Fit organizations are the goal, not just Agile ones.

I'd love to see us retire "[x] Agility' as a discipline and move to 'organizational fitness'

I’m thinking I want us to abandon the notion that the goal of organizational change should be agile organizations, or product-driven organizations, or even customer-focused organizations. Don’t get me wrong. I am an agilist. I’m a believer in product thinking and in focus on the customer. I believe that these practices are powerful tools for improving organizations and the work lives or people who make them up.

But I think we’re all making our lives harder as change agents and serving our customers more poorly by hanging these up as the goals we (and they) should seek.

I have a simpler goal – that includes all the things (and more) – ‘organizational fitness.’

I wonder if we’re making a bit of a mistake as we try and focus on these aspects of organizational fitness and ignore others (financial health, etc.).

Let’s set the stage a bit.

We’re talking about organizations – groups of people working in some level of alignment for the survival and success of their collective entity. The entity survives in the short and long run by capturing more value than it consumes; if it can’t do that, at some point (as Taleb says) “there ain’t no game no more.” Does this mean the best organizations are the most profitable? Nope. If I increase profits by abusing the people within the organization, eventually they will leave (or in the most extreme case, die off) – no more organization. If I exploit my customers, I can generate surplus value for a while – but at some point if we build crappy cars, Japan starts building better cars, and we go bankrupt.

Our collective goal – whether inside out organizations or outside supporting them (as we consultants do) – ought to be to improve our organization’s value creation and value capturing ability. If other organizations are better than ours (and there are always better organizations) – our organization will be less effective, and ultimately may die.

We want them to be more effective, capture more value, and thrive.

Agility, product skills, and customer focus are absolutely part of what it means to be healthy – just as resistance training, stretching, cardio, and diet are all part of physical fitness. We need to embrace the wider meaning of organizational fitness – and in doing that I think we’ll find that many of the barriers we face in driving transformation will suddenly be less fearsome.

I’ll add to this that organizational fitness means different things to different organizations – a digital startup faces a different environment and challenges than a global energy company who in turn faces different ones than a regional financial services company, etc. etc. etc.

The fitness required of a NFL player is different than that required of a UFC fighter which is different than that required of a gymnast which is different than that required of a cyclist. And at each stage and level of every sport – from U10 soccer to senior aerobics – they differ as well.

We serve our clients poorly by not understanding what constitutes organizational fitness for that specific organization at this specific moment of time and tailoring what we suggest to their specific needs.

More on this in a bit.