Minna Janhonen

Lean – Agile Coach

Nitor

 

Minna is a professional in organizational development, with a passion for building practices and culture that enhance agility, resiliency, and fluency at work.

She has a firm background as a researcher and a strong experience in coaching people. She did her Ph.D. about knowledge sharing at teamwork (2010), and ever since, she has focused her energy on making teams and processes better.In her work, she is used to train and coach people in varying roles, leaders as well as teams, to improve their work. The regular topics in her work are servant leadership, self-organization, competence sharing, complexity, adaptivity, and resilience.

Minna finds her mission in helping organizations take the next steps and expand from technical agile practices towards organizational agility and resilience.

Minna is known for her common sense and research popularization skills. She is eager to write blog posts and loves transforming science into practice. She works at Nitor as a Lean & Agile Coach.

If agility is not in the culture, it doesn’t exist

If agility is not adopted to an organization’s culture and visible as a shared way of thinking and acting, it actually doesn’t exist.Lean and agile way of working is drawing more and more attention as an organizing model that enhances better customer orientation, fluency of work, faster value delivery and better competitiveness.

However, it’s very common that agility is only partially adopted in the organization – it touches only some parts of the organization, while rest follow different mindset. The organization uses many different organizing models at the same time. The agile teams’ release on demand and fast delivery capabilities are impaired by a hierarchical structure, slow decision making and rigid culture that don’t allow realizing the benefits of agility. Best value is gained when leaders and support functions, including human resource management, understand and adopt agility. Utilizing agility is a paradigm change that affects organizational structures, processes, people practices, strategy, and values as well as leadership and decision-making practices. So, what organization can do to adopt agility as a part of a culture? In this presentation, core organizational practices and values that support agility are presented. True agile culture is visible as no silos-mentality, autonomous teamwork, continuous learning, seeing employees as persons and not as resources, and agile strategy and values.