Strengthening Organizational Agility

Training without culture change is why your new processes never stick. I've spent a decade training product teams, and I can tell you exactly which ones succeed: the ones where leadership built the infrastructure and culture to support what we taught. Here's what I've learned. Most organizations approach training backwards. They bring everyone together, deliver great content, get enthusiastic feedback.... and then send people back into systems that punish exactly what they just learned. A team learns to run small experiments? Their planning process still demands detailed 12-month roadmaps. They're taught to validate with customers? There's no time allocated, no research budget, no clear way to feed insights back into decisions. They embrace evidence-based prioritization? Leadership still overrides everything based on gut feel. The pattern is clear: Training + Culture = Capability. The teams that actually change their habits have three things in place: 1. Decision rights: People can actually act on what they learned without eighteen approval layers. 2. Time and resources: Customer conversations and experiments aren't "nice to haves" squeezed between meetings. They're built into how work happens. 3. Leadership alignment: Managers reinforce new behaviors in roadmap reviews, retrospectives, and how they talk about success. This is why it's great to START with the managers and senior leadership when making an organizational change. Before you invest in another training program, look hard at your organization. Are you set up to support what you're about to teach? Do your processes, metrics, and incentives actually reward the behaviors you want? If not, you're not building capability. You're just running expensive theater. What have you seen work, or not work, when rolling out new ways of working?

Listen, if you say “fail fast” but spend forty minutes in a post-mortem grilling the team on why a test underperformed — you just taught everyone in that room that failure is dangerous. If you say “take risks” but give the bigger raise to the person who hit their number safely rather than the one who tried something ambitious and came up short — you’ve told your team exactly what you actually value. You can’t talk your way to an experimentation culture. Ninety-five percent of the signal comes not from what you say, but from those three decisions. Reward. Promote. Fire.

Many organizations approach innovation the way they approach budgeting or operations. They create roadmaps, timelines, and committees designed to produce breakthroughs on schedule. But the history of technology suggests something different. Most meaningful innovations do not arrive neatly on a calendar. They appear unexpectedly. A new idea. A technical breakthrough. A surprising connection between two things that previously seemed unrelated. The real challenge is making sure your organization is ready when those moments appear. The companies and institutions that consistently innovate tend to invest early in talent and technical capability. They build cultures where experimentation is encouraged and where people are willing to test new ideas. They maintain the flexibility to pursue unexpected opportunities and move quickly when promising ideas appear. Innovation rarely begins as a fully formed plan. More often it begins as a possibility that only a few people recognize at first. The advantage goes to the organizations that have prepared themselves to recognize that moment and act on it. You may not be able to schedule inspiration. But you can build teams, systems, and cultures that are ready when it shows up. #SchmidtSights

Great leadership isn’t about ensuring alignment all the time. Here is why: I recently worked with a leadership team in a global company that, at first glance, seemed to be thriving. Meetings were quick, decisions were made efficiently, and everyone was on the same page. They believed this harmony meant they were operating at peak performance. But beneath the surface, something critical was missing: 🚫 innovation. Their constant agreement was stifling progress. Without diverse ideas, challenges, or healthy debate, the team was simply recycling the same thinking, overlooking new opportunities and struggling with complex problems. It was a classic case of ‘groupthink’—where everyone falls into agreement to avoid conflict or discomfort.  👇 Here’s what I did with the team: - Diagnosed the agreement cycle & TPS - Introduced psychological safety practices - Encouraged intellectual humility - Secured mechanism for diverse input integration We started worked on inclusive decision-making practices by ensuring that every voice in the room was heard. We integrated mechanisms like structured brainstorming, anonymous idea submissions, and rotating roles of idea champions to reduce bias and prevent dominant voices from overtaking discussions. 📈 The result? Not only did their decision-making improve, but their solutions became more creative and forward-thinking. Leaders, here're the takeaways: 1️⃣ If your meetings are full of "Yes, I agree," ask yourself what you might be missing. 2️⃣ Diversity of thought is your competitive advantage. 3️⃣ Teams thrive when they feel safe enough to disagree and bold enough to innovate. This is psychological safety. P.S. Do you think your team challenges each other enough? I’d love to hear your thoughts 👇

