We ran a sequence of social business events that we branded the Patchwork Elephant, but when we were thinking of a name for our new company we decided to upgrade to agile.

WHY ELEPHANT?
There are a number of layers to the elephant:

• For most enterprises today we believe the shift to Digital, transforming the organisation and changing business model is the Elephant in the room!
• We also use the Indian subcontinent parable of the Elephant and the blind men.  Each one feels the Elephant and “sees” something different – one thinks it’s a snake, one a fan, one a wall, one a pillar, one a tree branch, one a rope – the digital transformation, new ways of working and social collaboration topics are complex and people see them in different ways from different perspectives.
• We wanted to echo the great ideas from three books:
  • Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s excellent When Giants Learn To Dance which even back in 1989 talked about the demise of beuracracy and hierarchy in business.
  • Louis Gerstner’s Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? – the 2002 book which described his successful turnaround of a giant of the technology industry.
  • Charles Handy’s The Elephant and The Flea from 2001 – part autobiography, partly a book on the changing nature of employment, and of the small independent going up against or working with the giant corporation.
• We see the Elephant as a metaphor for the significant mass and associated inertia in a typical medium or large organisation.  They can be slow to change.  We believe they can become at least as nimble as their smaller, newer competitors, but only if they adopt new thinking, new styles of leadership and a different, more open culture of teamwork and collaboration.
• We also need to tackle this complex, big issue of Digital Transformation in easily digestible chunks – eating the Elephant one bite at a time.

WHY AGILE?
People say Agile Elephant – surely that’s an oxymoron?  To that I say, if you’ve seen an Elephant in the wild up close and personal, you’ll know how agile they can be!

As well as highlighting how we can make business, the Elephant, dance, we ourselves need a more nimble way of working too.

We want to move away from the traditional cascading waterfall approach for these kinds of transformational projects.  We are Agile.  Instead we believe in an iterative, distributed approach to managing projects and getting the job done with lean efficiency.

We need to consider ways we can make our organizations become more adaptive.  We need to change how we think about change.  An Agile approach is fundamental to the new mindset required, for achieving better results, and faster.  Agile underpins all of our thinking.

So we are the Agile Elephant and we would love to be working with you and your company!  Contact us to find out more or start a dialogue with us around the possibilities of the new Digital landscape.

Here is the panel session that I took part in at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris this week, on 11th & 12th February 2014.  We were discussing the key factors for strategic enablement of enterprise 2.0, social business, and social collaboration in organisations. Emanuele Quintarelli set the scene presenting a survey of Italian firms. Then the discussion, moderated by Bjoern Negelmann, was between:

• Emanuele Quintarelli – Digital Transformation Practice Leader, Ernst & Young
• Luis Suarez – formerly Social Computing evangelist, IBM Software group
• Dr. Chee Chin Liew – Enterprise Community Manager, BASF SE
• David Terrar – Founder & CXO, Agile Elephant
• Simon Levene – Senior Strategy Consultant, Jive Software

There was actually some tension between the speakers, resulting in a great discussion.  The tension is between the likes of Emanuele and myself who want to lift the argument to real, hard, business numbers and metrics that the executives in the C-Suite can understand in a business case, versus Luis and others at the conference who want to focus on the culture change required in the workplace, on improving employee engagement, the move to knowledge sharing, open business and collaboration, with use cases that are effective.  Both are important.  But to accelerate things, it’s my belief we need cold, hard business logic combined with the inspiration to change to open business.  Listen to the discussion and you decide.

Here are a few key quotes I’ve lifted out of the dialogue:

“7 out of your 10 colleagues don’t give s#%! about what you do today!”

“need more doing than talking”

“go back to the core nature of how work gets done”

“how can I help you today?”

“but first of all we need to make it clear to the business where is the benefit”

“does management agree or recognise social as an enabling tool for more engagement and to solve the problem of the fundamental (financial) crisis?”

“not happening yet because we are talking about collaboration, we are not talking about measurable business benefits”

“the majority of people in this room are believers in this thing”

“it’s up to us as a community to get out there and communicate it better to the average business person in the street

“it’s all about use cases, if you come up with a list of top 10, 15 use cases of how people work and socialise them”

“break a silo, and you go in to openness and transparency”

My post setting the scene and introducing the show is here, and my conference report will follow shortly.