Agility isn’t just a skill necessary for athletes—companies also need it to achieve success!
Agile doesn’t just refer to physical performance anymore; having an agile mindset will get you far in the business world and help you grow your business! This may be a new way of working and has a new mindset different from what you know, but it has quickly become one of the hottest topics today because of its notable advantages.
The Impact of an Agile Approach
Practising strategic agility in your organisation will help you gain one of the major keys to growth and success—perception. It’s no longer enough to quickly respond to sudden changes in market conditions and customer needs. To gain success in this fast-paced world, you need to see what nobody saw coming and capitalising on opportunities as soon as they appear.
Practising strategic agility helps you achieve this—and more! When your company goes agile, you will see the shifts within your company and outside the business environment where you operate. Besides recognising opportunities, you can also quickly identify threats, even preventing them from materialising in the first place.
Once you’ve mastered your strategic agility, you are guaranteed to achieve your objectives and company goals, eventually allowing you to reach the top.
How Strategic Agility Can Help Your Business
Strategic agility is more than just being fast—having an agile mindset and operation can benefit your company in more ways than you think. An agile transformation can:
Gain a Competitive Advantage
No one reaches the top by being constantly one step behind the market. In today’s business world, you need to adapt and innovate at a rapid pace. You can only become number one by being first!
Becoming the first mover or the fastest follower in creating services, products, and offers will give you an advantage in gaining new customers and outperforming your competition.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
An agile mindset works with the intention to provide value to the customer. Aligning on customer value propositions decreases handovers and increases accountability and transparency. Having customer-centric operations, objectives, and key results allows your teams to deliver seamless experiences and makes your company attractive to prospects.
Build Cross-Functional Teams
Agility helps engage employees by empowering them to take more risks and to adapt to changes. Having empowered and engaged employees is essential—but you won’t achieve much when they operate independently and avoid sharing information.
Having an agile approach helps break down the “silo mentality” at work, encouraging your people to collaborate with each other while also fostering creativity and innovative problem-solving. A cross-functional and self-sufficient team will maximise productivity while using much fewer resources—making it beneficial for everyone involved in the process.
Conclusion
Agility is a proven concept that’s here to stay—but you should not apply it blindly. While strategic agility may have many benefits, it does have its own share of drawbacks! As such, you should invest in agile consultancy to help you identify and analyse the best practices to apply and incorporate the right behaviours to develop a strategic agility framework that will help your business.
Let SKILLFIRE help you grow your business! Our innovators, agile coaches, and delivery leads in Australia will work with your development teams to innovate, maximise customer outcomes, and engage your people. When you work with us, you can identify high-impact OKRs that align your teams and enable them to grow. Connect with us to learn more about OKR Quick Start!