Five foundations for business agility

Setting up the babel journey, an immersive learning journey about business agility, has been an interesting journey so far.

Our purpose

We started from an idea we all found engaging: a more experiental way of training and coaching people than regular meet-ups, workshops, or conferences. We shaped it through several conversations, feeling energised throughout the whole process.

Agile

As convinced (an a bit naive) as we were our idea would immediately take off, reality hit us quickly.

• People found it interesting, but weren’t buying.
• Our idea of kicking off the babel journey with a boot camp event with dozens of participants appeared more challenging than expected.
• Sponsors were intrigued, but hesitant.

Quick customer feedback helped us pivot, re-shape our idea, build in flexibility. Now, after several iterations, we have our first case, two sponsors, and a more concrete story to onboard others.

Team dynamics and collaboration

Our shared enthusiasm gave us an energetic start. But everyone’s busy, other work sometimes mixes up agendas, the struggle to get the ball rolling gave us some doubts.

Luckily, all of us are to some extent experienced in understanding team dynamics and facilitating good team collaboration. Through good communication, we were able to overcome our tensions.

We even expanded the team twice, once to engage someone with a complementary background, once out of need due to the unexpected short term unavailability of one of our team members. Two opportunities to find a new balance in how we work as a team.

Budgeting

Our goal is not to get rich with this venture. But we do want to create a financialy healthy business.

While the initial budget was a good theoretical sanity check, real world feedback quickly forced us to revise. Flexible budgeting allowed for adjustments, our only constraints being our availability and the objective of financial health from the start.

Decision making

You cannot tell every potential sponsor or customer “I have to check with my team” for every little detail. You want to go fast and you want to convey a certain level of maturity. Even when working in a small team, the advantages of decentralised decision-making quickly become clear.

Business agility

As a small start-up team, we are experiencing several foundations of business agily:

• a shared purpose;
• agile learning through short feedback loops;
• consciously managing team dynamics by building on everyone’s strengths;
• flexible budgeting;
• decentralised decision-making.

Do you want to experience these yourself and bring that experience into your work environment?

Then join the babel journey!