Actions

Strategic Agility

Revision as of 17:45, 26 February 2020 by User (talk | contribs)

Definition of Strategic Agility[1]

Strategic Agility is an organization’s ability to think ahead of the market, quickly mobilize itself, adapt to market shifts, fill capability gaps, capture new revenue ahead of the competition, and even create new markets. Strategic agility requires going outside of systems, structures, and processes, and allowing fluid organization of teams to achieve loosely defined missions. It is an innovation playground.

Achieving Strategic Agility[2]


Elements of Strategic Agility[3]

Laying a solid foundation for a strategically agile organization requires three key elements.

  • Clarity: Developing strategic agility starts with getting clear on winning. Without it, people and organizations typically end up going in many different directions, especially when faced with unexpected change. Most leaders can pretty quickly provide the financial objectives. You want to enable everyone in your organization to understand the business of your business and have the ability to make the best possible decisions day to day and moment to moment to get the organization to its destination. And you have to communicate why the destination is the one that it is including how it will benefit customers and employees. Having a vision of winning that people understand makes it easier to get and keep everyone working on the same page throughout the year.
  • Focus: If getting clear on winning represents the starting point for strategic agility, keeping people focused on the goal is the driving force behind getting there. Front-line employees tasked with delivering your product or service day in and day out can easily lose sight of the big picture. You can help them stay focused by constantly communicating your company’s definition of winning in many different ways and with as much specificity as possible. For example:
    • Start every meeting by reviewing the organization’s top three strategic goals and how they will help everyone win.
    • Post visual cues and “brain prompts” throughout the company to remind people of the destination – what it looks like when you’ve arrived at the goal.
    • Make sure individual employees understand how their jobs contribute to the organization achieving the goals.
    • When things change, communicate how the company will still win and why.
    • The more you keep people focused on winning, the better your chances of hoisting the trophy at the end of the game.
  • Connection: Connection starts with having a powerful vision people can believe in and feel good about, and it also requires giving honest, candid performance feedback on a regular basis. Feedback has always been an essential ingredient of high-performing teams. With increasing numbers of Millennials and GenZers entering the workforce, it has become more important than ever. Employees of all generations want feedback, especially when delivered in a timely and constructive manner. However, Millennials and GenZers will demand it – from their managers and their peers. If you don’t give it to them, they will find another workplace that does. Moreover, these younger generations expect to be able to give feedback as well. They have grown up in a social media world that makes it easy to give instant feedback to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Those born since the advent of smart phones don’t know any other way in their social lives, and they expect the same type of communication on the job. This may take some getting used to for leaders who grew up in a work environment where feedback was mostly top-down, one-way. But you need to get good at it if you expect to keep talented young people who buy into your vision of winning.

Today’s rate of change won’t slow down any time soon. Making strategic agility a top priority will allow you to respond to it (rather than react) without losing focus and will keep your organization on track to win.


Enabling Capabilitiies for Strategic Agility[4]

In their book 'Fast Strategy: How strategic agility will help you stay ahead of the game' (2008), Yvez Doz and Mikko Kosonen formulate 4 Key Enabling Capabilities for Strategic Agility:

  • Strategic Sensitivity (seeing and framing opportunities and threats in a new way, in time)
    • Casting a wide net.
    • Multiple levels of analysis.
    • Including understanding of one's creeping and binding "lock ins".
  • Collective Commitment (collective decision-making and commitment)
    • Keep the top level meetings focused on strategy.
    • Create culture of holistic accountability instead of silos.
    • Make time for full information sharing and interaction.
    • Treat personal objectives and concerns as critical inputs.
    • Have a FAIR process that allows for needed UNEQUAL resource allocation.
  • Resource Fluidity (fast and efficient resource mobilization, redeployment)
    • Some resources are more fluid (money, brand) than others (key people, fixed inputs, special relationships with clients).
    • Challenge is cognitive and political rather than procedural or financial.
    • Generative growth (on the edges) is key.
    • Maximize knowledge sharing with outside parties (Compare: Co-Creation).
    • Experiment.
  • Management Depoliticization
    • Most top teams are, for natural reasons, collections of independent individuals with strong opinions rather than inspiring and innovative teams.
    • Teams need to be organized for mutual interdependencies, with incentives to match.
    • Cognitive diversity is a key precondition to high-quality internal dialogs (Compare: Cross-Functional Team)
    • Use young rising leaders as a shadow management team focused on the future.
    • Have an OPEN strategy process.
    • Leaders must learn to ASK and ADAPT rather than to DECIDE and TELL.
  1. What Does Strategic Agility Mean? Future Lab
  2. Achieving Strategic Agility Forbes
  3. Key Elements of Strategic Agility Human Factor
  4. Key Enabling Capabilitiies for Strategic Agility 12Manage