Den snabba takten i affärsvärlden medför stora utmaningar, både i ledarskap och organisationers förmåga att möta de nya kraven. Dandy People har länge framgångsrikt hjälpt organisationer att ställa om för att bli snabbrörliga och kundcentrerade. Nu startas ett nytt bolag för att förse företag med chefer och ledare med de ledarförmågor som behövs för att dagens organisationer ska vara framgångsrika.
I dagarna släppte organisationen Techsverige en rapport som lyfte det ökade behovet av nya specialister inom tech. Men för att en organisation framgångsrikt ska kunna möta nutidens krav måste hela organisationen ställa om. Och detta ställer höga, och många gånger helt nya, krav på chefer och ledare.
”De stora utmaningar vi ser i de flesta organisationer idag bottnar i problem kring organisationen och ledarskapet”. För att kunna möta och hantera den tekniska utvecklingen behöver arbetet ofta ske på tvären i dagens organisationer, där medarbetarna tar fram lösningar tillsammans för att man ska lyckas. Det är här de stora förändringarna behöver göras för att öka det faktiska värdet som organisationen behöver leverera. “Vi kan inte bara tillsätta nya specialister, hela systemet behöver förändras för att fungera på ett bättre sätt,” berättar Mia Kolmodin, VD och grundare av Dandy People.
I’m well aware that people often see me as quite a fearless person. I often get comments like “but you are never afraid of anything”. But as all people I have had lots of struggles every day to overcome my own fears, to prove to myself I can do something I thought I couldn’t. And just as probably most people I have tried and failed a lot. One of my mantras I usually say to myself, and others around me is that it will solve itself somehow just as long as we stick to our values and believe in ourself and each other. As Dandy People now has turned 5 years old and we have grown to over 20 people I’m writing this post aiming to tell a bit of the story behind Dandy People and share some of my own personal fears, beliefs and our struggles and successes as a team along the way. None of this will be any silver bullets, but I hope you might find it valuable and perhaps inspiring.
The Dandy team on our spring conference 2022 celebrating turning 5 years together.
Building a learning organization where fast and shared learning is a key strategy
Curiosity is one of our most important characteristics as humans and we should always find new ways to explore and increase the pace of our own learning. I have always been very curious and loved learning new things just as long as no one is forcing me. My own strategy to learn new things has often been to work together with people with other skill sets to learn from them, and with them, while testing and building stuff together. This has been one of my core beliefs of how to deliver value and a foundation that has shaped how we want to work and run Dandy. In Dandy we always see learning as part of our job. This means we shape our assignments to work two and two as often as possible, or in teams. Many times we have shared a “1 FTE” (yes, our customers sometimes call it that) assignment on two people, and we always look for assignments for a team. The reason for this is both that we have a much bigger success rate on tough assignments by doing that, and also that we get to learn from each other on the job and we will live as we preach..
This belief around learning has also from the start made us prioritize having quite a big financial space for each individual to put time and money on learning new skills outside of work. Everyone is responsible for their own learning but of course we support each other. By doing this and always striving to deliver valuable training and learning sessions for others we make sure we are always at the front line and we will always be learning, making us ready for any new challenge that might occur within Dandy or at our customers.
Starting up my own business – getting over the fear of hiring people
But if we go back to the very beginning, before we started Dandy People, one of the biggest fears I had was to hire people and to be the one responsible for the wellbeing and financial security of other people outside of my own family. This was holding me back for years to move beyond having my own consultancy with only me, myself and I. This was the first obstacle I had to manage and get over when starting Dandy People. Before this I had been running my own company and doing Agile coaching, pretty much the same as we do today in Dandy, but under the umbrella of another consultancy. At that time I had way too much to do and had to say no to helping more and more customers which made me want to find another solution. I felt a huge need to build my own team to help the customers I had and others like them to bridge the gap between business and IT and by that building organizations that could deliver customer centric solutions. I was just getting more and more customers and I really struggled to find the time to help them in a good way as a one woman band. So knowing what I wanted to do in my company wasn’t a struggle at all. Just continuing with what I did, but together with a team of great people. I also knew I wanted to start a_real_company with people who shared my vision, not an umbrella company where everyone follows their own vision, and not just a group of friends who only share the space and occasionally meet and socialize. I often find it just as valuable to know what you don’t want as what you do want, especially when it comes to business.
After looking around for about a year for someone to start my company with, I realized that the people I enjoyed working with all had their own ideas and visions of companies they wanted to start, and none of those was inline with mine. So I would have to go alone… this could easily have been the end of this dream, since I was pretty sure I would never manage it alone. I would work myself to death then. But it happened so that when we came home to Sweden after celebrating Christmas abroad, we got a phone call at the airport that my husband’s company just got sold, meaning he would get out of running a full time business in just a couple of months! This was amazing news both because it meant we as a family would get a small amount of money from his business that we could invest and he would be available to help me with my dream. The choice was easy. He became my business partner. Just a few months after that, in April 2017, we officially started Dandy People and we had an address downtown for our office where we could set up seminars and meetups to meet customers and candidates for employment. After just another few months, after summer we were already a small team of people that could take on customer assignments and collaborate on business development, just as I was longing for. We have never had any problems paying salaries, not even during Covid (but more on that later) and I have never regretted taking on the role as an employer. I am so happy it didn’t stop me from taking the step to grow my business.
Sharing is caring – and it may just be what you need to build a strong brand
You might have seen or used the infographic posters with our logo on. Most of them have my face on them since I am the creator and designer of them. The story started before I started Dandy People and was one of the kicks in the butt I needed to make the decision to start my own company. I created the first Agile in a Nutshell poster just to be able to give something visual that captured the most important things for the class at Hyper Island that I was going to run a half day short training for together with my colleague Per. We had a lot of experience based exercises as always, and was going to do some theory using a whiteboard. But I felt something more was needed to help them remember afterwards, so I decided just the day before to do a one pager with the key topics. After the training I published it as a PDF for download on our blog just if anyone else would be interested in using it. And it happened a LOT of people were interested in that. A few weeks later I was in Paris on a weekend with Mathias and suddenly I realized I had over hundreds of comments on the share of the blogpost on LinkedIn and many friend requests. My first thought was of course that something was wrong with LinkedIn, but it wasn’t. It just exploded due to people really liked the poster. Sharing valuable content for free has been a great business model and so we have continued to do so. When we create new posters we usually set them free on our Dandy blog within days up to 6 months, and also other content such as canvases, coaching models and serious games.
Some of the posters in the series.
Today I have lost control over how many downloads of the infographic posters we have, and also how many posters we have shared. But a few years ago it was close to 350.000 downloads (totally free with no email signups or nothing). People within the Agile community are translating the posters for free to their language to be able to use them better and we also share those translated posters to everyone, so today we can offer our infographics on Agile topics for free in 15 languages to anyone interested, making the Dandy brand really strong. If you would ask most management consultancies they would probably say this is a no can do for them and any business. I’d say it is exactly the right thing to do if you want to be part of the growing Agile community and if you don’t want to spend huge amounts on useless brand campaigns. Of course it might take some bravery (some would probably call it stupidity), design skills and that you feel fairly safe you know your stuff to make it work. But testing and see how it goes can take you a long way.
Building a company with a strong brand and still minimizing known risks
As I wanted to build a_real_company having an office was important to me and something I wouldn’t negotiate with. Many small business owners already then had their offices at home, but for me it would mean a huge benefit to have a good address downtown in the city to meet with customers and I was sure it would also be easier to attract employees. But we know that statistics say most startups don’t make it due to high costs linked to long contracts, and office space is just exactly that. Meaning getting our own space with a long contract was a big no-no, and that’s why we chose a shared office space instead. We picked one with the best address, a short leasing contract of just one month, where we could have our own room, with good big spaces to run seminars and training, and where we could have our dog 🙂 Those were the key principles and worked out well. We have been able to stay there for 5 years, moving into bigger and more rooms when needed, and now when we have outgrown it, we can easily get our very own space. The move to our very own space is just weeks away now and it feels just like moving out from your parents. We are (almost) grownups finally!
