“Something In The Way She Moves……”
We were having a discussion one night about agility. It started with the language of sports or war to develop metaphors for illustrating business parallels. Agility became my pet for that chat and endless ranting to come. I concluded that if it is going to work, it has to be translatable and applicable from the boardroom to the stockroom in an enterprise, and also for it to have a useful life and supporting tools and applications. It does! It may well be the redefining model for our activities comprising strategy through execution with all that is between and attached. When I look back at the times when and where the tools at hand and programs in play fell short, or failed to handle a business issue in trouble, agility was missing. Agility was missing tangibly in the execution because agility was missing in the thought process, planning, vigilance, metrics and business philosophy. You can see the absence of agility, Ying, because you can see the manifestation of rigidity, Yang.
The word agility conjures images. Easy images can come from the world of sports or dance, examples of how unconstrained movement abounds. We can see it in a running back weaving around tacklers or a graceful behind-the-arm pass leading to a soaring slam dunk, or the blinding grace of a triple play. We can see it by watching Ginger Rogers dance, in high heels, moving backwards with Fred Astaire. That’s the easier stuff, the physical, the athletic, the practiced. Yet, there is the thought agility, strategic agility, tactical agility, resource agility and countless invisible dimensions that all come into play within and behind many of the tangible actions.
Last year I was fascinated by the presidential elections. The candidates were a mixed lot, ranging from brilliant to slow, engaging to obnoxious, agile to rigid, all of these things observable. The televised debates and media interviews did much to bring those differences to the public. But for me, the most fascinating observations were in what I saw in the way the candidates’ campaign staffs performed and behaved. The contrasts were eye-popping. The contrasts were so eye-popping that I will argue that in more than one instance, it was the campaign staff’s rigidity that snatched defeat out of the hands of victory. The agile campaign staffs did as much to win the race as the merits of the candidates. The winners had the power of agility. The losers died from rigidity, laughable rigidity, and heart breaking rigidity, managed from the past rather than from the future. If you’ve read Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat,” it becomes clear that the campaign that “got it” leveraged the unbounded capacity that taming and releasing the web behemoth brought to the battle. It conjured images of a well equipped cruise ship turning and racing about with the grace of a Boston Whaler while others were still debating whether to turn into or away from the icebergs they just noticed. Responsiveness to change, targeting issues, speed of deployment, dispersion of messages, connecting with the audience, on and on…
So what is agility? How can we measure it? Can we tell the agile companies from the rigid ones? The data is there. The answer is yes to all of these. It is definable. It is measurable. It is useful and can be applied to our enterprises at any scalable level. It has a big price attached. We may have to let go of some of our long held paradigms about what matters most and how certain types of controls are essential to business success.
Can we think about who we believe are agile? Why so? Lots of military examples abound, business too. What’s the difference between an SUV and a racecar? How are some public services agencies agile, or rigid? Have you ever stayed at an agile hotel? Have you heard an agile speaker? What is an agile mind like?
I expect that we will be having some fun for months to come on this topic. It’s your turn… how fast can you make it?
