Definition Strategic Agility. Description.
Strategic Agility is a company's ability or capacity to continuously adjust and adapt its strategic direction by identifying and decisively seizing major, game-changing opportunities when they arise. Like other forms of agility, such as operational agility, portfolio agility and organizational agility, the underlying idea is being quick on your feet, nimble, responsive, always alert. However in the case of strategic agility the focus is on the need for flexible, fast adaptive strategy formation.
A major challenge with achieving strategic agility is to balance this ability to respond and adapt quickly to changing market conditions with having a relatively stable direction (strategic vision) and key corporate resources.
Typical examples of this type of organizational agility are:
Specific organizational capabilities to be strategically agile include (Donald Sull in HBR, February 2009):
- Strong capability to finance big bets.
- Flexible governance structure.
- Long-term perspective by shareholders and executives.
Other organizational capabilities to be a strategically fast company are (Jocelyn R. Davis ad Tom Atkinson in HBR, May 2010):
- Align senior leaders to strategic initiatives.
- Innovation teams capture and communicate lessons learned.
- Develop the ability to explore new technologies rather than improve quality or lower costs.
 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.
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Competitive Agility. Importance, Benefits and How To's
"In our survey report 'Competitive Agility - Anytime, Anywhere, on Anything', many contributors see change agility as more important than all other factors.
Why is agility so important?
- Adaptability to change, anytime, anywhere, on anything can be seen as stable and helps build integrity and trust with customers.- Being nimble and adaptable to market requirements creates opportunities for early market entry. Delivering such agility and flexibility internally drives innovation externally.
- Agility is change embracing and develops pre-emptive ability. Agile companies are more likely to initiate change and gain competitive advantage over larger, slower moving corporations.
- Agility allows a company to do business and not spend time reacting to problems and issues. Embracing agility as how we do it around here, rather than striving to maintain the status quo means you are more likely to deliver customer value.
It follows, for many contributors, that agility leads to deeper relationships internally and with customers. This is a key driver for sustained growth.
 Other valuable outcomes are that agility tends to:
- Be unique and hard to duplicate (Editor: compare VRIN)
- Can correct bad practices more quickly.
- Have a better chance of being more profitable than their less responsive competitors
- Be dynamic and can successfully make adjustments to maintain profitability
- More responsive to customers, markets and new opportunities
- As one person said: "For one thing, your competitor has to reckon with a 'moving target' which is always more difficult to compete with!"
- Keeping an eye on what is happening in the market and be ready to change. Change preparedness to turn on a dime is that ability to adapt to and implement change easily.
It follows that agile companies have change processes and change management policies that can be activated with ease.
Becoming agile
Many contributors commented on how to become more agile:
1.Take small steps toward great results
2. Develop the ability to change as a core competency
3. Adapt core competencies to what environmental forces dictate
4. Don’t have frozen protocols...
Please share any additional thoughts about how we can build competitive agility... Thanks..." |
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Agility is Based on Competition and Survival
"The theory of agility is framed on the concepts of competitive survival methods.
While such theories may have been appropriate in the past, serving the winners and keeping the losers in their place, the recent and perpetually continuing financial crisis has tested the validity of such concepts as competition, survival of the fittest and agility.
If we examine agility from the animal kingdom environment, survival of the fittest does not come at the expense of survival of the smartest or the weakest in that environment. The concept of agility therefore needs to be re-evaluated in a visionary way - moving away from survival of the fittest at the expense of smartest and weakest in society." |
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Studying the Role of Early Adopters and Early Majority
"Strategic decision making of agile firms must be based on analysis and information of the industry early adopters and majority.
Moore (2002), in his book, 'Crossing the Chasm', details a Technology Adoption Life Cycle.
- "What the early adopter is buying... is some kind of change agent.. By being the first to implement this change in their industry, the early adopters expect to get a jump on the competition, whether from lower product costs, faster time to market, more complete customer service, or some other comparable business advantage. They expect a radical discontinuity between the old ways and the new... Being the first, they also are prepared to bear with the inevitable bugs and glitches that accompany any innovation just coming to market.
- The important early majority, "wants to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations".. An "enhance[ment].. Of doing business... By the time they adopt it, they want it to work properly, and to integrate appropriately with their existing technology base."" |
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What is Strategic Agility? Definition
"The ability to continuously adjust and adapt strategic direction in core business, as a function of strategic ambitions and changing circumstances, and create not just new product and services, but also new business models and innovative ways to create value for a company." |
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Speed is not all in Strategic Agility
"For me strategic agility will be the by product of know-how and conceived adaption to new situations or environments. Unlike other who believe that speed is all it takes. Speed will be a by product of at least two conditions." |
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Some Principles for Being Agile
"I recommend to consider the following pricnples for being agile:
1. Highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of their requirements.
2. People and management must work together daily throughout the project.
3. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done
4. To create most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a team." |
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Is Agility a Long Term Strategy?
"Should agility be treated as a long-term strategy or is it merely one specific way of creating strategies, adaptively adjusting the goals that have been set in before? As a global company, it might be difficult to meet agility and expecting a result in a quick turn." |
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Strategic Agility in the Culture
"I feel this strategy of agility should be adapted as a culture in the company, where it starts from HR to sales, operation, manufacturing.. Or from workers to CEOs...
This may then be called a true strength of company. Agility is ''openness to new ideas, culture and adaption and master local tastes very quickly...''" |
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Awareness of the Impact of Agility
"To me the adaptation to agility of organizations starts with the awareness of the impact of being agile.
It all started with agile software development in the project environment of a standing organization. However, the standing organization where the primary processes are today got more and more in the way of the required speed. Management isn't able to cope with 2,4 or 6 week sprints of an agile software development:
- The decision making processes and cycles of quarter and (half) year take much longer and don't interact with 2, 4 or 6 weeks.
- Plus what about all those key workers of the primary process who have to be continuously involved in the ongoing agile development of the organization. What will happen to them? Do they stay key-workers, being so much off from their primary work?
This whole thing of being 'agile', to respond accurate and adequate to external (market, stakeholders+) and internal (compliance, techniques+) tends to require a different management & organization." |
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Strategic Agility Means Speed of Action
"The key to agility is speed, quickly acting on and delivering strategies leads to the ability to consider the next strategy, or the new big thing that is going to affect your business. Speed of action is king." |
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Developing an Agile Top Management Team
"Nowadays any company has to be strategically agile -- able to respond and adapt quickly to changing market conditions.
One important but sometimes overlooked aspect of the capabilities and competences a firm should possess to achieve such strategic agility is the need to have a highly competent top management team in developing this agility.
But how do you grow and nurture such an 'agile competence' among the members of the top management team and... for the team as a whole?
I'm looking forward to your ideas and suggestions..." |
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Strategic Agility Special Interest Group
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Compare with: Operational Agility | Portfolio Agility | Organizational Agility | Anti-Fragility (Taleb) | Organizational Absorption | Agile Absorption
| Strategic
Risk Management
| Scenario Planning
| Game Theory |
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Strategic Agility Sponsor
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Special Interest Group Leader
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