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Agility is an issue that is becoming more and more prominent in businesses across industries. While it is a common goal, its meaning can be somewhat ambiguous. Depending on the context, agility can mean different things to different organizational units. But one common thread persists: the accelerating speed of change. Change is not only driving organizations to keep up and anticipate, but more so to be its catalyst in order to be competitively positioned.
The speed of change is not a new phenomenon. In the 1960s, researchers noticed how technology was impacting the rate of change; how the ‘nature of change was changing’ and how normal expectations and rules for dealing with change no longer applied.1 From these studies, the term ‘turbulent environment’ was coined. Companies that could not adapt quickly enough struggled for survival. Today, companies battle for their corporate lives as change progresses at an alarming pace with the predication that we will see “more change in the next 30 years than we saw in all of the last 100.”
Many organizations are not able to endure and lose the battle as is evident in the changing list of Fortune 1000 companies. According to Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness, “An analysis of Fortune 1000 corporations shows that between 1973 and 1983, 35 percent of the companies in the top 20 were new. The number of new companies increases to 45 percent when the comparison is between 1983 and 1993. It increases even further, to 60 percent, when the comparison is between 1993 and 2003.”
Change management has become a significant corporate undertaking because it is critical to business success. With emerging technologies, rapid innovation, new business models, regulatory compliance and fierce competition, change has become more intense and relentless. From this rapid-fire environment, the need for agility has emerged as a front burner issue. This paper examines:
- The qualities of business agility
- Challenges the restrain agility
- And how leadership, technology, business-critical information and other organizational aspects can improve an organization’s agile ability.
Defining Agility
Fundamentally, an agile business “can move quickly, decisively and effectively in anticipating, initiating and taking advantage of change.”
But what are the traits that give businesses the agility edge? In Agile Business for Fragile Times: Strategies for Enhancing Competitive Resiliency and Stakeholder Trust 5, the following are listed as qualities of companies that are successfully agile:
- Maintaining a continual focus on profitability and revenue growth
- Understanding central priorities and the importance of assessing and reporting on value
- A sustained commitment to communications that starts at the top
- Acquiring and filtering pertinent information from and to key constituents, rapidly
- Testing assumptions and frequently measuring results
- Having a performance culture
- Enabling shared decision making
- Adapting rapidly to change
It further states that companies that embrace these traits have a “survivability edge that allows them to observe, react and factor market changes into an embedded discipline of continual cost and growth refinement.”
To be truly successful in creating and sustaining an agile business, leaders must exemplify these qualities in order for agility to permeate the entire organization. Executives must effectively drive and manage change to strategic goals; create environments that encourage innovation, collaboration and problem-solving; recognize and reward high performance; ensure effective and efficient communication; and identify and minimize barriers to change. Executives who understand, cultivate and infuse these traits throughout the organization create a workplace of high performers. The critical role of leadership in fostering and developing an agile work force is underscored by executive education programs such as “Strategic Agility: Leading Flexible Organizations” from Harvard Business School’s Executive Education Program and “High- Performance Leadership” from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
As the need for agility moves down the managerial chain and into the functional units, it can manifest itself in different ways. At the level of an individual contributor, agility is demonstrated by the ability to quickly solve day-to-day business problems, to identify new processes and frameworks for speed of delivery, to cross global and functional lines without faltering and to accept, respond and initiate change. Employees who adopt and thrive in the reality of change have a propensity to be high performers. While the need for agility is obvious, its pursuit can be riddled with obstructions that impede it.
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