I dag stod det klart att Karin Hagren är vinnaren av Stora Ingenjörspriset i Ledarskap. Vi vill gratulera Karin till detta fina ledarskapspris och samtidigt passa på att välkomna Karin till Dandy People! Karin är i dag Agile Director på King och kommer att börja som Agil Enterprise Coach hos oss på Dandy People i Augusti. Vi ser med tillförsikt fram emot att få lära av Karin och jobba tillsammans hos våra fantastiska kunder.
Utdrag ur pressmeddelandet på My Newsdesk
“Det känns jättestort att vinna! Jag brinner för ledarskap och har gjort det i hela mitt yrkesliv, så det känns fantastiskt att bli nominerad av mina medarbetare och sedan vinna, det känns helt grymt! Det är genom ledarskap man får saker att hända och det handlar om att få alla att vilja vara med och lyckas tillsammans”, säger Karin om att motta priset.
Juryns motivering Mottagaren av priset utövar ett ledarskap som visar vägen och möjligheter och är utforskande och sökande istället för dikterande och styrande. Vinnaren är en nyfiken ledare med stor erfarenhet av arbete i internationell kontext. Hon är både strukturerad och pragmatisk samtidigt som hon är en kulturbärare av rang. Vinnaren har skapat en miljö för aktivt lärande och visar stor öppenhet för förändring. Hon leder geografiskt utspridda personer och team, drar dagligen nytta av sin ingenjörsbakgrund och har fokus inställt på det agila arbetssättet.
To handle the speed of change, complexity, and ambiguity in this challenging situation with the COVID-19 outbreak many of us are in now, we believe an Agile mindset can help us find new innovative solutions together.
Our mission at Dandy People is to support individuals, teams, organizations and societies to overcome challenges and become better together every day. This is why we decided to pre-launch our Agile Online Trainings, before we have all trainings on the platform. So, during this time we offer a 30% rebateto anyone of you who are interested in learning how to enable Agility, plan for the unknown and work and deliver in an Agile way.
Please use the code: PRELAUNCH (valid until March 31st) to get the 30% rebate.
The Agile Online Trainings you can access now are:
Agile in a Nutshell – Live
Agile Team in a Nutshell – Live
Agile Leadership in a Nutshell – Coming soon
These trainings contain videos, infographics, games, interviews, business cases, canvases, workshops, articles and lots of material free to download. Everything to support you in your personal learning journey to leverage Agility. Understanding what it is when it is needed and get you started to work as an Agile team – or improve your existing team, to deliver awesome results together.
We are also moving our live events to an online webinar format, and continuing to building our online Dandy Community
Please use the code: PRELAUNCH (valid until March 31st) to get the 30% rebate.
We have been able to create these trainings with support from the Agile global community and we are so happy to be able to give back to you all in times like this. Thank you so much to everyone involved <3
Christmas is a time for happiness and joy with family and friends. We feel so lucky to be part of an growing Agile Community in the world that care for each other across the world.
We know that not all people are as lucky as we are. Thats why we would like to take a moment to reflect, and to give to the children. We have started a fundraising campaign via the Swedish Charity organization; SOS Barnbyar. We hope that if you enjoy our posters perhaps you would like to join us in this Christmas Campaign to share with those we care about.
For the past 2 years Dandy People have created free Agile infographics that have been translated to many different languages, and downloaded over 50.000 times.
When Agile becomes something for the whole organization leadership needs to adapt to support Agile values and principles. Take the opportunity to give energy and grow a leadership that supports an organization fit for the future. Let’s build an Agile Mindset that can change how leaders act in their daily activities, how they lead people and business, form organizations and governance.
EDIT 2021: The poster is now updated to ver 1.2 with some improvements and better connection to transformational leadership and theory X and Y.
This poster is for me a way to visualize key concepts for how to lead with an Agile Mindset. At Dandy People we use it in our Agile coaching and training. We hope you as well can have use for it in your work. Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions on this poster.
