Agile People — Shift from Traditional Functions to Flexible Roles

Why the shift?

People are the most crucial assets of an organization. An organization with narrow functions is a system that encourages certain behaviors and discourages others based on functional prescriptions. People who don’t behave as expected take a personal risk of being punished even if they intend to improve or correct things. Therefore this is a system that needs to be replaced by one with flexible and broad roles, which leaves people the freedom of deciding “how to” do their work themselves based on good knowledge of why, and empowers people to have ambiguous multiple functions and work with fluidity by voluntarily helping each other in teamwork and adjusting their roles from time to time to accelerate work flow and improve efficiency.

How to define a role?

Let’s look at an example. There is a company that is in the situation where someone is needed to rapidly validate a business or technological opportunity by experimentation. Since the existing functions and processes are not ready for the exploration at all, there’s the need of establishing a broad, action-oriented role to take the task. Here is how to define such a role:

- Name of the role: We should avoid naming this role with a focus on “how”, such as Analyst or Advisor of something, instead…