What is Business Agility?
Business Agility is a set of organizational capabilities, behaviors, and ways of working that affords your business the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose. No matter what the future brings.
Developing Business Agility
Over the years, we’ve seen that organizations face many challenges on the journey toward business agility. Lack of leadership support, a top-down, risk-averse culture, and resistance to change can all stall transformation.
Too often, we see organizations push a process-led transformation— where most of the focus is on adopting and implementing frameworks, methodologies, tools, and techniques (e.g., SAFe, Scrum)— in hopes of building business agility. This only takes us so far.
Change Is Realized Through Culture and People, Not Process
True organizational change requires a cultural change through people, not just a process change. As an example, imagine an organization that has a strong culture of “safety.” They value perfection and playing it safe. This type of culture would be in conflict with the themes of experimentation, failure, and learning, which lead to creativity and innovation. Without recognizing, understanding, and working with the culture, your ability to successfully lead change will be hindered.
Agile Transformations Begin with Learning
Thriving organizations are learning organizations. They embrace the agile mindset, view failure as learning opportunities, and create environments for people to embrace the uncertainty of today’s world.
Learning has the power to transform people, unleash their full potential, and in turn, fuel the necessary cultural and behavioral shifts that enable agility. When you approach learning at both an individual and organizational level, it becomes a part of the culture, turning your organization into a learning organization.
