The Case for Organizational Agility

For many, the primary benefit of organizational agility is the ability to solve critical problems quickly and effectively. Being highly agile will indeed help you solve the problems you have today, but the more important point is that building your agility may be the thing that allows you to exist to solve problems tomorrow, no matter what they may be.

At this point, everyone is, or at least should be, aware of how the rapid rate of technological change is affecting our organizations. My children are in school learning the skills they’ll need for jobs that don’t exist yet. Changes in the climate, population growth, and mass migration are having a profound impact on how individuals—and organizations—operate in the world. COVID-19 accelerated the rate of change even further.

(Read the survey here.) Because of this, organizations need to think beyond their most immediate concerns and consider the exponential upward trajectory of change. Building our agility allows us to step into any problem, even the ones we don’t know about yet. Without the ability to sense the need to change or the means to quickly adapt, the odds of being the next Blockbuster (not to beat a dead horse) are higher than ever.

Promoting people-centred design and organizations is at the heart of everything Domain7 does, and in my experience, agile organizations tend to be more humane.

From a consumer perspective, agile practices give companies the ability to iterate their offerings quickly based on actual user feedback, and intentionally make space for teams to ask the humane question, “Does this work for the people who need it?” This simple question can lead to more inclusive, culturally appropriate, or accessible products or experiences on a much shorter timeline.

Agile organizations typically have a more “organic” structure as opposed to a strict hierarchical one (I’ll write more about organizational structures in the next instalment/section/chapter), allowing good ideas and strategic decision making to take place at any level of the organization. This means creativity and power are not reserved only for those at the top, which makes room for employees to bring more of their creative energy into their work. Because of this, employees are typically less constrained by their job titles (which rarely reflect the full scope of any one person’s responsibilities anyway) and empowers them to grow to meet new challenges and develop their own personal agility.