What Is Organisational Agility?

Organisational agility is when a company can quickly adapt to changes in their business environment. Being agile means that an organisation can adjust their strategies effectively to react to shifting markets, new technologies, and competition.

Organisational agility also focuses on creating a more collaborative and innovative work environment and culture. This could mean using new technologies to streamline processes or enabling cross-team collaboration for better project success.

Why Is This Important?

Change and ambiguity are everywhere in business today. You never know what surprises your business might run into. Markets change, customers change, technology is always developing, and the world is full of unexpected events. 

Organisations need to be agile so that they can react and adapt effectively. This will help them thrive, save costs and be able to meet demand.

The 4 Key Elements Of Organisational Agility

When looking at organisational agility, there are four key elements to consider:

• Leadership Agility: A holistic approach to leading and managing change. This involves cross-team collaboration and communication.
• Cultural Agility: To understand, incorporate, and work within different cultural contexts.
• Business Agility: The structural and operational flexibility of a business’s operating model.
• Career Agility: To support flexible career paths without boundaries with an adaptable talent and performance system.
  

How To Implement Agility

Being able to improve or implement agility is rooted in the company culture. Organisations need to facilitate a culture that openly embraces change and is willing to adapt to new scenarios.

Some important strategies for implementing agility include:

• Taking on a mindset focused on growth and learning. This includes regular coaching and training programs, always looking for feedback, and continually finding new ways to learn and grow.
• Quickly acting on opportunities. A major part of agility is recognising opportunities before others, acting on them and introducing changes faster than others.
• Being flexible with resources. Agility recognises the opportunity to change people's roles, shift around teams, and be fluid with resources. This speeds up decision-making processes and makes introducing change an easier task.
• Always leading with core values. Keeping core values as the driving force behind operations will keep organisations moving in the right direction.

Successful Organisations Who Are Working Agile

Many major companies use agile to help them scale and consistently adapt and stay relevant. Some of the best examples of successful Agile organisations: 

• Lego Digital Solutions. Teams at Lego use sprints and Scrums, which are Agile methodologies. Additionally, they have implemented a SAFe framework to improve collaboration and reduce duplicate work. 
• Sony Interactive Entertainment. SIE also implemented a SAFe program to allow for better collaboration between the company’s many engineers. In doing so, they were able to reduce planning time and downtime.
• Barclays Bank. With Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), Barclays implemented people-first agile coaching. This helped them to help improve productivity and streamline processes.
  

Final Thoughts

Agility helps organisations stay ahead of the competition and respond to turbulence and change. As such, all companies should consider taking a more agile approach. It can help improve multiple aspects of an organisation and lead to successful growth and development in the long run.

If your organisation is looking for a tool to manage agility in the ever evolving and changing world, have a look at Falcony | Observe. It enables you to better involve your staff in safety matters, create clarity on non-conformities, prevent and decrease the amount of friction in cross-team communications, and gather actionable data while doing these. 

We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.‍

By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.

More information at falcony.io.