Another great Harvard Business Review article, The Agile C-Suite, got my attention this month.  It talks about the balance that leaders need to find between efficiency and innovation, particularly in uncertain times. 

At the Performance Thinking Network, we say that agility is a combination of innovation and execution.

Since before last summer's 10th Annual Six Boxes® Summer Institute we've been exploring the combination of Design Thinking and Performance Improvement with our friend and colleague, Surya Vanka, of Authentic Design in Seattle. There is something in that combination that enables organizations and leaders to be more agile.

Surya has captured the essence of Design Thinking in his Design Swarms® process. He takes teams through a sequence of activities to produce innovative solutions, designs, or plans that can be implemented and have a compelling value proposition. Design Swarms enable teams to produce innovation on demand.

At The Performance Thinking Network, we've distilled the essence of human performance engineering, or organizational performance improvement into our plain English, simple but powerful Performance Thinking® methodology . We teach and certify Performance Professionals of all kinds to conduct organizational performance improvement projects, many of which involve systemic planning and implementation of new systems, processes, programs or initiatives. Some of our colleagues at large organizations use this approach for big, global implementation projects. Performance Thinking® is a process for reliable execution.

We're continuing to find new ways that these two flexible and widely applicable approaches can be integrated, always looking for opportunities with clients to drive agile performance improvement or change. So it was hard not to think about that aspect of our work when I read The Agile C-Suite.

- Carl Binder, CEO