What happens when organizations don’t have the capacity to change? Or, even worse, when organizations don’t know that change needs to happen in the first place?
They become brittle and eventually, they break.
The antidote to this inflexibility is agility, my preferred definition of which goes like this: “the ability to move quickly, decisively, and effectively in anticipating, sensing, initiating, and taking advantage of change.” And learning agility isn’t just a pie-in-the-sky idea: it’s a survival skill.
I’ve studied organizational agility academically, and I’ve been involved in implementing its principles here at Domain7 and on behalf of other organizations in some capacity for over two decades. But my interest in agility started even before that, when I was an undergraduate student in biology.