Agility - Let me count the types

 

(First published on LinkedIn and in the The Agility Series Blog)

When we use the word agility these days it is usually prefaced by the words organizational or business. But are organizational or business agility the only two types of agility?

Before I answer that question I need to fill in a bit of the back story about why I asked myself that in the first place. Last year I was the lead author on a book called Agile Value Delivery: Beyond the Numbers which we were lucky enough to have endorsed by a co-author of The Manifesto for Agile Software Development. At the same time as I was leading the writing that one I was also acting as the mentor for the PRINCE2 Agile and I was working on creating an Agile for Executives and Leaders course - it was a bust six months!

As I was laying out the course I felt the need to take a different approach than simply writing yet another executive overview of Scrum or basic agile the way most have done (while there is value in those as well I wanted something a little different). Our book  had talked about Value agility and we also had a section on the implications of agility thinking on the rest of an organization with a particular emphasis on HR and Finance.

So as I started writing the course I began to think about the 'rest of the organization' part we had mentioned in our book. So that's where 8 of the 9 types came from, which I  introduced in the course.

The 9th type of agility came about while working with my friends at www.GreatWork.io and with our first wisdom council for our recent book on Organizational Agility where polled a group senior leaders on 4 continents on what they thought Organizational Agility really was. One of our council members, Claude Emond identified Learning Agility as a missing type so it was added to the list.

So, here are the 9 types of agility with a (still forming) definition for each type:

1. Organizational Agility - Organizational Agility is what you get if the other eight types of agility are present. While that statement is true, what is also true is that how we define our organization through mission, vision, values, and  principles statements determines the organization that we get. While Mission and vision are specific to each organization,  values and principles statements can be more universal. For example think the Manifesto for Agile Software Development is applicable in any organization that does software development. The manifesto’s values and principles statements are  not specific to any single organization. So is, we believe, with the values and  principles of an agile organizations—there are some statements that have a universal applicability to them.
2. Leadership Agility - will focus on helping leaders understand the differences between the traditional model and the one required to lead an agile organization in an ambiguous an uncertain world (will be tackled next)
3. Cultural Agility - focuses on the culture of our organization while recognizing current contexts such as the five generations in the work force, the importance of diversity, as well as our values and principles. This supports the ‘who’ aspect of  delivery as well as the environment we want to create for success. We will be adding a tool very soon to our learning portal that focuses on the creating high-performing teams in support of cultural agility.
4. Strategic Agility -focuses on ensuring we have unity in leadership and remain sensitive to emergent understanding as we execute against our strategic goals such that we can reallocate our people and resources as needed. This establishes the why of things. We have already released a companion guide for this one.
5. Value Agility - focuses on prioritizing and incrementally delivering value through individual product deliveries that are in line with an organization’s strategic objectives and key stakeholder needs. This establishes the what and when
6. Delivery Agility - focuses on making the right choices in each part of delivery to support the established priorities for value delivery. This establishes the how, who, and where
7. Business Agility - focuses on improving efficiency and effectiveness in current business operations. This serves to both validate the value that has been delivered and also identifies new opportunities for creating value
8. Client/Customer Agility - focuses on how we can create and maintain a shared understanding on the “why” question throughout delivery. It takes an outside-in view of the organization and why it does things - to satisfy customer needs
9. Learning Agility - focuses on the people in your an organization and adopts the perspective of hiring people who have a growth mindset over a fixed mindset which means hiring to behaviours versus only hiring to skill. Hiring the behaviours which support your values and principles is a leading indicator of how well people will mesh into your culture. As an organization is a reflection of its people, if you want an agile organization t

As The Agility Series is still being written (both literally and figuratively) it remains to be seen whether we will stop at the 9 types or not as we don't know what will emerge from the work ahead. It also remains to be seen what the exact definitions will be for each type - the above is just our starting point.

So what do you think? Are they other types of agility ?

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