Agility is an Organizational Value
Agile has definitely reached buzzword status. Have you heard any of the following?
- 'Agile is one of our initiatives for this year’
- ‘We plan to implement Agile next quarter’
- ‘Agile is in the budget for this year’
- ‘Yeah – we started Agile’
A large number of companies going in with this mentality will fail, and come out saying things like ‘Agile just doesn’t work in our organization’. Here’s the thing: Agility is about people. It’s a way of thinking; it’s a way of being and acting. It’s not a process. It’s not something you buy and implement. You would not say ‘we are going to implement company culture this year’, and organizational agility falls in the same camp. Agility is an organizational value and philosophy guided by patterns and frameworks.
A lot of this misunderstanding stems from Agile software development. Even within the software community there is confusion. For instance, Agile is not a development methodology – it’s a set of guiding principles. Even the methods that fall under the Agile umbrella such as Scrum can best be described as frameworks to help guide and implement Agile principals.
That being said, Agile software development should also be celebrated. Software development is a realm of extreme uncertainty, which has allowed agile techniques to evolve at much faster rates than other aspects of business. Now that extreme uncertainty has spread well beyond software and we can take advantage of these advances and adopt them more broadly to support organizational agility. To use a software analogy on agility: Agile needs to be part of the organizational operating system – not a program that run within it.
In business, agility is most often described as “the capability of rapidly and efficiently adapting to changes”, but this definition has a very mechanistic feel to me. When I think about true agility I think about a Cheetah for instance. With that frame of reference, I define organizational agility as the capability to react with speed, strength and grace. This makes agility less machine-like and more focused on its true core – people.
