Agile against the current:Working in new ways, when no one else is
How Shaila Varma built a transformational new strategy by taking an agile approach
Have you ever worked really hard on a plan, only to find it fizzles out and never comes to fruition? Shaila was given a exciting remit: to create a strategy for the new Fundraising and Marketing Directorate at British Red Cross. The strategy needed to bring together the two functions and increase income generation. Also, she was clear: “I really wanted to make sure we didn’t just write a strategy and put it in a drawer with nobody paying any attention to it.”
Can a huge, heritage organisation really be agile?
By Shaila’s own admission, “as a charity we are not agile, and we’re certainly not agile for things that have lots of stakeholders”. But, she applied some key principles that stood her project in good stead:
- Agile ways of working aren’t all or nothing. You can test them out on discrete pieces of work. This will help keep these manageable, build interest and buy-in internally
- You can take an agile approach to embedding agile! See your first project as an experiment. As Shaila said “I’ll give this a go, and if it goes really wrong I can shelve it.”
- Find your allies. If the way things are currently done isn’t working for you, there will be others who are thinking the same. Find allies who are also excited about new ways of working, so you can support each other and amplify each others’ voices.
How do you bring people with you?
When there are a few hundred people in your department, you need to be super intentional about how you get people involved so that they have genuine input and feel ownership of the outcomes. An agile approach supports you to find the sweet spot between a handful of people squirreling away working on a document that no one else agrees with, and having so many people involved that the resulting work is watered down and unambitious.
Shaila employed some kickass agile tactics to engage and empower the vast range of stakeholders for this project:
Plan a great kick-off
Shaila knew that getting off on the right foot would be important. She brought together a small multi-disciplinary project team of do-ers, from her immediate team and members of key “frontline” teams. “We put a lot of thought into planning and facilitating a great kickoff session, so that we set ourselves up to start really well.”, she said. This set the expectation and got people excited about the project and the new ways of working.
Articulate the rules of engagement
Shaila’s project team collaboratively agreed how they would be structured, what their principles would be and what ways of working they would use. They captured their discussion on an online whiteboard so they had a record of what they had agreed, which they kept coming back to. Involving everyone in creating and agreeing their ways of working – like the principle “we ask difficult questions” – set the tone high team engagement and ownership. These agreements evolved as the project developed from the strong starting point they had built together.
Work out in the open
Shaila’s project team captured all of their work on online whiteboards that were open for anyone to view. They also held regular sessions where anyone could drop in to get an update on progress and annotate the boards with their own feedback and ideas. This allowed for radical transparency where anyone in the organisation could understand what was happening as the project developed, rather than waiting for a ‘finished’ strategy to be imposed on them. Shaila reflected: “Bringing in diverse perspectives was key to developing a better quality strategy, and meant that we had people more on board with the strategy by the time we launched”.
Invite regular feedback
Shaila’s project team adopted the ethos that they would listen to and reflect on all feedback. They read every single post-it that was added to their online white boards. This didn’t mean that they acted on everything they heard, but they were able to explain their rationale and everyone felt heard. Shaila explains it like this: “We had a mindset that feedback is part of our process. One key takeaway I have is that using agile techniques, helps you be more courageous in your communication, and to properly reflect on feedback.”
The outcome: A bold and adaptable strategy
Taking an agile approach to strategy development and collaboratively building it with a wide range of stakeholders has massively exceeded everyone’s expectations at British Red Cross’ . Shaila said “The strategy ended up being way bolder than we thought it would be. It’s been described as outstanding by the leadership team, and it is already driving big changes which are helping us engage audiences more effectively. The strategy is not out of date, even in this unprecedented year.”
One of the big wins from this process has been that the team were able to summarise what the Fundraising and Marketing Directorate want to achieve together in a simple “Strategy on a page”. This means that it can be easily referred to and shared with new colleagues; it’s creating a strong shared understanding of objectives across the teams.
For Shaila, the mindset shifts that agile ways of working have enabled have also delivered a “major unlock” to problems which previously seemed insurmountable. For instance: “We need unrestricted funds but supporters want to give us restricted funds, particularly around emergencies. This seemed unsolvable 2 years ago, but agile has enabled us to lean into that head on, and whilst it’s still evolving, we’re now much more able to use our best selling points.”
By being up for giving agile ways of working a go, and being willing to fail and adapt if needed, Shaila has created a better quality strategy that reflects the breadth of her new Department and that has the buy-in it needs to really deliver.
Watch Shaila’s full story here:
