According to a Forrester Report, “Every industry is subject to disruption. Only a truly agile business is equipped to respond”.((Craig Le Clair, ‘Business Agility Starts With Your People’, https://www.forrester.com/report/Business+Agility+Starts+With+Your+People/-/E-RES112281))
Whether it’s from advancements in technology, industry disruptors, social movements, leadership and management turnover, different preferences between generations, or any number of other factors, your organization will need to adopt a mindset that can adapt and fluctuate.((https://www.bizlibrary.com/blog/organizational-culture/business-agility-modern-employee-training/))
This is a subtle way of saying that in the current disruptive era, adaptability is no longer an option for businesses, it has rather become a necessity. The mantra now is to adapt to grow or struggle to keep up with the competition. The success of businesses now rests on their ability to change to varying circumstances.
What is Business Agility?
It is important to look at the meaning of Business Agility and why it is necessary before delving into how it can be enabled.
Business agility is the ability of a business to realize and sustain its full potential both in terms of its profits and its people, regardless of internal or external environment changes. It enables organizations to innovate and deliver more effectively, thus turning market disruption into a competitive advantage, while thriving in complex environments.((https://www.solutionsiq.com/resource/blog-post/what-is-business-agility/))
To put succinctly, it is the ability of any organization to quickly adapt to market changes, respond rapidly and flexibly to customer demands without compromising its continuous need to be at a competitive advantage, and to lead change in a cost-effective, quality and productive way.
With the disruptive effect of technology in all industries, business agility can equally be said to be the ability of an organization to evolve with the trend in the industry by adopting technology and an agile culture.
Why Is Business Agility Important?
As rightly put by Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, “change is the only constant in life”. This resonates well with the business world. The introduction of technology in most, if not all industries, has changed the way businesses are done.
The industries are not the way they were a couple of decades ago. Hence, with the continuous development in technology, it can be safely concluded that the future is unpredictable.
This is where Business agility comes in. To meet up with the changing needs and requirements of consumers, businesses need to be able to adapt without majorly altering its models. Businesses with an agile culture tend to adapt faster to these changes than their counterparts.
How Can You Enable in Business Agility?
Are you about to kick-off an agile transformation? It is important to know that business agility is not rocket science. Any organization interested in being relevant in decades to come must invest in the following to enable agility.
Leadership & Management
The duo of leadership and management cannot be diffused from the development of business agility. Effective leadership is at the center of successful organizations. Business agility requires leaders that can establish and enroll people in shared visions of success and can guide and manage all of the above successfully.
This requires changes to how you lead and manage. Agile transformation requires a leadership structure that will integrate a mindset shift in the employees and ensure the implementation of the processes.
As Jeff Gothelf rightly suggests, “… seek out the nonconformists—the candidates that don’t fit easily into a box. These are the generalists with an entrepreneurial spirit. They’re the multi-faceted tinkerers who have specialized in a discipline like design but turn out to be pretty good coders.”((Jeff Gothelf, ‘Bring Agile to the Whole Organization’, https://hbr.org/2014/11/bring-agile-to-the-whole-organization))
Organizational Culture
The culture of an organization must be designed in a way to make it easily adaptable to changes in the industry. It must evolve towards experimentation, openness, trust, transparency, and growth-oriented. In addition to this, organizations must create a culture of learning and responsiveness to industry trends.
This will enable employees to acquire the relevant skills and knowledge to flow with the latest technology or other forms of changes in the industry.
Organizations must design and create open physical and virtual environments that empower people to do their jobs most effectively in the environment that is most conducive to them. These environments offer opportunities to foster transparency, communication, collaboration, and serendipitous encounters between teams and units across the organization.
Organizational Structure
Businesses looking into agile transformation must have a well-defined and straightforward organizational structure. This has to do with how activities like task allocation, coordination, and supervision are directed toward the achievement of organizational aims. In addition to this, the traditional decision-making structure which is from “top to bottom” must be changed to “bottom to top”
Traditionally, decisions are run through a hierarchy of management ensuring everyone is on all fours before a decision and implementation shifts. These processes are slow and a waste of valuable time. However, to achieve agility, the power to make fast decisions need to be with those who are the closest to customers’ feedback and not necessarily those at the helm of the leadership ladder.((ibid))
People and Engagement
The powerhouse of any organization is its people. Hence, investing in people is also important in an organization’s agile transformation. The right workforce with the necessary skillsets must be recruited. They should not only be vast in the use of industry-specific technologies but also be open to learning future technologies.
Technology and Innovation
Getting the right workforce would serve no purpose if there are no tools and technologies to work with. Hence, any organization willing to adapt to changing trends in the industry must invest in the necessary technologies. For instance, with the current pandemic, an agile organization will invest in video conferencing and other remote working tools for its workforce. This is to ensure that the sudden change in the mode of operation does not negatively affect the company.
Overall, there is no denying the fact that any business that fails or is slow to adapt to industry changes will be forced out of the competitive market.
