Agility: The Key to Company Growth

Being agile—learning from successes and failures and being able to adapt to rapidly changing conditions—is important for individuals, but it is also exceedingly important for organizations. In times such as these, your organization needs to be able to quickly react, pivot, and move toward new opportunities. But while organizations need to put processes into place to encourage agility, individuals must be encouraged to think creatively, as well. Here is some great advice our experts have gathered on how you can encourage organizational agility at the individual and organizational level.

Encourage resiliency—and don’t run from risk. Failure isn’t the end of the story. Bouncing back from adversity, and how your organization uses difficult situations as a catalyst for change, helps ready people for future challenges. The more your organization can encourage the mindsets and skills of resiliency, the better staffers will be in the future at solving problems, shifting their perspectives, and creating processes that allow everyone to deal with adversity successfully.

Focus on what you can control. There are so many factors out of our control at the moment, but trying to reign those things in is pointless. Find the places where you can make a difference and work on those areas. Encourage creative thinking, innovation, and professional development. Think about the longer term and invest your energy accordingly.

Learn from other fields. There is a lot to learn about organizational agility by looking at the behaviors popular in software development. By using an agility system, individuals learn specific roles and a rhythm that considers reflection and a problem-solving mindset. Learning from start-ups can be helpful, too, as they have adopted a minimally viable product mindset where revisions and updates are part of the process.

Build from a stable foundation. It might seem like a paradox, but the companies that are most agile also tend to have sturdy roots. You need a secure base if you want to encourage people to perform without worry or fear. Here are some tips on creating a stable base from which to launch an agile workforce.