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Christophe Derdeyn on Why Agility is Essential in Business Transformation Efforts

Traditional business advice often treats organizational change like following a recipe – stick to the plan and you’ll get the results you want. Reality tells a different story. When companies try to transform how they operate, rigid plans frequently fall apart once they meet real-world challenges. Drawing from 25 years of guiding complex transformations across multiple countries and industries, veteran executive Christophe Derdeyn shares practical insights on why staying agile makes the difference between successful change and costly failures. His experience spans everything from merging operations across nine countries to helping traditional companies find new market directions.

Understanding the Scope of Transformation

Business transformation touches every corner of an organization. “When you talk about business transformation, you’re dealing with so many different aspects,” Christophe explains. “It’s either changing your operating model, changing the way that you manage your business, or changing how you go to market.” With so many moving parts, staying flexible isn’t optional – it’s essential.

Even the best-laid plans run into unexpected challenges. Christophe has seen this firsthand while setting up shared services across nine countries and multiple business functions. “Your destination organization is never shaped in exactly the way that you originally dreamed it would be,” he notes. “You encounter a lot of practical issues.” The solution? Build flexibility into the process. “You need to have a plan that can change to a certain extent,” Christophe advises. “You can solve things in different ways and meet different stakeholders’ needs in different aspects.”

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Tackling Challenges Through Flexibility

Take offshoring operations as an example. Companies often move IT or finance functions to new countries seeking efficiency and cost savings. But paper plans can’t capture every challenge. “You will have new context that you need to consider where you can’t do all the homework up front,” Christophe shares. “Many of the things that you will encounter are either new or a little bit different from what you expected initially.”

Old-line companies facing market changes need special flexibility. Finding new directions takes trial and error. “There’s not one company that will put five people together, they do a brainstorm, and then they say that’s it,” Christophe points out. “You need to work out many different ideas, test, fail, evolve.” He emphasizes taking a systematic approach: “You need to set it up, start to run it, and of course manage your risk. But then once you see that certain things work, you evolve those, and things that you see as problematic or don’t give the intended outcome, you need to stop.”

Adapting Mindsets for Agility

Can organizations teach people to be more agile? Christophe sees mixed results. “There is a large group of people that you can teach to work in an agile context,” he notes. But mindset matters more than methods. “If you’re conservative in nature and you like structure and predictability, then it’s very difficult to become agile,” he explains. “Those people we can put into an agile process and they will run through the process, but they make the process rigid because of the mindset that they have.”

After 25 years in the field, Christophe can quickly spot who will adapt well to agile approaches. The key isn’t following agile processes perfectly – it’s maintaining genuine flexibility when plans need adjustment. “We try to design an agile process and then we kind of box it in, which by definition makes it no longer agile,” he observes. True agility means staying open to change while keeping sight of end goals. Success comes from balancing structure with flexibility. Leaders must provide clear direction while staying ready to adjust course when reality demands it. In Christophe’s experience, that’s how transformation efforts deliver lasting results.

To learn more about Christophe Derdeyn’s insights on agile transformation, check out his LinkedIn profile.

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