Measuring Business ‘G-Force’ And Agility

Q: What are the main differences between the instrument panel in your car and the one found in a fighter aircraft?

A: Because the fighter pilot is travelling a lot faster and survives primarily on the ability to out-maneouvre an enemy threat, the normal ‘steady-state’ information isn’t anywhere near good enough.

 

In our cars, change happens relatively slowly. Slowly enough at least that when we look at our speedometer, it is absolute speed that matters rather than its rate of change. We learn to use our experience to tell us when to brake rather than our instruments. Above around 160mph, though, and even the best reflexes aren’t good enough to cope with an unexpected event up ahead. Above this speed and we need more information in order to be able to function safely. Increase the speed to Mach 2, and you just created an enormous information problem. Fighter pilots, of course, are expected to fly routinely at these kinds of speed. The main additional information they need in order to do this effectively is acceleration, and more specifically ‘how many g’s am I pulling’. Fighter aircraft are fitted with g-meters precisely to give this information. The pilot needs to know ‘g’ level in order to evade threats on the one hand and to know when there is a danger of exceeding the physical limits of his or her body and those of the aircraft they’re harnessed into.

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In the past, organizations have, like the typical car driver, been able to survive using steady-state measurements of a small number of largely now standardised business metrics. Increasingly, however, companies in many industries are beginning realize that the rate of change in their industry has exceeded some kind of limit whereby those traditional dashboard measures are no longer adequate. Change, for most of us, no longer happens in gentle, predictable ways, and so, just like the fighter pilot, our dashboard demands the incorporation of new instruments. Businesses increasingly need their own ‘g-meter’.

 

The business equivalent of ‘g’ is rate of disruption and discontinuity to the business. In terms of managing the business, it is about identifying rates of change of key business metrics in order that the organization is able to respond appropriately and, crucially, faster than the competition. The key management metric is agility. And the key business requirement is requisite agility – is there sufficient ability to change inside my organization so that I can react faster than my competitors?

 

We’ve been thinking about ‘requisite agility’ for a number of years now. The problem with designing and implementing a solution that enables it to be measured is that it demands a lot of data in order to be able to sensibly identify where and what the right disruptions and discontinuities to look for are. Fortunately, three million data-points turns out to be sufficient to do a meaningful job. And so, after sixteen years accumulating the data, for the first time, we are able to detail the bones of an organizational ‘requisite agility’ sensing methodology.

 

Requisite agility, in the context of the story of the two men being chased by a bear, is about making sure we’re faster than the other guy. Being faster than the view private instagram 2017 other guy has always been the predominant business driver. Now, for the first time, we can measure precisely what it means. And, therefore, what we need to do to make sure we’re not the one caught by the bear.