Forget top-down mandates. Real business agility comes from unleashing the innovators within your organization. Over the years at Make, we have spent a lot of time with our customers. Many of them disrupting their industry with new digital first business models. In these conversations, we consistently come across a certain mindset in people using our technology. They are re-thinking how to operate, re-imagining their business. These innovators are the ones driving real change, enabling businesses to stay nimble and agile. Those people are the ones making the difference, empowering them is the key to achieving business agility. So today, let me share with you a recipe that includes what we believe are the key ingredients to unlock this potential in your organization. First, there is the WILL. It’s the drive to innovate. This one is about the mindset. It’s the belief that they can solve and overcome any challenge. Fundamentally it’s their urge to discover, to persevere and to make breakthroughs. And you can impact this by inspiring them. By celebrating those who drive change. By showcasing where transformative solutions like visual automation, AI agents or no-code tools can be used to overcome day-to-day business challenges. It’s about inspiring people through use cases and success stories - to motivate people to achieve more of their own potential. Second, there is the SKILL. People’s ability to drive innovation. Whether people have a highly technical background or are self-taught doesn’t matter. It’s about fostering a culture of continuous learning and adoption of new technology. It’s about allowing your people to spend time on acquiring new skills to drive change, and to reinforce it with supporting these learning opportunities. And third, it’s about your business ENVIRONMENT. The organization around the individual, strengthening the innovators. The right environment is about promoting a culture of innovation, experimentation. Empower individuals. Let them fail fast and iterate. Allow them to challenge the status quo and embrace change. If you bring those ingredients together, you are creating a sweet spot. You are setting yourself up for making business agility a reality.  So, don’t wait for innovation to find you. Start to transform your business by impacting those three aspects for the innovators in your team. What steps are you taking to foster innovation in your company? #businessagility #nocode #automation 

100% of companies will tell you they want a learning culture...but why then does learning become something that's done 'when things calm down'? Because in many places, they never do 🤷♀️ What I mean by a learning culture is when an organization is set up so that people continuously get better at their work, every week, not by accident, but in an intentional, structured way- supported by their learning habits and behaviours. A learning culture is most visible when it's normal and expected to share the problems you see, share what you don' know, share the knowledge you have and listen to hear what others have to say. And the best way to create this culture?? Through continuous micro behaviour and habit changes. Such as... 1) End meetings with a 2-minute “What did we learn?” Ask: What did we learn today? What should we do differently next time? 2) Replace “Who did this?” with “What in the process allowed this?” When something goes wrong, model the language: “Let’s fix the system, not hunt a person.” 3) Make one question your default answer to a problem: "What do you think happened and what should we do? It trains people to think, not just react. 4) Turn mistakes into a 5-minute “lesson captured” Store it somewhere visible (Teams channel, shared doc, noticeboard). 5) Normalize “I don’t know… yet” Leaders say it first. 6) Do a weekly “one improvement” round In a huddle or team check-in- each person shares one small improvement they made or noticed. 7) Use “ask and listen” after decisions or training After explaining something, ask: “Can you tell me what you understand from what I said?” Not to test people- to confirm shared understanding. 8) Create a “question parking lot” that actually gets answered When questions come up mid-work, park them. Assign an owner and a date. 9) Praise learning behaviours, not just outcomes Catch people doing the right things and say thanks! 10) Build a micro-habit of feedback Once a week, everyone gives one piece of helpful feedback to someone. Really importantly, while these ARE simple tweaks to habits and behaviours, they require people to step out of their comfort zone- and that challenge has to be recognized and supported. What have you seen or introduced to shape a learning culture? What gets in the way? Leave your comments below 🙏

