Why do organisations fail to achieve business agility?

Recently I was asked to participate in an Interview Series by Noopur Pathak of Innovation Roots, an Agile consultancy based in Bengaluru and several other cities. One of the questions she asked me was why organisations fail to achieve business agility.
Here's an excerpt from my reply.

 Do you want to be agile?

There are many more reasons organisation fail to become agile than there are to succeed, but the first question to ask organisations is what they want to achieve. Is business agility one of those things? Because if you are in a very stable situation and you have very stable business, agility isn’t necessarily on the priority list of what must be achieved.

On the other hand, nearly all organisations – including those in industries we consider most stable, where nothing seems to have changed in decades – face the disruption of new ways of doing business, and innovators entering into their markets. It means everybody must think about the need to change… the need to change fast. Remember: “It’s not the big fish that eat the small ones, it’s the fast that eat the slow!” If your organisation is slow, there is a good chance that your competitors or new entrants into the market will disrupt it and take market share.

So the first question is, “Is agility an aim for the organisation?” If it isn’t, you won’t achieve it. If you realise that you do need to become agile, there are still many reasons why you may fail.

A failure to plan

For example, you need to plan to become more agile (more able to respond rapidly to changing market conditions), and you need to invest in those plans. If you want to encourage innovation, you need to communicate that goal to staff and show how you will reward it. Traditional command and control approaches to managing business, and fixed long-term goals, won’t work, particularly if disruptors are already entering your market and introducing new ways of working more successfully than you are. You have to think about the way the organisation can empowers its staff, and allow them to think differently, to try new things in a safe-to-fail manner. That allows the organisation to discover different ways of working. Agility comes from the chosen strategy of an organisation, and from its leaders’ ability to communicate and encourage staff to implement that strategy.

It's not just IT

When people say the word “Agile”, they are often only thinking about it in the context of software development. That software is important to business agility is not in question. Software has “eaten the world,” it is the driver for business transformation, it is the foundation of digital solutions. The way you create software, and the way you plan, manage and finance software development is crucial if you want to achieve business agility. However, I encourage leadership teams to consider first why they want to achieve business agility, and what it involves in terms of the changes needed in their organisation. Then they can start planning, not only how it will change software development, but also every other area of the business. Each area, just like the software teams, must invest in new ways of doing business, must try multiple things to see what works; must act before knowing if it will work, learning from failures and exploiting successes. Rather than waiting for the fully developed ideas – the big up-front plans with every component costed and all outcomes forecast, the big implementation and the big-bang delivery – smaller steps and more learning on the journey is essential.

These are strategies for moving faster than your competitors and ensuring survival in rapidly moving markets. That’s why business agility is important. It answers the existential question of how we survive in this rapidly changing world, where organisations can quickly discover they are no longer fit for the new competitive landscape.

Back to some of the reasons for failure to achieve business agility:

• Not wanting it
• Wanting, but not planning for it
• Planning, but not investing in it
• Not seeing through the changes
• Not dealing with the negative consequences of innovation in the organisation – not ensuring there is safety in both failed experiments, and successful ones that disrupt existing parts of the business. 

There is no formula

One other thing. People think there is some magic method or strategy or formula that makes organisations agile. There are principles to learn, but there is no formula. Applying those principles in the unique context of your business, your market and your people – and helping your people to innovate – is where business agility comes from.

You can read more of this interview at: innoroo.com/blog/