In order to cope with the fast-changing world, business owners and managers not only need business acumen but they also need to make informed decisions on which information and communication technologies to invest in, and when; on what resources they need to hire – or fire – to better serve new customer needs; on marketing and advertising campaigns, including social media, to catch current market trends, capture market share, and avoid being left behind by hungrier competitors.

Covid-19 has had – and continues to have – a major impact on all businesses, demonstrating with often devastating effect that we’re living in an increasingly VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) environment that demands a more pro-active rather than reactive style of management, lest the business will constantly be running behind the facts, desperately trying to ‘catch up’.

Especially in small enterprises and family-run businesses “the man/woman at the top” is most often expected to have all the requisite skills, to be able to make the right decisions in a timely fashion. But this is no longer reasonable nor realistic!

Small enterprises and family-run businesses need to transform into agile organisations that leverage not only the creativity and innovation capabilities of its members to their fullest potential, but also ensure flexibility and responsiveness to customers as well as trends in markets or technologies. And this includes being responsive to safety requirements and expectations, which in their own right may change frequently and rapidly as we have seen over the past 8 or so months.

Traditional top-down ways of managing organisations – whereby the management identify and decide what needs to be done, and then make sure their employees complete the work according to instructions and expectations – fail to appeal to the younger generations, the so-called millennials, who value opportunity more than loyalty. And this clearly includes government-imposed safety requirements/restrictions.

Without discounting the expertise and experience of those that have built businesses to where they are today, no business can survive without tapping into the needs and wants of these new generations – whether as employees or as customers!

Organisations around the world, both large and small, both for-profit and not-for-profit, start to embrace so-called Agile Organisation structures as an alternative to the traditional top-down, command-and-control hierarchical structures. Reputable – and successful – companies including ING, Haier, Decathlon, Zappos, and WL Gore prove that Agile Organisation is not but a fad for young upstarts. Instead, they see it as an essential step in their organisational development to ensure business sustainability.

In Agile teams and organisations, the role of the manager is instead to enable those doing the work to contribute their full talents and capabilities to generate value for customers and eliminate any impediments that may be getting in the way. The manager supports the judgment and wisdom of those in touch with customers as to what work needs to be done. The manager also trusts in the talents and capacities of those doing the work to figure out how to do the work in the right way. Agile is neither top-down nor bottom-up: it is outside-in. The focus is on delivering value to customers. The customer determines what gets done, not the manager!

The objective of this 2-day seminar is to empower participants with the necessary skills, tools and insights to redesign their organisations and teams, and develop their organisation’s capacity to cope in a fast-changing business environment where decisions tend to become ever more complex and open-ended, and have to be co-created by everyone involved (perhaps in particular under e.g. government-imposed restrictions like we currently face due to Covid-19).

The goal of the programme is to help small business owners and managers – particularly in the tourism & hospitality, construction & property management, and information & financial services sectors of Cyprus – develop and implement agile organisations that are capable of improving productivity while at the same time improving quality and speed of service to customers.

This will be achieved through a sequence of interactive exercises, simulations and games, in which the participants will learn a vernacular with which to change the mindsets, attitudes, and eventually the behaviours in their organisations, a change that is essential to achieving operational and organisational excellence.

For maximum impact, we propose a learning experience directly linked to participants’ cases, which will be collected prior to the seminar.

DAY 1: Participants will receive the basic insights and tools for a more agile leadership, which will allow them to already diagnose their own case or situation and prepare for the second day.

DAY 2: We go through participants’ cases and deep-dive in the skills required for each particular situation. We will also discuss a number of generally applicable tools and techniques for making teams and organisations more agile.