Agile and agility are buzzwords almost everywhere, also here in Taiwan. The danger with a word becoming so prevalent is that it easily becomes meaningless. And because everybody understands whatever he or she wants, it might get a negative connotation quickly as all kinds of things “done” to people are called “agile”.

My work is to help organizations become more agile, so I have mixed feelings with the word agility becoming so frequently used. 

The definition of the word agility is in my view still a very useful and relevant one: “Agility is the ability of an organization to adapt itself quickly and effectively to changing circumstances.”

I believe that the driver for becoming an agile organization is more pressing than ever: Being able to adapt quickly and effectively to changing circumstances. Often caused by technology, the speed of change is high. As is the complexity of today’s world where there are less clear cause and effect relations and therefore higher uncertainty. So, what could be achieved through good planning in the past will work less well in today’s world.

There might still be situations where a factory can operate on a command and control model, like at Foxconn. In most contexts, however, this approach is not going to be appropriate.

Agility is not a specific management model or the application of a specific framework. It is about embracing certain principles that affect and change the culture and structure of the company.

As I will argue in this article, the general culture of the country or region will have a strong influence on the transformation of organizations towards an agile company.

Distributing authority and decision making

The key approach for obtaining the ability of the entire organization to adapt to changing circumstances is to distribute authority and decision making. Instead of having decision making centralized with a few people, usually on the top, decision making is decentralized. 

That means decisions are more often made by people or teams close to the problem or close to the customer. 

Most practices of agility rely on creating self-organized teams. Instead of having to ask their boss first, teams or individuals can decide themselves what seems most appropriate to do. And this also means that “the boss” cannot arbitrarily overrule them. It is also important to notice that this goes beyond a leader (= a person) “empowering” his / her people. This is ultimately about creating structures that empower people. That means, even when the empowering leader might no longer be around, people are still empowered. As Brian J. Robertson puts it in his book on Holacracy: “No matter how much today’s best leaders may want to empower others and give them a voice, the formal power structure in most modern corporations is that of a dictatorship.” 

The role of Taiwan culture

How easily principles that are supportive for agility can be adopted in an organization also depends on the country's culture because many agile practices make cultural assumptions. They all assume that members in the organization can be more or less equal and that people don’t shy away from giving difficult feedback and actively deal with conflicts. From this standpoint the question is: How easy or difficult will it be for companies in Taiwan to become truly agile? 

Similarly, to a recent article on innovation I published in this magazine, I believe that Taiwan’s culture of high power-distance does pose a challenge in this regard.

Power distance is a term coined by Geert Hofstede describing the “the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.” Quite often in Taiwan there is this expectation from both sides (above and below) in organizations about what should be. 

On the one hand this means that we still find a large percentage of people in leadership positions that believe that it should be them who make most of the decisions in the organization. 

A friend working in a Taiwanese software company told me that the company is officially using Scrum (a specific way of adaptive product development), a framework that relies on having self-organized teams. However, the scrum team cannot act in a self-organized way and still has to run decisions by the superiors in the hierarchy. That is because the organization still sticks to existing old structures and unfortunately defeats the purpose of having a self-organized team.

The other side of power distance is also present: A Taiwanese CEO of a Western Multinational in Taiwan told me that they want people in different teams of different units in the organization to directly talk to each other to sort out issues and make decisions. So leaders are willing to distribute decision making. However, people still prefer to run communication by going up and down the hierarchy between the two units because it’s “the task of the boss to decide if it is relevant” and to make a final decision. The approach of distributing decision making is currently not easy to implement in a setting that worked differently up until now and is still structured that way.

This phenomenon is not limited to larger companies. I spoke to a representative of an international startup accelerator with an office in Taiwan. He shared with me that there are very distinct cultural differences in the way startups in Taiwan operate in contrast to startups from Europe or the US. The startups in Taiwan have a very pronounced power structure in place that is focused on the founding team or even the founding person. In a small startup that might not show as an issue. However, it will be a problem, once the organization grows.

Every company needs to find its own solution

I argue that in order to become truly agile, distribution of authority and decision making is key. To a certain degree this seems to be at odds with the dominant culture in Taiwan. 

Every organization will need to develop its own approach to becoming more agile considering its specific situation. Like the Chinese white goods manufacturer Haier that transformed itself into a kind of market of micro-enterprises inside the organization. Individual teams have full decision-making authority and profit and loss responsibility. Many of the teams are still organized in a hierarchical way with a clear leader, but can act like an independent company inside the larger organization. This approach is very competitive but seems to work very well in a Chinese cultural context.

We take an agile approach to becoming more agile. The way Creaffective works with our customers in transformation journeys to jointly define a number of safe-to-fail experiments introducing practices of agility that we believe will bring value to the organization given its current situation. After a certain time we review the outcomes, to see how to continue and what to change. By running evolutionary iterative experiments we change an organization in small steps. What looks like a small step at the time will lead to big changes over a longer period of time.

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About the author:

Florian is founder of creaffective Munich and Asia, coach, consultant, trainer and bestselling author of five books on innovation, agility and effective collaboration. 

He supports organizations worldwide in German, English and Mandarin to strengthen their capabilities for innovation and agility and helps them to better navigate complexity. He has been working with clients in Taiwan for the last 15 years. In 2020 he relocated with his family to Taipei.

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Have you read?

♦ Can Taiwan companies be innovative?
♦ The future of work – is Taiwan ready for it?
♦ How are these future leaders making Taiwan better?

Uploaded by Penny Chiang