A leading FMCG company with 5,000+ employees faced challenges of slow decision-making, siloed structures, and bureaucratic inefficiencies. While frontline employees were engaged, leadership struggled with alignment and execution speed, limiting the company’s ability to respond swiftly to market shifts.

To drive agility, we needed to change their mindset that they always “REACT”. We redefined it as re-ACT. Autonomy, Collaboration and Transparency—core agile principles, iterated. Leadership embraced a shift from hierarchical control to adaptive decision-making, allowing teams to own their outcomes. Siloes were dismantled to enable cross-functional collaboration, ensuring faster information flow and joint problem-solving.

Our approach was iterative. On-ground conversations and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) helped identify key bottlenecks, while co-creation workshops ensured employees shaped the transformation. Agile practices were introduced, including:

• Daily standups to enhance responsiveness and coordination.
• Leadership coaching to embed agility in decision-making.
• Cross-functional value-stream teams to drive customer-centricity.

The impact was immediate. Within a week, a frontline salesperson flagged a competitor’s strategic shift during a standup. Instead of the traditional escalation process—where the field sales team informs their Area Lead, who then escalates to the Sales Head, who brings it up in an HOD monthly meeting, often leading to delayed action—the team acted within a couple of days, staying ahead of the competition.

To sustain momentum, leadership institutionalized regular retrospectives and open forums, reinforcing a culture of continuous learning and adaptation. By embedding agile principles, the company evolved into a fast, collaborative, and proactive organization where teams operate with autonomy, alignment, and shared purpose.

We partnered with a fast-growing FMCG company to enhance agility in their operations. During our initial “Listen phase,” we identified a critical issue: departmental silos were causing significant delays in the sense-analyse-respond loop, hampering the company’s ability to act swiftly.

The siloed structure meant that information flowed bottom-up within departments, was shared across teams, analyzed in isolation, and then cascaded back down for action—a process rife with delays. To address this, we introduced value stream-based teams with cross-functional representation and implemented structured meeting cadences. These changes dramatically improved the speed of information flow, strengthened stakeholder alignment, and paved the way for quicker decision-making.

The impact of this transformation was evident almost immediately. A frontline sales team noticed the competitor withdrawing their 100g product from the market—a signal that typically would have surfaced only during the monthly Area Sales Managers’ meeting. In the past, this delay would have triggered a slow response cycle involving analysis, strategy development, and eventual action.

However, the newly formed cross-functional team escalated this insight during their daily stand-up, bringing the information to the right people without delay. Recognizing the urgency, the team speculated that the competitor might reintroduce the product at a lower price or bundle it with another offering, potentially disrupting the market and jeopardizing their own market share for the coming month.

Faced with this imminent threat from a major multinational competitor, the brands and customer marketing teams quickly brainstormed counterstrategies. Acting swiftly, they revamped their trade push and relaunched their product with an enhanced offering. The proactive approach allowed the company to stay ahead of the competition, maintain market share, and avert a potentially significant disruption.

For the client, this was a transformative “A-ha” moment.

This remarkable success came early in their transformation journey, driven by a simple but powerful change: redesigning the cadence structure. Teams now felt empowered to share critical information directly and frequently with the right decision-makers. By eliminating the need to climb up and down the organisational hierarchy, they gained the agility to respond to threats in real-time.

The air at our client, a leading distributor of engineering and project management software solutions, was thick with frustration. Legacy processes were dragging the company down, forcing employees to jump through hoops just to get simple tasks done. That’s when we introduced #RuleSafari—a methodology designed to help teams track practices, wrapped in bureaucratic red tape, that are likely stifling innovation and killing morale and then work to eliminate it.

In an eye-opening workshop, cross-functional teams embarked on this safari with one mission: identify and challenge the rules that no longer served them. The team was encouraged to list existing rules, policies, and practices, including unwritten norms & habits within the organization that they believe are outdated, unnecessary, or counterproductive. Complex approval processes that turned simple policy updates into month-long sagas were exposed. Inefficiencies that were crippling lead generation and delaying critical software installations were also brought to light. The group then evaluated these rules based on their impact on the business and the work environment.

But here’s where the real magic happened— The Rule Safari didn’t stop at just exposing the wild animals in the corporate jungle. They were acted upon and simplified by slashing layers and cutting decision times drastically.

The employees realized they weren’t just tweaking processes—they were revolutionizing the way things worked. The Rule Safari didn’t just fix problems; it unleashed a wave of empowerment. Employees felt a renewed sense of ownership, and collaboration improved.

The company now strides forward with its teams aligned, energized, and ready to conquer new challenges.