sold by them. The salespeople immediately remarked that if we \nwanted to change what we were selling, we had to get the C-suite \ninvolved as it would have a material impact on the bottom line. And the \nC-suite, obviously, responded with the argument that our customers \nweren\u2019t asking for it and that our suppliers and partners weren\u2019t \nwilling to work with us on realizing these changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s going on here? Well, it relates to a column that I shared some months ago<\/a>: to change anything, you have to change everything! And it aligns perfectly with our instinctive desire to keep things as they were and to control our environment to the maximum extent possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an additional perspective though: the R&D organization in\n most companies that I work with considers itself to have the duty to \nbuild what the business side of the company asks for. The problem is of \ncourse that the business side doesn\u2019t know what it wants until it\u2019s \nblatantly obvious what\u2019s needed and then they want it immediately. The \nnew requirements from business often come up late and demand an \nimmediate response from R&D. advertorial \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reality is that in practice, it\u2019s the R&D organization that \nsets the business strategy for any organization. The design decisions \ntaken by key people in R&D make certain business opportunities \nimpossibly expensive to pursue, in terms of cost and time, and other \nbusiness opportunities are easy and fast to realize. For all the talk \naround agility, realizing any significant architectural change in a \nlarge, established system takes a long time, often measured in quarters \nand years. The consequence is that it\u2019s the responsibility of the \nR&D organization to predict the most likely business strategy \noptions that the company will pursue a year or more down the line and \nprepare the system architecture for this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This means that if you\u2019re in R&D, you need to take \nresponsibility. It\u2019s your job to have a clear idea of what the future \nmay look like and ensure that you\u2019re creating a future for your company \nwhile delivering on today\u2019s challenges. It\u2019s critical to be ambidextrous\n and to balance the short and longer term. Most organizations rapidly \nbuild patterns for this, with a tendency to focus on the short term \npredominantly. It\u2019s your responsibility to not blindly follow the \nestablished patterns but to continuously question the status quo. As \nAndy Grove used to say, only the paranoid survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In most organizations, there\u2019s a tendency to use excuses to explain why certain changes aren\u2019t realized. One of the most effective excuses is to abdicate responsibility and to point to others in the organization as being responsible for holding you back. As the saying goes, your comfort zone is a beautiful place but nothing ever grows there. It\u2019s up to each of us to shoulder the heaviest responsibility we can carry and to step into an uncertain, unpredictable future, taking calculated risks and delivering for today and tomorrow. It\u2019s up to you!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get more insights earlier, sign up for my newsletter at <\/em>jan@janbosch.com<\/em><\/a> or follow me on<\/em> janbosch.com\/blog<\/em><\/a>, LinkedIn (<\/em>linkedin.com\/in\/janbosch<\/em><\/a>) or Twitter (<\/em>@JanBosch<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, we had a strategy workshop at Software Center, the public-private digital transformation acceleration partnership that I lead. During one of the breakout sessions, we had a fun discussion around business agility that illustrated a very recognizable pattern. In a discussion around how to realize business agility, the focus was on who could be … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1152,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions\/1152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}