Organization Agility
Strengthening the ability to navigate turbulent markets
Organization agility is the ability to rapidly react to changing customer and market conditions to seize and maintain a competitive advantage. To respond successfully to disruption, leaders must change the way their organizations are structured, and the way they operate and behave. Achieving organization agility will enable a business to take full advantage of disruptive change to rapidly create customer, stakeholder, employee and company value.
Many organizations are trying to become agile, but are not reaping the full benefits. Although 94% of business leaders think that agility and collaboration are critical to their organization’s success, only 6% believe their organizations are highly agile today. What makes it so difficult? These are the key challenges:
Resistance to change
Often there is resistance to change from within the organization. While leaders initiate plans for organization-wide agility, implementation is often cumbersome because of the significant shift in ways of working that it entails.
Unsuitable organizational structures
To transition to a more flexible structure, many organizations try to break away from a fully hierarchical model with silos, to a ‘multi-speed’ model where customer-facing activities are organized into value streams. However, these streams need to be balanced with activities in a stable core. And finding the right balance is complex, especially when value streams cross many business units.
Leadership, mindset, lack of commitment, lack of clear vision
Leaders set the tone for the entire organization. However, on many transformation journeys, leaders continue to employ legacy leadership styles and behaviors that are not consistent with the new mindset and behaviors that the organization is trying to instill. This sends mixed messages to the rest of the organization.
Difficulties in scaling
Independently optimizing different parts of the organization does not work. Equally, trying to “copy and paste” from another organizational transformation does not work, as each journey to achieve agility is unique. And many companies face a shortage of skilled personnel. The result can be a locally-optimized transformation that fails to consider the whole organization.
Technology challenges
Where technology slows them down, it is difficult and frustrating for teams trying to deliver greater value. However, technology can enable teams to achieve results faster and make it easier to get work done.
Our thinking
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