Keys to Become an Agile Organization – Moving Beyond Change Management to Change Agility

Keys to Become an Agile Organization – Moving Beyond Change Management to Change Agility

“What can I do to improve my organization’s agility and change capabilities?” If you’ve asked that question before you are not alone. Many organizations find themselves struggling to make successful changes. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, organizations will need change agility — the ability to rapidly respond to changing market conditions and seize change opportunities faster than competitors.

According to a PMI and Forbes report, 92% of C-level executives believe organizational agility is critical to business success. Eighty-two percent believe agile approaches are important for implementation of strategic initiatives, and 84% believe it is necessary to succeed in digital transformation. But only 27% of executives surveyed considered themselves highly agile.

Most organizations use change management as a means to deal with the needs of a specific change, but the pace and scope of change makes this approach insufficient in dealing with the scale of change we are seeing today.

The broader, bigger challenge organizations face today is how to be agile and flexible with all this constant change. Organizations with a high degree of agility can react successfully to new competitors, development of new technologies, or sudden shifts in overall market conditions.

What Does It Mean to Be an Agile Organization?

Agile organizations can do these five things very well:

• Identify and capture opportunities more quickly than competitors at both the operational and strategic levels
• Take advantage of change, both planned or unexpected, with speed, effectiveness, and flexibility
• Transform information into insight in response to market changes
• Adapt and change quickly 
• Quickly and efficiently reconfigure strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology toward value creating and value protecting opportunities

Does being an agile organization mean you are not a stable organization? I liken it to breathing You can’t ask, ‘Should I inhale or should I exhale?’ You have to do both.

You have to be stable to keep your organization resilient, reliable, and efficient. But you also have to be dynamic, nimble, and adaptive. Structures, governance, and processes need to be designed to support both stability and agility. Many organizations are highly stable but struggle to determine how they can become more dynamic and agile. The journey to be more agile in your organization is a developmental process. Building agility practices and disciplines over time and working to continuously improve over time are key.

Be Agile with Management Practices and Disciplines

Management practices are often at the core of what needs to change for organizations to become more agile. Goal setting, for example. A “traditional” organization often performs annual goal setting that is introduced from the top down and reviewed annually. This process can sometimes cause a disconnect between the goals and the day-to-day work of teams.

In today’s constant changing environment, agile organizations often set goals annually but include quarterly action plans and accountabilities. Plus, these organizations are more apt to adjust goals as priorities change. Agile organizations will conduct more frequent performance reviews as well.

Resource allocation is another practice where agile organizations have a leg up. Traditional organizations are often siloed and don’t always share resources willingly across the organization. When they do, those resources are often lacking the skills and knowledge needed to successfully complete projects in an unfamiliar area.

On the other hand, many agile organizations often have a more cross-functional team approach embedded in their practices.

Organizational Agility Framework

An organizational agility framework provides your organization with a guide that supports your core stable business and the future of where you need to go. 

Here is an example of an organizational agility framework I recommend:

1. Start with leadership and management practices. Traditional organizations leaders influence through hierarchical authority. Agile organization’s leaders influence through coaching and development.
2. Planning and goal setting. It’s not just frequency but also focus as well as mechanisms in place to learn from the market.
3. Run the business. Operational agility is key. Think of it in terms of continuous improvement. How do you continually improve current business and be agile and respond to feedback from customers in terms of changes needed?
4. Change the business. Strategic agility allows you to innovate and drive new ways of doing business. The core here, is how do you take market data and innovate, iterate, and experiment with new models, new products, and new services?
5. Employees and culture. Highly agile organizations have practices and disciplines in place to help their employees continually have a view of the external market, helping employees continually grow and learn.

Change Agility Requires a Mindset Shift

There is a lot of negativity that often comes with change. Before you’re able to effectively change processes and practices, the first thing you have to change is mindsets. Initially it isn’t going to be the mindsets of employees. It has to be the mindsets of the leaders that initially change.

#agility #management #changemanagement #agileorganization