Businesses are beginning to find their way through the COVID-19 recession and are facing many changes, challenges and unknowns. Three themes are dominating their strategies: e-commerce; changing customer expectations and the need for agility. These related themes reflect key trends which have existed for quite a while. The COVID-19 situation worked as a catalyser and made them more relevant and more urgent.
In this article, we will focus on “Agility” which we believe is an essential enabler of success for the other two primary themes and is a critical operating skill-set for insights professionals.
Agility is frequently equated with fast or quickly. We understand the importance of that, and no doubt, fast is essential, however, sometimes it may lead to agility viewed as “the same as speed” and not well-thought-out. The dictionary gives two definitions of the agility: “the ability to move relatively quickly and easily” and “the ability to think and understand quickly”. For businesses and the insights profession, a combination of the two definitions is better than the separate ones: “Agility is the ability to think, understand and move quickly and easily.” This is the definition we will use here.
Why agility?
A consequence of the pandemic and the subsequent recession is that consumer behaviour is changing rapidly. For everyone, the reality is changing, people do different things and do things differently. Some changes are temporary, some will last.
Businesses also face this dynamically changing reality. They are observing customers reacting differently, buying differently, using products in a different setting, changing attitudes, changing expectations. In addition, they are confronted with supply chain disruptions, and retail channel changes: some channels fight to survive, some are exploding. The strategies and plans businesses made only a few months ago suddenly seem obsolete. While trying to rebalance, they are overloaded with questions, and conflicting observations, signs, requests. All asking for a response, but how? There is no panacea, no general answer, no stress-tested game plan. Therefore, agility is critical.
Businesses must respond agilely, which means think, understand, move quickly, and move easily. Without the normal planning process does not imply without thinking, without understanding, without using what is already in hand. For more than a century business science and consumer behaviour science, have been guiding and helping businesses understand, develop, and react. There are models, frameworks, theories and within businesses a lot of data. Reality is changing, but it has also been changing in the past. The difference today is the speed of change. Therefore, agility and agile thinking is so essential and why it needs to be embraced by the organization(i). Use the insights, use the frameworks, use the data, but use them consciously and test continuously.
Using the existing insights, data, frameworks, and combining them with new insights that are based on testing will take the full definition of agility(ii). Not only the businesses, but also the insights profession must be agile, which means think, understand, and move quickly and easily and enable the businesses to proceed quickly and easily as well. Insights professionals know consumers and consumer behaviour, they know the frameworks, they know how to test and interpret. However, success and being able to move quickly and smoothly will require that data, insight and benchmarks are available and accessible before a question is asked. Success also requires decision-makers to understand the data and insights .
Agility does not mean without structure. The accessibility to existing and new information requires structure for speed. It requires a platform, an optimized ecosystem. If the insights or the data are not sufficient, then the missing data or indicators must be generated, quickly, and the answers must be shareable and implementable fast and easily. This foundation and infrastructure are essential to provide the guidance, support and flexibility the decision makers will need.
The bottom line is: Success in the future will require businesses and insights professionals to focus on developing the skills, platforms and infrastructure that enable and turbocharge agility. Use this time of disruption to retool.
Four initiatives to build agility
We recommend four initiatives for the insight profession and for you at your company:
- Identify and implement practices that enable faster insights delivery, decision making and execution
Reduce the time and friction from request to insights delivery: input for decisions needs to be delivered fast and, in a format, and structure that is thought out and immediately accessible by the decision makers. Accessibility means in a form that works for their decision-making habits and is in a familiar structure, so they always know where to look for the answer they need. It can range from very structured and templated traditional documents (ppt, docs) to continuously updated dashboards or simulators – you know your internal clients and their appetite for change. - Test and learn
In “the old” normal times and in more traditional businesses, experimentation was often narrowly proscribed. The experience in the digital world and the COVID-19 crisis, however, has made experimentation essential as there is no playbook and new ways of working and new ways of going to market are needed. The challenge is how to experiment and test company-wide and systematically learn from it in a structured and fast turnaround model. - Start thinking in terms of ecosystems with a combination of external and internal partners
Agility requires the right partners. For client-side insights professionals to be agile, they need agile external partners. For external partners to be agile, they require agile minded clients. The partners need to work hard at identifying areas where they can remove friction and decision time from the process of moving from request to delivery of insights. Making the process frictionless means that the insights professional has the time to think, understand and translate the information into executional insights for their internal clients. - Develop structures, processes, skills and training for a distributed workforce
These are new times where the recent experience with and acceptance of distance learning, distance meeting, distance interacting with multidisciplinary teams revealed new opportunities, benefits, limitations and needs. It is also the perfect time to address a growing need: your workforce is changing rapidly to a younger profile. Implement/accelerate processes for collaboration, continuous learning, flexibility, inclusion, and accountability in the new normal.
This article is based on many years of experience in changing, innovating and adapting in the insight profession. We acknowledge that the importance of Agility has been published before by thought leaders like McKinsey, Bain, and in various Harvard Business Review articles, which were inspirational for us.
References:
(i) The Agile C-Suite, Harvard Business Review, Darrell K. Rigby , Sarah Elk and Steve Berez, May-June 2020
(ii) Agility to action: Operationalizing a value-driven agile blueprint, Santiago Comella-Dorda, Christopher Handscomb, and Ahmad Zaidi, McKinsey and Company, June 2020
