What is being more RAFA?

 As an organization it can be difficult to move quickly in a dynamic environment on the one hand and to empower our people to take more accountability on the other hand. For any organization it is important to be more RAFA in these environments and situations. What does this mean? RAFA stands for being more Resilient​, Adaptive, Future proof and Agile as an organization. 

Why is it important to be more RAFA? 

 Business and Organizational Agility creates an adaptable organization wherein value creation and achieving business results accelerates. Organizations need to be more RAFA to adapt to ongoing and unpredictable changes. Looking at recent years, organizations are encountering more and more changes such as: 

• Economic, financial, health crises every x year that have an impact on our businesses. 

• Constantly looking for added value towards our customers, our employees, the environment… 
• Empowering people to take up entrepreneurship. 
• Focus on sustainability. 
• Automation and Digitalization 
• Challenging ways of working (hybrid). 

• … 

Some interesting insight in becoming more RAFA: 

During the last years and in many recent client assignments (reference case NIRAS) in becoming more RAFA we have noticed some interesting elements that need the right attention: 

• You need to be aligned on the organization’s vision on RAFA:  

• • What do we want to achieve? 
  • Why are we doing it? 
  • Is our organization ready to enhance and embrace RAFA-patterns? 

• Consider RAFA as an incremental change: it is not (always) the final goal, but a supportive and continuous process! 
• Focus on team and portfolio as starting point of your RAFA journey and do not start with the full implementation of e.g., an agile transformation. However, starting such a journey with the end in mind is of course a prerequisite. 
• Decision-making is based on equality, transparency, autonomy, and trust; 4 key values that have the largest impact on a RAFA-continuum. 

How do you know if your organization is ready for RAFA or transformation towards a more agile way of working? 

 Via this survey and by answering 10 simple statements, you will have a quick response on the question whether your organization has already taken some steps in become more RAFA or that a well-defined roadmap is needed to start the journey to move towards the most ideal situation within your context. 

Discover your RAFA-level

How do you tackle this journey? 

Threon has developed an approach to further guide you in this journey. 
This approach focuses on 4 levels and 4 domains resulting in a 4×4 matrix.  

The four levels are:  

• enterprise portfolio 
• business programs 
• product/solutions 
• team 

and are focusing on getting a grip on the strategy, the real game changers, the underlying components, and the people that makes this happens. 

The four domains are: 

• leadership & culture 
• interactions 

• organizations 
• governance and tooling 

and are focusing on the culture, behavior, organization and structure (framework) to create the needed conditions to start implementing the RAFA patterns in your company.  

For example, on 1 – 1 (“Enterprise Portfolio Level” and “Leadership & Culture”) the objective is to stimulate the organization on faster value creation and realization business value. This can be among others fed by getting aligned on the RAFA vision on the one hand and performing a “strategy execution and organizational fit” assessment to so where the blind spots are.

On 4 – 2 (“Team” and “Interactions”) the objective is to create the right team dynamics and suitable way of working within the spirit of continuous delivery. Threon can help by a scrum or Kanban implementation (rituals, flow….)​.

Interested in becoming more RAFA?

Contact us and together, we will help you to start (or further implement) your journey!