To Lead in Complexity
The basis for Agile leadership is that we need to have a leadership that works in complexity – that support flexibility, transparency, collaboration and authonomy to enable the “workers” to make smart tactical and operative decisions to reach well defined impact goals. There are several common leadership concepts that support this kind of leadership;
Catalyst Leadership
Management 3.0
Systems Thinking
Servant Leadership
Three leadership Styles
In the poster there are three leadership styles visualized;
Catalyst Leadership (Best for Agile)
Achiever
Expert
The infographic contains numerous of illustrations to visualize some of the behaviours of each leadership style. I believe (without perhaps any support from research) that you can change leadership style to become a Catalyst Leader if you make this decision, practice and work on it. I also believe that the environment we live and act in shapes how we behave and what we might see as good leadership.
Agile Mindset and what it might mean in Reality
When you understand that Agile actually is a way of thinking, a mindset, and not a process ot tools, it usually unlocks the “next level” in your game. But many leaders might find it quite difficult to put the Agile mindset to practice in reality. What does it really mean for governance? How do we build organizations, create good salary models, plan our projects, grow our staffs knowledge, build teams…? I have covered just a tiny part of that in this poster, the list could go on forever I know.
Need Coaching and Training for Agile Leadership?
If you need help to reshape the leadership in your organization to support your Agile journey, let us know and we’ll happily join forces with you to coach and train your managers and every one else who can become leaders. (more…)
For all Leaders interested in building an Agile mindset and enable organizations fit for complexity and innovation.
Are you a Curious Leader?
During the fall of 2017 we at Dandy People have set up a series of seminars and meetups for Curious Leaders, exploring different areas of interests in what an Agile mindset and an Agile Transformation could mean in other areas than what usually might be perceived as Agile by many mainly involving IT and development teams.
We call this series “Curious Leaders” and we invite all leaders who’s interested in growing that Agile mindset and finding new ways of building strong and flexible teams and organizations fit for humans that can manage complexity and enable every day innovation and quality. This applies in any business or service who are digitized within the organization and sell digital services or products.
What does this really mean for leadership, organization, recruiting, procurement, business strategies, marketing, projects, deliveries and our ways of working and processes?
Don´t miss this great opportunity to learn from the best and become an organization for the future!
Free Seminars and Meetups for Curious Leaders
December 7 – Next Session
For Curious Leaders – Beyond Budgeting
With Bjarte Bogsnes, Senior Adviser at Statoil
Bjarte Bogsnes has a long international career, both in Finance and HR, and has been heading up the implementation of Beyond Budgeting at Statoil. Bjarte is Chairman of Beyond Budgeting Round Table (BBRT).
We welcome curious leaders to this exciting seminar in Beyond Budgeting! The well known speaker, author & teacher Bjarte Bogsnes, Senior Advisor at Statoil, shares his insights in dynamic forecasting, no traditional budgets, the KPI trap & Statoil’s “Ambition to Action” model. Beyond Budgeting is also known as “Agile Budgeting”. (more…)
I dag kick-startade vi våra frukostföreläsningar hos oss på Dandy People. Det blev fullt hus med gamla och nya vänner. God stämning och frukost, samt mycket spännande diskussioner med högt i tak. Dagens bästa citat stod nog Benny Forsberg för när det var dags för diskussionerna -“Hur många dörrar kan man slå upp på en morgon egentligen :)”. Lika delar igenkänning, provokation, nya inspirerande lösningar och lyckade exempel verkar vara en bra mix 🙂
Jag håller tummarna för att visioner och goda ideér till förändrat arbetsätt och ledarskap fick näring i dag, och att dom kommer att fortsätta att spira på fler håll i framtiden.
Här är beskrivningen av presentationen:
När kunderna kräver bättre digitala tjänster och produkter behöver företagen hitta nya sätt att organisera sig för att snabbare leverera kundnytta. Gör man inte det riskerar man att bli omsprungen av snabbare konkurrenter. För att lyckas med detta krävs medvetenhet hos ledning och ett strategiskt ledningsbeslut.Den här föreläsningen riktar sig till nyfikna ledare som vill möjliggöra kundfokus och innovation.
Mia går igenom trender och nya tankesätt kring hur man organiserar sig och leder arbetet på ett målstyrt sätt för att mobilisera hjärnkraft med korsfunktionella och autonoma team som snabbare kan leverera rätt produkter och tjänster. Mia visar även modeller för hur organisationer kan arbeta strukturerat med innovation och kundfokus för att välja att bli en haj i stället för en snigel samt riktiga exempel på den här typen av transformation från olika typer av branscher.
