The Key to Greater Organizational Agility

Braden Kelley is an innovation and change specialist, the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, an InnovationExcellence.com co-Founder, and is the creator of the Change Planning Toolkit™ and a book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (January 2016 release).

  Agile   Change Management  

Companies seeking to cope with the pace of accelerating change are looking for ways to go faster, and managers in non-technical disciplines have become increasingly infatuated with the agile software development methodology. Many are finding ways to adapt parts of it to create agile change, agile marketing or other such things. Sure, agility sounds like a good thing; and sure, agile marketing sounds like it must be better than regular marketing. But is it?

What is agility, really? According to Dictionary.com: “The power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness” or “The ability to think and draw conclusions quickly; intellectual acuity.” When it comes to a business context, I however prefer to define agility a bit more simply, a bit more concisely. Agility, or organizational agility in our case, is: “How quickly an organization can change directions.”

Many people, especially in an organizational or commercial context, get confused between agility and flexibility. They are not the same thing. Organizational agility is about how quickly an organization can change directions, while flexibility in an organization gives it the ability to do different things with the same resources, often by purchasing more flexible equipment (at a higher price) or by training people to do more than one thing (resulting in higher training costs) or by hiring …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.