Accelerate or Get Left Behind

The Challenge to Innovate and Grow

Organizations face a challenge to innovate and grow in an exponentially changing environment of disruption and digitization – and to do it quickly. Sitting still is not an option, while running one-time projects to catch up is expensive and fleeting. Leaders can endure and lead in this environment by building lasting organizational agility.

Established business models are being turned upside down by global socio-economic and business trends including the digital revolution and exploding gig economy. Growth and harnessing disruption are on every executive’s mind as new competitors and new technologies shorten business cycles and create new customer demand and new ways of reaching customers.

Large complex organizational structures, embedded processes and cultures of past success exacerbate the challenges by slowing down the rapid innovation or reinvention needed to prosper in this new world. Quite simply, organizations must be able to assess and adjust more quickly if they are to survive.

• 70%
  Of Fortune 1000 companies have ceased to exist in the last 70 years
• 68%
  Of business and HR executives say rapid technological advancement is a significant force impacting their business¹

The Agile Culture Growth Opportunity

Companies with top quartile levels of organizational agility have more than double the three-year average growth rate of the average organization (15%² vs 7%). “Agile” techniques like design-thinking, sprints and the rapid iteration of minimally viable products have shown remarkable results or technology product development.

Leaders have taken notice and are asking how agile principles can be used across many aspects of the organization to accelerate speed to value — more than eight out of ten (84%) HR and executive leaders say that becoming agile is an important business priority.³

Behind the successful deployment of agile techniques are cultural mindsets, decisions and behaviors that focus on customers, collaborative interactions, iterative development and responsiveness to change.⁴ In order to successfully create organization-wide agility, people must work and behave in line with many of these cultural attributes.

Successfully creating an agile culture requires a cultural convergence of:

• Intense empathy for customers: Leaders and employees have the means to listen to, understand, internalize, anticipate, work with and design around customer needs — often before customers have articulated these needs.
• Co-operation to generate the best ideas: Leaders and employees have to break down silos and embrace diverse perspectives – openness, candor and psychological safety are key. But, the balancing act is not to have so many people and ideas that nothing gets decided or accomplished, so you also need…
• Fast and iterative mobilization: Leaders and employees need fast decision-making, fast investments and enablement to work and deliver value as fast as possible. This means adoption of an “80% right/100% fast” mindset to take decisions, start and enable work that allows for adjustments, redirection, rework or even stopping — which is often very difficult for many leaders.
• Openness and readiness to change: Leaders and employees need to be prepared to leave old ways of doing things behind and focus on the end goal and the best way to get there — even if that feels uncomfortable. A shift to greater cultural agility represents a significant change. As we discuss in our research paper Continuous Change Requires New Ways of Thinking, helping leaders and employees become change-ready is key: they need to understand why becoming more agile matters; they need to be emotionally ready to make the change; they need to feel enabled to support the change; and they need to have the intent to embrace becoming more agile.

• 81%
  Of employees in high-performing organizations say their companies are responsive to changing customer needs²
• 2x
  Growth rate for companies with top quartile organizational agility levels²
• 82%
  Of employees in high-performing companies also say their companies are quick to invest in future ideas²

Sprinting Toward Organizational Agility

Creating organizational agility represents a significant culture shift for many companies. And, culture change can take time — but it does not have to be that way. In their book, Sprint⁵, Knapp, Zeratsky and Kowitz of Google Ventures suggest sprints work best in situations where there are high stakes, not enough time, or where you are just plain stuck. If you are reading this, maybe you are experiencing one or more of these and there is no time like the present to get started.