Staying relevant and competitive requires adaptation. Rigid goals and planned views of the world are not quite compatible with innovation. Yet many companies pursue strategies based on detailed planning and multi-year objectives disconnected from reality. Organisations undergoing Agile transformation very often get stuck with reconciling corporate governance processes of planning & delivery and ideas of ‘pivot or persevere’ decision-making enabled by frequent learning. Agile teams are forced to be feature factories as they are just meant to realise a strategy that looks like a very comprehensive plan of initiatives/functionality to build.

How do adaptive organisations strategise? What is a way to set objectives without limiting our ability to react to a change? This talk shares an experience of goal-setting evolution from (more than) an annual-based planning approach to a framework of emergent rules, tactics & metrics. We will look into reasons why organisations struggle with goal-setting, how to recognise bad strategies and come up with better ones.

This talk will leverage the experience of Singapore Airlines(SIA) in strategy development and changing this process due to Agile transformation.

Learning outcomes
The participants will be able to:
• Recognise anti-patterns of rigid strategy creation;
• Explain the benefits and practicality of an emergent approach to strategising to support an adaptive organisation;
• Describe how a strategy is connected to organisational goals and how product teams can monitor strategy execution.