How organizational agility will become the cornerstone to thrive in VUCA environments?

What is organizational agility?

Aaron De Smet, a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Co, defines Organizational agility as the ability of an organization to renew itself, adapt, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, turbulent environment.

Without a doubt, it sounds like all the organizations need agility in environments like the one that we’re living right now, but how can we achieve organizational agility excellence?

How can I start leading with organizational agility?

The study “Organizational Agility at Scale: The Key to Driving Digital Growth” by Workday identifies five behaviors that are required to achieve organizational agility:

*Continuous planning: instead of creating a plan and following it with no questioning, the mindset of planning an action that should be revisable all the time will allow us to be able to adapt to the uncertain. Recurrent daily meetings are a great way to move to a continuous planning culture.

*Fluid structures and processes:organizations that are not afraid of constant change and can move from one state to another, breaking down silos and making knowledge a transversal resource are optimal to cultivate organizational agility. Certain creative dynamics, such as the “6 thinking hats” from Edward De Bono can help to break silos-oriented mental models.

*Building the future workforce:focus on creating a career plan and a career path to your organization. Ensure that everybody in your team feels like they have possibilities to grow. Apps like Nodabl definitely aid to manage the growth of the people you’re surrounded by.

*Informed and empowered decision making: ensure that everybody in the organization can access all the data that they may need to make decisions. Managing the intelligence and information of your organization from an information system such as Asana can help everybody to have access to what they may need in real-time. 

*Measurement and guidance:internalize the importance of developing metrics and key results that allow your organization to measure success and pivot faster if you’re not achieving it. Building and embracing an OKR-based culture is a good idea if you decide to bet for this point.

These ideas will help you in implementing organizational agility culture in your context. Want to take the next step? Just write to us.

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