Why Agility?
We have learned a lot about COVID-19 in the past few months and we are still learning and adapting. Agility is the “key” to adapting quickly and effectively to the new COVID-19 environment – and to maintaining and refining.
Our Leaders, Teams and Organizations must optimize Agility to continue to operate and evolve.
According to McKinsey:
Agility is the ability of an organization to renew itself, adapt, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, turbulent environment.
“The keys to organizational agility”, Dec 1 2015
How can we develop Agility while we are in the middle of a pandemic? It starts with understanding what Agility is made up of, what our strengths are and where we can develop – as individuals, teams and organizations.
The Agile Model ®
Suddenly there are many approaches to Agility in the market … however only a few have been around long enough to test, learn, invest and demonstrate success.
The Agile Model ® was originally developed by Dr. Nick Horney in 2001. It proposes 5 drivers and 15 capabilities that produce agility. The Agile Model® is endorsed by the American Management Association (AMA) and has been recognized as the “best leadership model for our changing world” in the 2008 book Human Resource Transformation.
Agility in individual leaders, teams or organizations is driven by five critical capabilities: Anticipating Change, Generating Confidence, Initiating Action, Liberating Thinking, and Evaluating Results. Each of these must exist within three enterprise domains (people, processes, and technology) in order to create and sustain an agile enterprise.
Agility Consulting and Training
“Focused, Fast and Flexible: Creating Agility Advantage in a VUCA world” was published in 2015 and further describes the 15 sub-capabilities within Anticipating Change, Generating Confidence, Initiating Action, Liberating Thinking, and Evaluating Results.
How is Agility developed? Through:
- Leader and Team Assessments (the spider charts and heat maps are particularly insightful)
- Workshops and related learning
- Coaching
- Consulting
And you can embed these within your transformation to stem delivery risk and improve effectiveness …
Leading out of COVID with Agility
Transformation was challenging before COVID-19. Now, with so many key resources working remotely, and with the additional focus on innovating to secure the new normal, it is that much harder.
Last week Dr. Nick Horney, Cindy Smith and myself presented an introduction to The Agile Model ® and programs and how to improve transformation success. We also covered a new assessment designed for COVID, the “After Action Agility Program”.
The full webinar is available here on the Strategic Agility Institute’s website or on YouTube here and the excerpt addressing transformation effectiveness is below:
Watch the transformation effectiveness excerpt (~10min)
Next Steps
Want to know more about incorporating Agility into your Transformation or your organization?
Drop me an email at gailseverini@symphini.com and we’ll figure it out.
Change Whisperer by www.gailseverini.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.