Organizations often struggle to become more dynamic, but it is not impossible. To have an agile organization begins by understanding what agility means and how organizations can evolve to thrive in an environment that demands constant change.
Agility is the ability of an organization to renew itself, adapt, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, turbulent environment. Agility is not incompatible with stability, quite the contrary. Agility requires stability for most companies. Agility needs two things:
1. A dynamic capability, the ability to move fast-speed, nimbleness, responsiveness, which demands a culture of change.
2. It requires stability, a stable foundation able to manage change. It is this stable backbone that becomes a springboard for the company, an anchor point that does not change while a whole bunch of other things is changing constantly.
It seems a paradox, right? But it is not: Agility rhymes with stability.
In really small start-ups, stability is typically embodied in the founder, and you have a few people around a founder. The start-up out of someone’s garage can be just fast and agile without a lot of stability. But as soon as you get any sense of size or scale, you cannot be agile without some sense of stability and without having in place a culture of change.
Change is the only constant, but it does not happen by gravity. Change is a process affected by culture and highly dependable on people’s perceptions of change. This process requires to be aware of the importance of learning agility, of the power of not knowing, while developing an expert network and using technology as a lever. The creation of this culture of change requires the involvement of the right people, effective communication, a change in everyone’s mindset, and a change in beliefs and behaviors. Curiosity is key, and part of the process is helping people to acquire the right skills and knowledge to remain agile while aligning incentives to achieve results.
In today’s environment, with enormous changes coming from both inside and outside of the organization, when we thrive on change and get stronger is when agility becomes a source of real competitive advantage.
Have you created a culture of change? Do you have an agile organization?
