Successful companies have mastered and learned to focus on execution to run their business. But focussing on execution could be a trap, because there might be better ways to solve their customers’ problems, especially when it comes to disruption and disruptive technologies.

In theory you want to disrupt yourself before someone else is disrupts you. And in practise companies focus intensely on making todays business more successful by focussing on productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction. This approach works very good for well-defined problems. It gives you the best possible solution for solving problems you are trying to solve, by understanding them, capturing their essence and details, weighing alternatives and finding the right solution.

Operational business trap: Get the right answers to the questions you ask, not knowing if you are asking the right questions. Tweet this!

It’s called the confirmation bias: see what you are looking for and miss what doesn’t fit your mental model.

Focus on operational business distracts you from seeing other opportunities and areas of risk. Focussing on current problems might blind you to the fact that business is no longer “as usual”.

Change your Focus – an Overview!

Focus on Impact

Working agile is not about being more productive within your organization. Tweet this!

Agile methodologies are for developing essential features that customers love – and only those features. Adding features and code create more complexity which leads to a more difficult and expensive code base to change.

The key in agile development is to stop building things which are not important and focus on things with real customer impact. Tweet this!

So the questions are not: How can my organization be more productive? Ho will agile methods increase productivity?

Questions should be: When we build this feature, what is the impact of this feature to my customers? Do we need to build this feature?

Check out my  previous posts on impact:

Focus on Outcome and Value for Customers

Ask the right questions – even when “there is no right answer”

The next parts in this series will cover the focus on experimentation, decentralization and problem.

Different thoughts? Additions? Please, let me know!