Är ni intresserade så kan vi också föreläsa internt hos er på er arbetsplats exklusivt med den här presentationen, eller någon annan inom Agil förändringsledning, ledarskap, Lean UX, produktledning, skalat Agilt arbetssätt, Agil upphandling eller annat ämne som passar er. Kontakta oss enklast här >
Tack alla som deltog, och alla Dandys som högg i och hjälpte till!
I veckan hade vi vårt första öppna kvällsevent på Dandy People med temat “Agil transformation utanför IT”. Ämnet engagerade många och platserna fylldes snabbt upp.
Gemensamt utforskade vi vad det innebär att vara Agil och när man har nytta av att agera Agilt. I små grupper fick deltagarna sedan bläddra i kortleken vi har skapat med mönster (patterns) för lyckat Agil transformation och välja de 5 som man trodde skulle skapa mest effekt i den egna organisationen. Det var inte helt lätt att välja bland de 20-tal korten, många reflekterade över hur olika dom hade valt, att det kunde skilja så mycket mellan olika bolag vad som behövde komma till för att möjliggöra ett Agilt arbetssätt.
Som avslutning diskuterade vi deltagarnas egna frågeställningar i en Lean Coffee och efter det gemensamt mingel. Det blev många givande och spännande diskussioner.
Stort tack alla som deltog och delade med sig av sina erfarenheter och frågeställningar. Vi hoppas vi ses på nästa event igen under hösten 🙂
This Friday we had our first “Dandy Friday” with our team, continuing to build the best possible place to work together. We talked about our company culture and did an assessment together, finding out who we are and discussing how we feel about that. We have a human, collaboratively culture as well as a creative and innovative culture. We are fast in adapting to new things and external factors like our clients is equally important to us as how our employees are feeling and doing. We also have a start up culture and we want to go fast.
We also watched the Ted Talk (illustrated) with David Marquet, “Turning the ship around” and reflecting about leadership and how to become a Catalyst Leader. Catalyst Leader is a role at Dandy People since we want to mobilize brainpower in our Dandys and we want every one to grow and become leaders them selves, just like we want to help our clients in the same way. Only someone who are an Catalyst Leader can get the role.
Our strategy is to create the best culture possible. No other strategy is needed 🙂
If you haven’t watched the movie you should.
Here you can read about what we did at our conference using the Business Strategy & Tactics Dialogue Board:
https://dandypeople.com/blog/the-lean-business-strategy-tactics-dialogue-board-free-download/
Transformationen har alltid pågått, det går bara mycket fortare nu i och med digitaliseringen. Antingen drar man nytta av möjligheterna och förbättrar sin organisation, process och produkt, eller så blir man omkörd.
Konkurrensfördelen i mindre bolag, är att man enkelt kan föra dialog mellan viktiga funktioner i företaget och snabbt få ut sina produkter. Stora företag saknar ofta den möjligheten och är därför långsamma att anpassa sina strategier och erbjudanden efter nya behov och efterfrågan på marknaden.
Ett tydligt exempel är samarbetet mellan affärs- och tekniksidan där vi idag ser stor potential hos de flesta företag. De stora möjligheterna ligger ofta i ökad snabbrörlighet av affären och ett mer kundcentrerat arbetssätt. Snabbare beslut som rör erbjudandet ger minskade ledtider och ökad time to market vilket ofta ger starkt positiv påverkan av affären.
Det är här vi kan hjälpa till. Nya agila arbetssätt som sätter människan i centrum och fungerar tvärs över hela organisationen ger engagemang och starka relationer mellan företagets olika funktioner med korta beslutsvägar och stark innovationskraft. Stora företag kan behålla sina stordriftsfördelar, samtidigt som de blir lika snabba och flexibla som en startup i att ta hand om nya ideér och möjligheter som dyker upp.
Citat
“Det viktiga är att människorna får så mycket kunskap som möjligt, så fort som möjligt, och därefter kan justera planen” – Mia (more…)
