Now, the second dimension is leadership unity, and we put this in brackets because the unity is almost a misnomer. The unity occurs because the differences within teams, particularly leadership teams, are ironed out in advance. So think of a think of a medical group in a surgery unit or an emergency room. There is unpredictability. Somebody can walk in the door or have an emergency, and they have to diagnose quickly and make quick decisions. Being able to do that and doing it in a responsive way is absolutely central. But in a team like this, you would have distributed knowledge. And we can see this in lots of leadership teams that each person has their area of expertise. In the best cases where there's unity, these leaders understand what each area's expertise is and how it connects. Academics call this transactive memory. We know who knows what, and we know who to go to very, very quickly. Now the truth is there's oftentimes conflicting views. Each area of specialization brings a person to a particular perspective, and those perspectives clash. What the best teams do is they have vigorous debate. They work it through so they know where each person's coming from. And they get that out of the way in front of any kind of unpredictable decision that they have to do. So that when the situation occurs, they can go to work and make the decisions in a very, very speedy way. The next part is that these are highly dynamic situations. So they have to try things, get fast feedback, and learn quickly from one another and bring all that together so they make the best decisions. At the end of the day it's the focus on the patient, focus on the customer. This leads to strong team identity. Each person has their perspective in their expertise. But they're bringing that together so that the real focus is the team working for the patient or, in this case, the customer. Each of those is important for creating that kind of unity in the leadership team. Now the last part of this is resource fluidity. This is having resources in your organization, human resources, financial resources, material resources that are multipurpose and can bend. And what we've seen is that when organizations can have unrelenting focus on their customer as the focal point, they then can have continuous improvement to strengthen the core and prepare for when they're going to need to change. Those two are givens. The third is that the resources themselves can be flexible. This could be that there's a general purpose resource, for example, computer aided design. These systems can be adapted for different uses over time. Even human resources can be flexible. They can learn quickly, or they may have general skills or multiple skills that allows them to be flexible. And the last one is allocation flexibility. There's a fair amount of research that's been done that the best performing firms are the ones that can take resources from one purpose and put them to another, allocating across business units or across functions rapidly. This is a very critical element for having that kind of agility. So if we come back to it, these three elements, organizational learning, creating that company, that organization that it's responsive to the external environment and bringing it inside. Having a leadership team that, while having differences and distributed knowledge, is bringing that together to make a precise decision. And then having resources that are adjustable and reallocated across situations. Those seem to be the keys to agile execution. Now as we review this, a couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, strategy execution is not just sticking to the plan. Things change and the organization needs to be responsive to this. Agility is both responding to and creating change for others more rapidly than competitors. And it's about focusing on the customer and adjusting to bring something to the market. It's very difficult to be agile from a standing start, so each one of these points of learning is about how does the organization continue to move, continue to adapt and change. And at the end of the day, agility is about reconciling opposites. It's not either or. It's about creating stability in the midst of change, creating the present performance with an eye toward the future, and creating efficiency with a capability that drives innovation in the future. All of those work together, and it's not choosing one or the other.
