Two Capabilities For Building Organizational Agility

AGILITY HAS BECOME A NECESSITY IN THE BUSINESS WORLD, AND LEADERS MUST PROMOTE THE TRAIT

- David Mallon

A few years ago, agility was considered a competitive advantage — a trait that a company could develop and nurture to get a leg up in its industry and markets. But late last year, when Forbes Insights conducted a survey of 1,000 executives across industries and geographies, 81 percent of them identified organizational agility as the most important characteristic of a successful organization. Today, agility isn’t about raising the competitive stakes; it’s an organizational trait needed to get into the game.

At its core, agility is simply the ability to change direction quickly in response to external conditions. The problem, of course, is that for the past century, people have been building companies that were anything but agile.

How can you make your company more agile? Focus your efforts on developing the two capabilities that define the trait: sense and response.

A SENSE-SATIONAL ABILITY TO ANTICIPATE CHANGE

Agility depends on the ability of managers and workers to understand what is going on in the world around them. They need to be able to see and identify — or even better, anticipate — changes occurring throughout the business ecosystem.

In 2018, we at Deloitte called out one of the biggest changes currently underway — a shift in the nature of the corporation that we’ve labeled the social enterprise. Social enterprises answer to an extended set of stakeholders, not just shareholders. To do this effectively, they must be alert enough to sense (and responsive enough to accommodate) a daunting gamut of stakeholder expectations and demands.