Making Agility Real
By Tricia Stewart, Chief People Officer, FibroGen and Jonathan Becker, Principal, This Team Works
Like a lot of good ideas, when agility made it to the corporate world, it followed a familiar arc in some organizations:
Excitement
Wide dissemination and use
Overuse and dilution
Skepticism
We all know the world is not getting less dynamic; agility is getting only more important. The way to help agility stay salient and embraced by key leaders is to give it more clarity and finer distinctions. Make it mean more. Indeed, agility has multiple manifestations:
Awareness agility: Maintaining self and situational awareness, with the ability to move and shift energy and attention. Not letting one’s focus get stuck.
Commitment agility: Willingness to commit then figure it out, rather than waiting and seeing.
Communication agility: Sharing and hearing information with trust and transparency, with an eye toward speed, completeness, and deeper meaning – and even communicating more than might be comfortable.
Decision agility: Making important choices with an optimal blend of quality, inclusion, and speed – and balancing thoughtfully between staying the course and reacting to new information.
Ego agility: Being willing to move on from something that is not working, or can be improved, whatever pride or sunk costs might be at play. Being willing to jump into any role that helps the organization.
Emotional agility: Embracing emotions and also moving on from the ones that are not helpful.
Strategic agility: Making robust plans that work under different possible future scenarios and adjusting those plans as circumstances change.
Trust agility: Finding ways to build and improve trust quickly. Not being stuck in a view of someone.
A concept like agility has real value when it helps us predict, diagnose, and improve organizational performance. By treating it not as one far-reaching concept, but as a set of granular and hence more helpful distinctions, organizations can make the most of this quite valuable idea.