The example of Nokia, and Apple and maybe even Google, really represents how important agility can be in an organization, in an industry they execute strategy. And we know that organizations sometimes find themselves sort of flat-footed and unable to respond as quickly as they need to, to be successful. What's behind that? One of the first things that makes agility difficult is the amount of uncertainty and change in the environment. In addition to that the ambiguity, sometimes there's no shortage of information but it's hard to interpret what that information means and that makes it ambiguous. Between uncertainty and ambiguity, this makes it difficult in some cases leaders and managers even detect what kind of change is necessary. So what makes it difficult actually makes it more important so if we can predict everything agility wouldn't be so hard. But if you can predict everything, it wouldn't be so necessary. The other aspect is inertia or momentum, they sound similar, but they're actually different kinds of things. Inertia is when things are sitting stable and not moving. In any organization that becomes complacent or resting on its laurels maybe faces this inertia and they become flat-footed and unable to respond to market changes. But the opposite can happen. Organizations can be sprinting towards the execution of their strategy, building momentum, really focused on what they're trying to do. And if the market changes, it's hard for them to turn. So either being flat-footed or sprinting, inertia or momentum makes it difficult for organizations to respond. So creating that center, creating that sense of agility as a responsiveness is critical. The third thing we often find is that leaders themselves are not always adaptable, and there are two extremes here as well. Sometimes the leaders are too slow to see what's going on. Too slow to respond and therefore the opportunities past by. But the opposite can be just as disturbing to an organization. Is that the leaders adapt to quickly and they loose focus and they're moving from opportunity to opportunity. Or issue and the rest of the organization can't keep up. So both of those extremes can be difficult in terms of finding the agility to adapt in an industry environment. The final one is the culture of the organization. This can lead to risk aversion. One of the things that we've seen is that companies that focus on execution can sometimes fall into what we call the execution trap, very focused on a performance, but if that performance starts to dip, sometimes managers tighten the bolts, there's more scrutiny, more observation. And they actually, in order to improve their performance are actually creating a situation where they're unresponsive. So each of these things can lead to organizations finding it difficult to adjust and to adapt in it's environment.. What we found is there's three keys to agile execution. And we want to go deeper into each of these and understand them more. Organizational learning, leadership unity and resource fluidity. Now, organizational learning. There's a wonderful model by Dorothy Leonard Barton that really looks at the reconciliation of opposites as necessary for the organization to respond and learn in its environment. This is reconciling external issues and internal issues. Looking at the present, but also investing in the future. And the four key drivers of this are being open to the outside, experimenting continuously, sharing information throughout the organization and having managers in the middle of the organization that own and solve problems. Let's take each one. So openness to the outside, this is building networks for gathering intelligent, or exchanging information, this can be where an organization is exploring new areas outside their competencies. But it can also be that they're exploiting their competencies, building on those strengths to move into new markets or to move into new areas. But the idea is to constantly be engaging and building networks externally with partners, with suppliers, with customers and other stakeholders. The second requirement is experimenting continuously. If someone's not going to disrupt you, disrupt yourself. Try new things. Don't rest with what's working, but think about what might be the next thing. And the truth is with lots of experiments you might make mistakes that has to be okay. The old adage fail fast you'll learn from it. And also fail small. Don't make big bets. Try new things and experiment continuously. The third is share information internally. Whatever you've been trying to do, whatever you're learning, whatever the cost of that, incur it once and then share the benefits throughout the organization. So investing in the capacity to have a real time collaboration. Developing the information tools. To do that is so necessary. The knowledge management systems that sit behind intelligent organizations is part of this. But after the fact, having disciplined reflections after action reviews so that we're constantly learning from what we've been doing together. Successes and failures, sharing that knowledge so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. The fourth is owning and solving problems where you live. These are problems that have to be data driven that are focused on the current performance of the organization but it's not dictated from somebody up on high. This is manager's leading from the middle. Having distributive leaders throughout the organization who take the responsibility to solve the problems and have the ownership and empowerment to do that. So these four elements are all part of creating that learning organization and you can imagine lots of examples of companies who are doing this in scientific fields and knowledge based industries, etc. These are some of the best practices for this.
