Agility bubbles: why every company needs one in 2023

In this guest article, Matthias Hasler, Chief Operating Officer at Synpulse8, explains why every company needs an agility bubble in 2023.

The term ‘agility bubble’, or culture bubble, refers to a scenario where a team is put in a protected state and given permission to do things differently than the rest of the business. The protection and permission of an agility bubble creates an environment of psychological safety, so that the team can more freely experiment, fail, succeed and try again.

I first learned this terminology in training with Michael Sahota – a speaker, trainer and consultant on evolutionary leadership. The concept is based on the idea that top-down transformations, agile or other, are doomed to fail in most cases because they tend to cause ‘flight or fight’ responses.

Transformations introduce risk, which can be perceived as a threat – leading to avoidance, disengagement or even rebellion from employees who might shy away from the unknown and view it as a threat to their stability. In contrast, a bubble-up approach has proven to be a very effective way of changing culture and mindset, which is a key enabler of developing greater business agility.

As the economy retracts, businesses will need to innovate and diversify in order to spread their risk. But a business-wide strategy overhaul can be risky, costly, and disruptive – with no guarantees of return on investment. That’s why it is timely and imperative for leaders to rethink their management approach and explore how agility bubbles can significantly impact their business performance.

Why agility is important – and how to do it right

An agility bubble can concentrate and accelerate innovation in a safe environment, while other teams carry on with business-as-usual to solidify existing income streams. A caveat here is that no organisation wants, or sets out to be, agile. Agility is rather a means to an end in achieving high performance. If you ask business leaders, their sights are generally set on becoming a high-performing organisation or unit, with agility playing a key role in this ultimate outcome.

Most businesses today are under pressure to innovate to thrive in the digital age. Indeed, a study by Accenture found that across industries, companies with strong innovation cultures (Pacesetters) consistently outperformed those without (Stragglers).

Pacesetters achieved 6.5% more revenue growth and 4.2x higher cost efficiency. Importantly, most executives surveyed (62%) agreed that building a strong innovation culture is a critical enabler for their firm to grow, but 82% admitted that their employees collectively lacked the behaviours and mindsets needed to build an innovation culture.

Digital-first companies offer a convincing example of how businesses can leverage a culture of experimentation to navigate the evolving landscape. To successfully innovate, many digital giants have made experimentation an integral part of their day-to-day operations, embracing a different leadership model that nurtures individuals’ curiosity.

Employees at Booking.com, for instance, have the freedom to launch an experiment of ‘millions of customers without management’s permission’. About 75% of its technology and product staffers use the company’s experimentation platform to test new ideas, according to Harvard Business Review.

Meanwhile, Google is widely recognised for its innovation culture, which it attributes to the acceptance that an unavoidable cost of innovation is frequent failure and rewards employees for risk-taking in not only its core product but also in its sales division and support functions.

But how can teams implement agility bubbles on a practical level?

From experience, the best course of action is to take those who are motivated to work differently and apply agile principles, mindset and culture. There are natural patterns, anti-patterns and traps in the process that leaders need to be aware of to make it successful.

One such trap is leading employees down a path of disillusionment by over-selling the intended results and setting unrealistic expectations. Rather than making too much noise at the outset about how revolutionary this strategy will be, let the results speak for themselves to encourage genuine buy-in from employees.

What happens over time is a ripple effect. Colleagues and other managers may start approaching to say that they want to replicate what you’re doing in their own departments – at which point you can start scaling the strategy across the organisation.

Some challenges may naturally arise. If the bubble refuses to follow process or fails to respect others who are not agile or operate differently, then the best course of action is to build so-called ‘adapters’ into the non-agile part of the organisation.

Having adapters around your bubble helps to create healthy relationships with the rest of the organisation, instead of asking others to change their way of working. This is a situation we call ‘paying the taxes’ for innovating using the agility bubbles approach.

Putting it into context

Matthias Hasler

The ripple effect is a phenomenon I experienced in a previous role. We started with two teams first, creating adapters through stability, equal voice, and psychological safety. This created an environment for the bubble staff to be successful, a model that was then scaled to three, then four, then six teams.

In time, this increased velocity, improved staff happiness and organisational alignment, and ultimately drove high performance. The team exceeded initial expectations on digital delivery and user experience and successfully grew the proposition in terms of the number of users.

One year into the experiment, I received a call from a senior manager who said he wanted to re-create these conditions in his own team. Therein lies the advantage of a pull strategy over a push strategy.

Here at Synpulse8, we already have some elements of an agility bubble. However, the aim is to grow the bubble and inspire other parts of the organisation to want to emulate our work and in time achieve wide-scale transformation. Again, rather than working from the top down and defining the process, we have started small with specific teams and are looking to expand on this.

We are still a young company, just over one year old, but big in terms of staff, projects, and certainly new ideas. This makes for a more complicated environment, and we don’t have the green field approach luxury in the sense of being able to start with a completely fresh slate. With that in mind, we are starting with small steps to introduce new ways of working that will deliver efficiency gains and heightened productivity.

Our product-build business line currently produces some “waste” – which is normal and not necessarily a negative thing – but the goal is to reduce the waste and create outcome over output. This means being emergent over deterministic and getting more and more teams keen to adapt and evolve alongside this approach.

In terms of success metrics, we can measure velocity – the trend and flow time – and thereby visually create a picture depicting the process. Over time, we can measure staff happiness, which in my opinion is a key indicator of success. Building this approach into an organisation that is still in the learning phase requires a lot of careful thought, and what we call ‘evolutionary leadership,’ creating a culture that follows the example set by the leadership team.

Indeed, creating the right culture is key for agility and high performance.

Playing the long game

In 2023, businesses are facing a myriad of uncertainties – from both the outside and within. Economic uncertainty will continue to be a theme for the year ahead, with firms also settling into newly established patterns of work and the growing emphasis on digital. It is also a perfect opportunity to take stock and consider how introducing alternative styles of leadership and ways of working can inspire teams to explore – and make the most of – arising opportunities.

As businesses reinvent themselves in the face of external influences, it is high time that they put agility bubbles at the top of their priority list. Leaders must understand that they need to give their teams room to do their best work, pursue unconventional ideals, and feel empowered to think and act independently. Only this way will businesses build the resilience and drive they need to succeed.

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