The subject is strategic change. The question, posed last week, is whether we can lichen business change to Agile software development — whether we can devise an Agile Business Change (ABC) methodology that “chunks” strategic change into a melange of small, manageable adjustments.

The alternative is some flavor of reengineering, business transformation, and replacing the engine while flying at 40,000 feet. Companies often wilt under the pressure of making it happen.

Lettuce peas start with a framework for describing any business. It has ten dimensions — five external, five internal. The external dimensions are:

• Customers: The people who make buying decisions about what the company has to sell.

• Product: What the company sells its customers.

• Price: What the company charges for its products, along with margin goals, contract terms and conditions and so on.

• Marketplace: The business ecosystem — suppliers, distribution channel, competitors and partners.

• Messages: How the business explains itself and its products.

The internal dimensions are:

• People: Employees and contractors — the human beans themselves, their skills, knowledge and experience.

• Process: How people do the company’s work.

• Technology: The tools people use when fulfilling their roles in the company’s processes.

• Structure: How the company is organized — its reporting structure, celery structure, policies and guidelines, and internal communications.

• Culture: How employees respond to common situations.

In healthy organizations, the ten dimensions are consistent, interconnected, and mutually reinforcing.

Companies don’t undertake strategic change just because one or two are a bit moldy. They undertake it because their salad days are behind them — because the company’s business model no longer works. Perhaps the company’s products are no longer relevant, or the customer segment it serves is shrinking, or its pricing is no longer competitive in its marketplace, or its marketplace has changed in some serious way. It’s fallen behind.

Happens all the time: Competitors turnip the heat, putting some company, whose business model is as tired as a bunch of botanical puns, in a pickle.

Many companies enter a sort of vegetative state in which doing nothing at all becomes the strategy — they pare spending down beyond the minimum, hoping someone buys them before they’re completely beet. The alternative, though, is nearly as bad, because there is no such thing as changing just one of the ten dimensions of organizational design. Any attempt to ketchup will hit a bunch of them, if not the whole enchilada.

For example:

You manufacture a line of premium products, which you distribute to hardware stores throughout the United States through a group of trusted, experienced, independent brokers.

And then, last month, a Chinese manufacturer started selling a knock-off product, direct to Lowes and Home Depot. Its wholesale price is half what you charge your brokers, and it sells direct — no intermediaries.

Sufferin’ succotash!

Your competitive challenge is pricing. But you can’t change just the price. You need a butter response than that, because just cutting price is cheesy — you’ll lose money on every transaction.

To cut prices while preserving margins you’ll need to change your processes. That means “changing” your people in some way too, because new processes wholly or partially invalidate old skills.

Most likely, you’ll have to change structure and culture as well, and reposition yourself in the marketplace (including, perhaps, bypassing your current distribution channel). All of which will require significant changes in technology.

That’s a lot to change all at once. You have to take an interconnected ten-dimensional model of the business that worked and redesign it into a new interconnected ten-dimensional model of the business that works.

Then you bet the farm, implementing the new organizational design as one massive process. And you don’t get to stop running your business during the change-over.

Enter ABC.

Unlike re-engineering, which is top-down and waterfall (and most of the time curiously devoid of actual engineers), ABC blends top-down and bottom-up design. From the top, the company’s executive team decides the basic shape of pricing goals, production strategy (process), and distribution. It also decides on any structural changes that will be required, putting the right people in charge of critical business responsibilities.

And, it will define the underlying cultural changes necessary for everything else to work.

The executive team will focus its attention on the cultural change. The rest of the company will use the 3-1-3-4 formula (3-year vision/1-year strategy/3-month goals/4-week plan) to figure out everything else and make it happen in manageable increments.

That, at least, is the theory. Whether it holds up when you peel the onion is an open question.

Low-hanging fruit live somewhere between proofs of concept and important results in the business change hierarchy.

Your average proof of concept, far from proving the concept, does nothing more than prove a concept — a more simplistic one, applied to a problem much smaller in scale and complexity. Proofs of concept are usually little more than rigged tests.

Low-hanging fruit, unlike proofs of concept and like important results, provide real business benefit. They’re usually peared up with large-scale change efforts, and even if the big change never happens, you get to keep the business benefits they provide, kumquat may*.

They are, in a word, peachy.

Currant thinking is that the primary value of low-hanging fruit … quick wins … is to create momentum or get the company out of a jam. Achieving a small but real change helps everyone see that this time the change methodology works and change is going to happen, unlike all of those other, previous change efforts that died on the vine.

But success at small change says nothing about how well the same techniques will fare when applied to a big change, any more than aspirin’s success at alleviating a headache proves it can cure malaria.

When the subject is large-scale strategic change, employees are justifiably skeptical, usually considering the next big thing to be nothing more than this year’s passing fad. They’re probably watched more than one high-profile strategic change fail, with none brought to (ahem) fruition.

If you are preparing to lead a large scale business change, here’s something to consider before you spend too much time raisin everyone’s expectations: Maybe low-hanging fruit are the only fruit worth picking.

Software enhancements are IT’s low-hanging fruit. If there’s one certainty in IT, it’s that enhancements succeed. Large projects are where the risk lies.

That’s where Agile, Scrum, Conference Room Pilots and their iterative, incremental, adaptive relatives come into play. Boiled down to their cores, they turn large development efforts into a swarm of small enhancements. They are managed and coordinated for architectural consistency and focus on a common plan, but the coordination and focus are loose enough that the enhancement-like nature of the work is the dominant style.

So I was thinking: Since there’s no such thing as an IT project — it’s always about changing the business, or what’s the point? — maybe we should apply the same thinking to business change that Agile and its relatives bring to software development.

We need a methodology that turns large-scale strategic change into a basketful of low-hanging fruit.

What might such a methodology look like? The question is better than my answer, as you’re about to find out.

One place to start is the 3-1-3-4 formulation I introduced in “Secretive solutions,” Keep the Joint Running, 9/3/2007.

3-1-3-4, you’ll recall, stands for 3-year vision, 1-year strategy, 3-month goals, 4-week plans. The 3-year vision and 1-year strategy provide consistency and focus. The 3-month goals and 4-week plan create the collection of quick wins.

It comes down to finishing one business enhancement effort and then asking, “What can we do next?”

For what we might as well start calling the “Agile Business Change” methodology (ABC — catchy, huh?) the 3-1-3-4 approach needs some enhancement:

The 3-year vision is still a shared vision, and there’s just one.

That isn’t true of the 1-year strategy. For ABC, each member of the executive committee must have one of these, and they have to make sense together.

Now come the 3-month plans. These fan out further, to middle management. Having so many 3-month plans is what will make the enterprise agile.

It’s also where chaos can ensue, because with so many concurrent change plans going on, the need for collaboration can easily lose out to the stiff competition for shared resources.

Like the IT department.

IT, in fact, has a role to play in preventing chaos, because most business change requires new information technology or changes to what’s already in production. If different requests are in logical conflict, IT is in an excellent position to spot the problem and coordinate a resolution.

The other mechanism for preventing chaos must be a corporate culture that encourages managers to ask themselves, about their plans: Who else will be affected by this?

And, after figuring out the answer, collaborating to make sure everything will come together in the end.

As I said, I don’t have a perfect answer to the challenge, just some glimmerings.

If someone reading this column has a better way of going about this and would be kind enough to share, I’d be grapeful.

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*Borrowed from this verse, remembered from an old Mad magazine: You’re the apple of my eye/The plum of the day/And I’ll always love you/Kumquat may.