Speed doesn’t kill startups. Lack of structure does. At Super.com, we scaled to $150M+ in revenue and 200+ team members without losing our edge. How? We built what we call Mission-Aligned Teams (MATs): a system inspired by Amazon’s single-threaded owners (STOs). STOs looked great for Amazon's scale but felt impossible for growing companies like ours. These 2 critical barriers made it impractical for most businesses and scale-ups: 1. Engineering Squad Requirements: True STO demands complete engineering teams (including managers) reporting to a single owner. At our size, we couldn't justify full engineering squads for each business unit. To make it work, we would have to quadruple our engineering headcount. 2. P&L Owner Complexity: STO leaders need unicorn-level skills: deep business acumen and P&L management experience. Not only are these leaders rare and expensive, but requiring all these skills in one person would have limited our talent pool and slowed our ability to launch new initiatives. What we needed was a model that captured STO's focus and accountability but worked for our size and growth needs. That's when we created Mission-Aligned Teams (MATs), a hybrid model that changed our execution (for good) Key principles: • Each team owns a specific mission (e.g., improving customer service, optimizing payment flow) • Teams are cross-functional and self-sufficient • Leaders can be anyone (engineer, PM, marketer) who's good at execution • People still report functionally for career development • Leaders focus on execution, not people management The results exceeded our highest expectations: New MAT leads launched new products, each generating $5-10M in revenue within a year with under 10 person teams. Planning became streamlined. Ownership became clear. Today, I’m giving away our Mission Aligned Teams Guide and Template and offering select high-impact 1:1 advisory calls on Intro, alongside the founders of Zillow, Reddit, Inc., and veteran VCs and experts like Andrew Chen If your team can’t answer “What matters most this week?” in under 5 seconds, it’s not a team. It’s a traffic jam. If you're scaling and structure is slowing you down, I can help. ✔️ Team design for execution ✔️ Scaling from founder-led to systems-led ✔️ Growth loops and organizational clarity ✔️ OKRs that actually drive results ------------------- 🚨 Want the exact Mission Aligned Teams Guide and Template we used to go from $0 to $150M+ revenue/year for FREE? • Like and share this post • Comment "MATs" I'll send you our entire MATs Guide — including the real team structures, internal templates, and step by step implementation guide that fueled our growth and built Super.com These are the same docs behind a Harvard case study and our $85M raise. No fluff — just what actually worked. This won’t be public for long, and due to time constraints, I'll be giving priority access for folks who shared this post. (photo credits to Manu Cornet)

I'm thrilled to share my 25th article for Rolling Stone, "Turning Adversity into Your Superpower." In this piece, I reflect on the inspiring story of Vasanti, a young woman from India who transformed her struggles into strengths. Growing up, Vasanti was told she needed to excel at computer programming to succeed abroad. Despite not being the best coder and even being bullied by a teacher, she persevered. "I love being told I can’t do something now, just so I can rise up to the challenge and prove others wrong," she shared with us. At a workshop we produced a few years ago, Vasanti's story moved everyone in the room. Despite feeling discouraged and nearly giving up, she taught herself to code, eventually landing a programming job in the U.S. Her resilience and determination became her superpower, inspiring her peers. My friend Kathleen Griffith created a framework in her book "Build Like a Woman" that I think directly applies to Vasanti's story. She shifted from breakdown to breakthrough and turned adversity into strength: ∙Acknowledged the Breakdown: Vasanti admitted that the teacher's bullying made her feel inadequate and almost caused her to abandon her coding dreams. ∙Identified the Breakthrough Goal: Despite her doubts, Vasanti decided she wanted to prove her capabilities and succeed in coding, setting a clear goal for herself. ∙Declared Action: She took control of her learning, teaching herself to code. Her self-driven learning process became a pivotal step in her journey. Her story at our workshop had a profound impact on her team. As Vasanti shared her journey, I noticed her teammates nodding and writing things down. One of her teammates, Ryan, was particularly inspired. When I asked him what he was jotting down, he said, "Honestly? I’m listing out new assignments that I can give to Vasanti." Vasanti's journey is a powerful reminder that our toughest moments can shape us into resilient, innovative individuals. Recognizing and sharing how our adversities turned into our strengths (even superpowers) can help us grow, build trust, and foster closer connections within our teams. For all the leaders out there, I encourage you to bring this model into your next team meeting. Ask your team members to share an adverse experience that shaped them and discuss the superpowers they've developed because of it. You'll be amazed at the strength and resilience within your team. You'll be amazed at the amazing stories people tell of how they developed the focus, grit, determination, wisdom, clarity that they now use to bring a positive impact on our world. Don't dwell on the negative, focus on the positive! Link to the article in the Comments below!

