Business Agility Foundations Training (ICP-BAF Certification)

This ICAgile accredited Business Agility training program offers an intense, strategic appreciation for top management to understand the ingredients to create an Agile organization that is responsive to value creation in a disruptive environment. This practical workshop is designed to help you to speed your business up, focus on what’s important, reduce waste and red tape and, most importantly deliver value to your business and your customers. Business Agility Accelerator is essential for leaders to jumpstart learning how to thrive in uncertainty and create organizational success.

Plus, pass the post-course exam and earn Certification in Business Agility Foundations (ICP-BAF) from the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile).

• A willingness to challenge traditional thinking and a desire to deliver outcomes for the organization.

• ICAgile accredited course: The ICP-BAF Certification from ICAgile is granted on the successful completion of this course. This certification is part of the ICAgile Business Agility Track .
• This course can help you earn ICAgile certification. Click to view our options for ICAgile Certification Training ›

Business Agility Foundations Delivery Methods

• In-Person

• Online

Business Agility Foundations Course Benefits

• Learn from official courseware to help earn ICP-BAF Certification

• The mindset and culture that business agility instils

• A model for change that is based on current management thinking and human dynamics

• The techniques to help examine and improve your work practices

• How to define your customer(s) and how you add value to them

• How to treat everything as an experiment, with a value test and hypothesis that is either validated or disproved with real empirical data

• How to use value stream maps, Kanban values, principles and practices, A3s, and lean thinking to eliminate waste and create space for innovation

• Continue learning and face new challenges with after-course one-on-one instructor coaching

Module 1: Awareness: The need for Business Agility

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• Illustrate the core foundational concepts of Business Agility in relevant business contexts.
• Clarify values and principles and why they are essential enablers of building organizational intelligence.
• Describe the role of these values and principles in cultivating new ways of thinking and working.
• Convey that critical success factors include trust, safety, collaboration, cohesion, autonomy, mastery, purpose, individual accountability, and new responsibility levels for collective team success and value creation.
• Grasp why and how to shift focus from "outputs" to outcomes by eliminating waste, doing less, and accelerating innovation.
• Communicate why creating disruptive outcomes in today's volatile economy requires real-time knowledge generation and radical new ways of thinking and working.

Module 2: Compelling Vision, Focus, and Clarity of Purpose

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• Communicate the importance of aligning organizations around a crisp, believable, compelling, and inspiring vision
• Convey that the experience of Aligning teams and organizations around a vision or clear purposes provides a key source of inspiration, engagement, commitment, and organizational cohesion.
• Envision the future state of business agility, then learn ways to look backward from that future to craft a compelling path to attain it. Ways include new capabilities, skills, behaviors, and practices that must be acquired (and why).
• Participants will also understand why and how to use this activity with their teams.
• Explain the values, principles, tools, and techniques needed to develop empathy and improve customer and stakeholder context-awareness.
• Identify that everyone in the organization between them and the customer is an internal customer.

Module 3: Enabling Business Agility

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• Describe the attributes of a growth mindset in contrast to the limitations of a fixed mindset in the Business Agility context.
• Introduce the concept of reframing failure as an opportunity to learn.
• Recognize that blind spots and mental biases exist and understand the role that our mental models play in shaping our perceptions and beliefs.
• Apply the skills needed to examine mental models and how individuals 'make meaning' by generating patterns filtered from experiences, beliefs, and values.
• Look at ways to slow down thinking processes to generate awareness, then form and reinforce new mental models.
• Provide an overview of the field of complex adaptive systems and complexity theory while providing practical awareness of relevant management models.
• Distinguish polarities (dilemmas, paradigms, and paradoxes) from traditional problems and learn to see the relationship between the poles with the goal of optimizing the wins and minimizing the losses.
• Practicing both/and thinking vs. the more traditional either/or thinking.
• Cultivate a both/and mindset to have deeper benefits with respect to collaboration and relationship-building.

Module 4: New and Differentiating Behaviors

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• Define high-performance questions, and give examples of the power they have towards enhancing organizational outcomes.
• Discuss techniques for using high-performance questions as often as possible in day-to-day conversations.
• Emphasize that value is only delivered through the completion of a new or improved functional slice of work that is implemented and delivered to a customer for use.
• Convey that valuable learning occurs once a product or feature is in the hands of customers who can use it and provide feedback.
• Understand why and how to identify small, discrete opportunities, then craft hypotheses in order to frame relevant experiments.
• Understanding why and how rapid experimentation accelerates learning and business agility.
• Experience the complex dynamics involved when creating sustainable change and the reason why individuals and organizations (as systems) deeply resist it.
• Describe and discuss change frameworks, polarity management frameworks, and what makes them effective.
• Highlight how to reframe disruptive threats as strategic opportunities.

Module 5: Implementing and Sustaining Business Agility

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• Learn why a lack of end-to-end systems thinking and a failure to focus on value throughout the organization leads to waste and ineffective outcomes.
• Demonstrate how a Lean Systems Approach enables business agility and generates and sustains knowledge by focusing on strategic goals, measuring value, defining a practical course of action, exposing and eliminating waste, supporting teams, enabling rapid decisions, and learning with quantitative analysis and empirical data.
• Introduce concepts and applications of the "Build - Measure - Learn" framework for dealing with uncertainty.
• Apply the concepts of “a human-centered approach to innovation" and focus on new ways of thinking about elements of a product or solution that evolve around the customer: people, technology, and business.
• Provide an understanding of the key values and practices of kanban, along with ideas on why and how to apply these values.
• Understand and use iterative frameworks and how they accelerate learning and discovery.

Module 6: Business Agility as the New Normal

In this Module, you will learn how to:

• Analyze what a business agility environment and learning ecosystem looks like and why it is vital in a VUCA world.
• Devise strategies to create an environment that enables value creation, rapid decision making, and optimized execution.
• Reflect on and synthesize key learnings in the unique context of each participant's experience, work structures, and challenges.
• Identify and explain ways in which you can make the ongoing application of business agility part of the habitual way of working in your organization.
• Communicate the importance of learning agility and how empirical data and relevant, actionable metrics support real learning.
• Understand the limitations of lagging indicators and excessive metrics that do not drive the right behaviors.
• Set adaptive and continuously improving measures of success based on leading indicators and "metrics that matter."