How business agility increases your profitability

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Madison and David Sherrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another episode of Definitely Maybe Agile. Today we continue our series on how business agility impacts your bottom line. What's on the cards today, Dyson?

I think we've covered the sort of obvious ones of reducing costs and increasing revenue. And I think it's worth us just speaking a little bit about the third and sort of final major way that you can hit a bottom line, which is around increasing profitability. And this is a delicate one. We've got to be kind of careful on this one. We can't, you know, without knowing context and a whole bunch of other things, it's really difficult to talk about it. But it's often forgotten. I've certainly seen organizations where they've been able to deliver a much, much better service to their clients, but they've not taken the opportunity to raise their prices. And obviously, in the today's climate, probably everybody's taking the opportunity to raise prices, is the way it feels. But something that's directly connected to, hey, we're doing a better job, we're meeting you, the customers, you we're meeting your needs, your your pain points at the right level. Now's the time for us to start, you know, recouping some of our investment by raising prices.

So this is the where you you have more money because clients want to work with you. You're maybe you're becoming an organization that uh people want to do business with. Uh they they understand they like what you stand for, they like uh what you represent in the marketplace. Um so how does business agility make that so?

You know, I think that there's a couple of things that come to it. One of them is is quite distant from the ability to really raise that profitability piece. And that one is to do with the fact that we're people oriented, kind of purpose-driven in the way that we organize an or uh an organization or a business from an agility perspective. And what that means is you're getting increasing alignment around shared values and principles and what it means to get somewhere. And I think that's something that is, in fact, we've I was talking to a a crew, a bunch of coaches from one of our clients this week. And that alignment across coaches from all across the world with this particular client was really powerful. It was one of the reasons that those individuals had come together and it pervaded everything that they were doing and talking about in the organization. That alignment is not a given, and it often comes out of that sort of business agility mindset.

I think that, and it's one of the benefits of that is that once you once you have that alignment, it has to be worked out, I completely agree. It will go, it will rapidly dissolve as well if it isn't worked out. But that alignment uh becomes very visible outside of the company too, in the way that people talk about the company, the way that your employees talk about the company, the way that uh you they feel about the company, because it's just naturally um the feeling that they have about that. And that's one of the ways in which I think it really truly helps the uh the organization. It's such an important aspect of uh what business agility is uh helping you build.

Well, it I think it's uh Seth Godin says that people you you buy from people like us, right? And that's part of it. When you've got a really clear definition of what it means to be us, then you're going to attract the people who want to buy from people like us. And and that's that's just a little distant, but very important.

And and that is uh is where we're talking about building rapport with our customers, where we're we're creating those connections, we're creating this uh the the community around uh how we want to interact with the the world around us, and uh which it exudes into a lot of other aspects of uh how we behave and uh how we interact with each other, both in the work that we're doing, and that then extends out into how uh the organization is perceived.

And I think that that the next piece, if you like, is the understanding of the end user, the customer. And again, when we come in from a business agility perspective, we've talked a bit about the cultural piece and the people orientation. The other one is the user-centric view, where and then the number of times, and I know because you and I have worked in similar organizations in the past, right? The number of times where we go in and the perspective is not from an end user's how we're going to use this system, product, service, whatever it is, but the perspective is how best to optimize this internally, is one that it is not what we're talking about. When you're looking at business agility, value streams in terms of end user value become the dominant point of conversation. It means every step of the way is continually thinking about those customers' clients, those end users. And therefore, there's there's a lot more opportunity to build rapport and understanding, and therefore to deliver something which is meaningful to those customers or end users.

So, how would you sum up how business agility impacting your bottom line through increasing your profitability? What sort of three points would you pull out of this and sum up for our listeners?

I I'm not sure. Let me pick a couple of them and I might leave you with a third. One of them is user centricity, like just understanding what the customer is and making sure we're delivering something that's relevant by walking in the customer's shoes. Number one. Number two is stronger alignment with who we are as an organization and therefore stronger alignment with our customers. And both of those mean we've got increased sort of fit, customer fit to product fit, if that makes sense. And when that fit is really, really strong, the the kind of cost gets taken off the table. You're in a position where you're really able to serve those customers and and price accordingly.

I I would I would uh add extending that internally, that it's uh that yes, we we get that bond with the customers uh externally, we also uh intrinsically start to bond better with each other because we've got more purpose in the work that we do. And so that in turn uh makes us uh more productive because we're working towards uh common sets of goals, a common understanding, and drives a lot of the other things that uh we see. So with that, I'd uh like to sum it up. You can send us your feedback at feedback at definitely maybeagile.com. And uh as always, Dave, it's a pleasure. Always a pleasure, Peter. Thanks again. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Madison and David Sharrick focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.