One of the most effective tools for AI adoption? Storytelling. Telling the stories of your early wins and explorations can humanize the work, model how change can happen thoughtfully — and inspire people to embrace new ways of thinking and working.   I’m often struck by how many interesting stories of AI-driven advancements are hidden within an organization.   I was speaking about this at an event when I was approached by an engineer who had used Anthropic's Claude hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a workflow to support a resource-intensive process. It had reduced the time it took the team to manage the work from weeks to hours — and they loved it because they were now able to use their time for more strategic business development. I asked who had heard this story. The answer? No one outside of her group.   Her journey to thoughtfully pull AI into process improvement, how she thought through data privacy and security, and worked closely with end users to deliver more value to customers represents a treasure trove of fantastic behavior to model for others . . .  and an inspiring moment of grassroots innovation in support of the company’s strategic objectives. It was a story that needed to be told.   Stories work because we connect to them emotionally. And these stories can be found all over large organizations. Find, articulate, and share the stories that are happening in your organization. Show how work can support your existing strategic objectives. Share what was hard about the process — and use this as an education moment on how to think about responsible AI, data privacy, security, and governance questions.   If your work identifies issues that need to be resolved, view that as a positive outcome — you've learned something important. Then, work to create a proper process for addressing those issues, which can become part of the ongoing story and learning experience.   Marketers have long used storytelling and use cases to bring the “possible” to life and inspire action. The tough — and unique — pressures of AI change demand a rethink of how we inspire change. Capturing and telling stories make abstract change initiatives more tangible for employees, help them visualize how they can contribute, and counteract fears and concerns. It’s also a way to celebrate and recognize successes. ***** What do you think? ****** >>>> Have you used storytelling to support change? >>>> What have you found to work best? ________ Hi 👋 I’m Alison McCauley. I’ll be diving more into the challenges and opportunities of AI change in future posts. Follow me for more on being human at the AI crossroads 🙋♂️ 🤖 💡   #aitransformation #changemanagement #storytelling #responsibleai

Too often, I’ve been in a meeting where everyone agreed collaboration was essential—yet when it came to execution, things stalled. Silos persisted, friction rose, and progress felt painfully slow. A recent Harvard Business Review article highlights a frustrating truth: even the best-intentioned leaders struggle to work across functions. Why? Because traditional leadership development focuses on vertical leadership (managing teams) rather than lateral leadership (influencing peers across the business). The best cross-functional leaders operate differently. They don’t just lead their teams—they master LATERAL AGILITY: the ability to move side to side, collaborate effectively, and drive results without authority. The article suggests three strategies on how to do this: (1) Think Enterprise-First. Instead of fighting for their department, top leaders prioritize company-wide success. They ask: “What does the business need from our collaboration?” rather than “How does this benefit my team?” (2) Use "Paradoxical Questions" to Avoid Stalemates. Instead of arguing over priorities, they find a way to win together by asking: “How can we achieve my objective AND help you meet yours?” This shifts the conversation from turf battles to solutions. (3) “Make Purple” Instead of Pushing a Plan. One leader in the article put it best: “I bring red, you bring blue, and together we create purple.” The best collaborators don’t show up with a fully baked plan—they co-create with others to build trust and alignment. In my research, I’ve found that curiosity is so helpful in breaking down silos. Leaders who ask more questions—genuinely, not just performatively—build deeper trust, uncover hidden constraints, and unlock creative solutions. - Instead of assuming resistance, ask: “What constraints are you facing?” - Instead of pushing a plan, ask: “How might we build this together?” - Instead of guarding your function’s priorities, ask: “What’s the bigger picture we’re missing?” Great collaboration isn’t about power—it’s about perspective. And the leaders who master it create workplaces where innovation thrives. Which of these strategies resonates with you most? #collaboration #leadership #learning #skills https://lnkd.in/esC4cfjS