We often use these words interchangeably. When we grow, we assume we have progressed and therefore, we have become successful. This is not necessarily true. Growth does not necessarily mean progress. With progress, success is not necessarily attained. The words denote very different meanings that must be understood clearly to truly succeed in business.

 

Growth in Business 

To grow a business means to sell more, to have a larger market share, to have more revenue or profits. The word simply means the output of a business endeavor has increased from one period to another. That is all. It does not mean that with growth, progress is assured.

 

Progress in Business

Progress requires knowledge sharing has to go hand in hand with growth. If a company sells more products in one year compared to the year before and has developed knowledge and expertise that is retained and shared with all employees in terms of how that growth occurred, it has progressed. It has learned what was done right and what needs to be avoided.

 

This learning, if properly retained, shared, and leveraged upon characterizes progress. It enables the growth to be sustained over time. It enhances maturity levels of the organization. It imbues a sense of accountability and purposeful commitment to continue the growth. Only then can there be real progress. Otherwise, the growth may happen but without such progress, it cannot be sustained.

 

Success in Business

Can such an organization that is progressive be deemed to be successful?

Not necessarily. Success is contingent on the extent to which an organization extends its expertise, provides support, and enables all other organizations associated with its growth to grow as well. This includes its customers, its end users, its vendors, its suppliers as well as society at large. It means extending the benefits it has gained to benefit others within its circle of influence. It calls for having a deep-seated commitment to extend support to as many external stakeholders as possible

 

Transitioning from growth to success

Extending support entails adding value to all companies within its network to develop and sustain an ecosystem within which the organization thrives. When knowledge is shared, and support is provided, value is delivered to all organizations without any expectation of returns.

 

Such a company is deemed to be successful. It succeeds because it realizes how collaborating with clients, end users, suppliers, vendors as well as regulatory bodies adds value its own success. Hence growth should not be equated with success. To achieve success, both enablers are drivers must be present.

 

What drives the transition from growth to success

The driver for the progression from growth to progress and onward to success is leadership that is committed to succeed through sustained learning and collaborative effort with all external stakeholders. Leaders that are dedicated to the principle of holistic success which requires all stakeholders to be successful for the organization to succeed. Such leaders seek engagement and growth of all internal and external stakeholders associated with the organization as primary indicators of success, not output and performance of the organization

 

What enables the transition from growth to success

The enablers for such a transition are sharing critical knowledge and embracing agility

 

Sharing critical knowledge

This requires developing and sustaining a work environment that facilitates the capture, retain, and share critical experience and expertise gained as the organization grows. This sharing enables employees to leverage on past learning to sustain the progression of its growth. This comes about when sharing of expertise and experience is undertaken as a normal practice undertaken routinely at all levels in the organization.

 

Embracing agility

To achieve holistic success, such an organization embraces agile practices that focus on adding value to all stakeholders. Adding value indicates seeking continually to increase benefits and at the same time reducing cost associated with acquiring these benefits. The commitment to continually focus on adding value becomes an overriding purpose of such an organization that seeks to succeed.

 

Hence both sharing critical knowledge and embracing agility are key enablers for making the transition from growth to success. These enablers are driven by leadership dedicated towards serving the interest of internal and external stakeholders. Without such leadership that drives sharing critical knowledge and embracing agility, organizations may experience growth on an ad hoc basis but will be unable to sustain the growth over time to success in business.

 

Summary and Conclusion

In summary being successful requires growth to be sustained, leveraged upon, and shared. Sustaining growth is premised on continually sharing critical knowledge acquired because of growth. Leveraging on learning that is shared to sustain the growth by continually applying lessons learned enables growth to continue over time. This denoted real progress. Success comes about through the development of a collaborative culture cultivated by leadership that ascribes to the notion that we only succeed when we all succeed. This notion is embedded as a key agile principle that when internalized, facilitates collaboration with all external stakeholders.

 

 

The Scrum framework focuses on managing and organizing work based on a set of values, principles, and practices. The principles are building blocks that will help anyone construct an effective agile team. Without principles, the foundation collapses, and any effort in introducing agile will fail.

There are six principles in Scrum which are:-

 

1. Value Based Prioritization
2. Empirical Process Control
3. Self - Organization
4. Collaboration
5. Time-Boxing
6. Iterative Development

 

In this article, we will discuss collaboration. For a Scrum team to collaborate, they need to develop a common awareness of the overall requirement of the project, strengths and limitations of each team member, as well as how team members can contribute to deliver the product.

The three pillars of collaboration are

 

• Awareness
• Articulation, and
• Appropriation

 

Awareness means individuals working together need to be aware of each other's work. This can be done by visually displaying the current tasks of each team member, how they're doing to do it and when it's going to be completed. The information displayed is critical and can be retrieved any time by all team members.

 

The word articulation means with full clarity. The information displayed visually need to be broken into simple terms so that everyone in the team is responsible for completing a task to help achieve a common goal.

 

The final pillar is appropriation means adapting technology to one's own situation; the technology may be used in a manner completely different than expected by the designers. This is in line with the Agile Manifesto of individuals and interactions over processes and tools. The team works together and uses the technology accordingly based on the project requirements.

 

The sporting world has a lot of examples of collaboration, for example football. Goalkeepers and defenders protect the goal, midfielders act as a link between attackers and defenders, and attackers score the goal. The focus of the game is to win games by scoring more goals than your opponent.

 

Traditionally this was the case for football. Now things have changed where even goalkeepers and defenders score goals. They don’t care about being in a fixed role. All they care about is winning. And if defenders are going to score goals, attackers must defend. This is collaboration.

 

To summarize, collaboration is only successful if all team members are working together to achieve a common goal. For that to happen, the team members need to stick to the 3 pillars of collaboration which are awareness, articulation, and appropriation.

 

By,

Udhay Sharma

Scrum Certified Trainer,

Scrum Master Certified, Scrum Product Owner Certified, Scrum Developer Certified

Scrum enthusiast since 2017