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Organizational Agility, Innovation, & Inclusion / Webinar Recap

Thanks to everyone who joined the fourth webinar in our Navigating Chaos series. We hope you learned something and have a few new ideas.


We were joined by Jennifer Sconyers of Abundance Leadership Consulting for a thoughtful conversation. If you missed it, here's the replay. Read on below for highlights and links to resources.



Key Takeaways from Our Conversation


Key elements to building resilience during unpredictable times are:


  • Maintaining adaptable foundations: Organizations should have core goals and missions that can remain stable but allow for adaptability in how they work to meet their long-term vision. Frameworks, like strategic plans or a theory of change, shouldn't be static documents but rather adaptable tools that organizations actively engage with and update regularly.


  • Ongoing communication and transparency: Both internal communication (keeping teams informed) and external communication (reassuring supporters or clients) are crucial during uncertain times. Transparency builds trust, and trust is necessary for the experimentation and innovation needed to adapt.


Values alignment transforms team culture. When teams successfully align around shared values, it creates a profound positive impact on team culture and program/product delivery. Yet, values require operationalization including:


  • Define values with concrete behaviors: Organizations should not only identify their values but clearly define what those values look like in practice through specific behaviors and actions. Making previously implicit values explicit and clearly communicated creates organizational clarity. Clarifying and removing jargon from diversity, equity, and inclusion concepts makes them practical, understandable, and actionable.


  • Use storytelling to understand values and motivations: Sharing what motivates leaders and teams in their work and why they're committed to it is a helpful tool to build trust. It helps the team understand the values driving each member's behavior, identifying where connections or disconnections occur.


Iterative, continuous learning and a willingness to experiment and occasionally embrace failure are key to organizational agility. Agile processes ensure teams can weather unpredictability by creating systems and structures to adapt during uncertainty. However, agility requires shifting away from traditional command and control structures, which may be uncomfortable for some organizations. Teams can start small and practice to develop agile skills and create team norms around experimentation and failure.


The core principles of Agile processes include:


  • Shared learning and values

  • Iterative development/experiment cycles or "sprints"

  • Regular check-ins and retrospectives

  • Continuous improvement


Inclusion is key to creating organizational cultures that embrace agility and innovation. Creating an inclusive culture starts with aligning values and centering fairness and belonging. Inclusion should be embedded in organizational programming and not be an afterthought or add-on.

Innovation is a practice, not an event. Yet, innovation needs structure, or the right “pace and space” to be successful, including:


  • A clear timeline (pace) for innovation activities

  • Defined parameters (space) for experimentation

  • Specific roles and responsibilities

  • Structured feedback mechanisms


Communications teams need to be at the leadership table. Communicating internally and externally is critical during the rollout of new products/programs and key pivots to an organization’s approach or programming. Communications teams are listening across all of an organization’s stakeholders and can help avoid pitfalls and create messaging to best relay the changes underway.


Resources


Abundance Leadership Consulting’s Managing Professional Relationships Course




Keep In Touch


Here’s how to connect with our speakers.




Buoy 231 Consulting


Learn more about the Navigating Chaos webinar series and sign up for future events!

 
 
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