26 The European Business Review July - August 2019
superstar CEOs, but a much more humble,
servant interpretation of leadership.As you have mentioned, scaling agility
is one of the hardest phases in organisa-
tion transformation. What are the common
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their journey to transformation and what
advice could you give to leaders for them to
succeedintheirdigitaltransformation?
It will be crucial to get the whole organisa-
tion work together in the same agile ways. That
means introducing agility at the level of individ-
uals, teams and the organisation as a whole. Only
then will your digital transformation succeed.
All too often, unfortunately, the notion of agility
and its implementation at the different organisa-
tional levels are done in a very unorderly fashion.
There is no common frame, no common language,
different support teams, little governance, etc.
That’s a proven recipe for disaster. Leadership
has a vested interest not to let this happen.
My advice is this:- Introduce customer-centricity as the number
one unifying principle for your transformation. - Organise around customer value missions.
Make small multidisciplinary teams, working
iteratively and with fast customer feedback,
responsible and accountable for creating and
delivering customer value within the missions. - Learn how to make agile teamwork successful.
Also, and most importantly, invest in learning
how to align, coordinate and integrate these
agile teams into an agile organisation that is
more than the sum of its agile teams. Use
communities of practice in accelerating these
learning processes. - Invest in the power of digital technologies to
create future-proof agility at scale.
Thank you so much Professor Viaene, it’s
a pleasure speaking with you.real-life experiments, they regularly come together
to share their experiences and discuss challenges
related to their experiments, they then together
evaluate which practices work and which don’t.
They decide to replicate what works and stop and
take note of what doesn’t work.
This cycle gets repeated at a steady rhythm,
a rhythm at which the organisation is able to
absorb the proposed changes. The idea is
that you get better at this routine over time,
allowing you to increase the learning rhythm.
This way, the rate of change inside the organ-
isation can be gradually synchronised with the
rate of change on the outside.
Working with communities of practice also
helps to make your agile and digital transforma-
tion inclusive, rather than exclusive. It allows
you to shape the transformation as an open
invitation for everyone to contribute. This way,
the organisation can collectively learn how to
do things differently and better, in view of
winning together.
I would be happy to call these people who
effectively take up that glove to help drive this
collaborative learning journey, leaders. Not
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how-I-changed-my-company stories featuringIn hisarticle‘Whatdigitalleadershipdoes’, publishedin TheEuropeanBusiness
ReviewMay/June 2017 edition,ProfessorViaeneintroduceda modelforDigital
TransformationLeadershipthatallowscompaniestooperationaliseorganisational
agilityforturbulentdigitaltimes.
His"4Vmodel"– covering4 clustersoforganisationalagilitypracticesatthe
highestlevel:Vigilant,Voyager,VisionaryandVested– is aninvitationfor
organisationstoformtheirown‘communitiesofagilepractice’aroundtheVsof
themodel,tohelpthemactivelylearnhowtobecomeagileorganisations.Moreinformation:
https://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/what-digital-leadership-does/ABOUTTHE
INTERVIEWEE
StijnViaeneis a
fullprofessorand
partnerat Vlerick
BusinessSchoolin
Belgium.Heis the
directorof theschool’s
DigitalTransformation
focusarea.Heis also
a fullprofessorin the
DecisionSciences
andInformation
Management
Departmentat KU
LeuvenUniversity
in Belgium.Agility. ,