Strategic Agility - The core survival principle

Strategic Agility represents an emerging management paradigm recognized by scholars and industry analysts as a critical approach adopted by modern organizations to achieve competitive differentiation and superior performance in volatile and uncertain market conditions.

Back in 2001 seventeen independent-minded software practitioners gathered together to solve a specific problem. The problem was that companies were so focused on excessively planning and documenting their software development cycles that they lost sight of what really mattered—pleasing their customers. Their focus was purely on software development and they did not know back then that this problem expands to many organizations across many industries. Everyone seems to favour the "customer-centric" terminology but not all understand that customer centricity is the strategic approach of doing business that puts the customer at the core of every decision they make.

Agility is a necessity and a core organizational principle for surviving and thriving. Geopolitical rapid developments in combination with the revolutionization of fundamental market principles via AI can be considered either as threats or opportunities. Leaders are accountable to steer organizations towards the opportunities path by:

• Enabling business agility

• Fostering a team of teams culture

• Setting up cross-functional foundations

• Incorporating technology and AI at all levels

• Installing sustainable and scaling operating models

• Continuously evaluating and assessing the risks

• Developing their products and services WITH their customers

• Ensuring they depend on teams and not on individuals

• Promoting a culture of product growth based on diversification

Organizations need to become idea factories and diversify their products and services while their growth strategy focuses on entering in new markets and industries. By definition, product diversification is the strategy employed by a company to increase profitability and achieve higher sales volume from new products. I am also adding by entering into new markets and industries. Global scale products are good but global scale localised products are even better.

As a leader you need to challenge the "status quo" non-stop and create new paths forward. The current state of today becomes obsolete tomorrow hence your organization is at risk losing competition, shrinking your margins, losing talent to your competitors and eventually operating below standards. The market is very strict and punishes stagnation. Nowadays market stagnation is not as we knew it, is different and things will change faster than we expect in the next couple of years.

As a leader, you need to answer the following 4 Key Questions :

1. What amount of change can your organization absorb?

2. How fast can you respond to change?

3. How well do you understand the structures involved?

4. Do you have enough data to take the right decisions?

Things develop and change rapidly, are becoming difficult to predict, the market becomes more complex and unknown paths increase. To be able to cope with these challenges, the "front-end" of your organization needs to focus on enabling the strategic agility and the "back-end" to focus on developing strong and solid foundations to execute and support it. Some important ingredients of a successful strategic agility recipe is the decentralisation of decision making, the development of domains of expertise, business intelligence and technology. To achieve strategic agility you need consistency, discipline and solid decision making.

Without consistent training an athlete to be agile, their risk of injury is much greater. Training to become more agile consistently teaches the body to move correctly when shifting direction at a fast pace while under pressure. There is no difference when it comes to organizations. Numerous signs are shown that could potentially "injure" your organization such as:

1. Negative profit margins trend

2. Low retention rates

3. Negative Life Time Value trend

4. Negative Conversion Rate trend

5. Non-functioning feedback culture

6. Poorly defined roles and responsibilities

7. Low innovation initiatives due to complex processes and processes overhead

8. Medium to Low Employee Net Promoter Score

9. Functional silos restricting collaboration

10. Lack of Enterprise Organizational Backlog and prioritisation

Every organization is unique, like everyone else. Having said that, note that blueprint solutions and approaches will never "heal" the above-mentioned symptoms. It needs effort and proper investment of time to identify the root cause problem and resolve it once and for all. It requires to slow down things, hit the pause of any expansion plan, re-establish your foundations and then proceed. Otherwise, it may look fine at the beginning, but as you progress, the 10 symptoms will double and triple and before you know it, a huge organizational debt will put you out of the competition.

Konstantinos Kareklas