Agility is critical for any business looking to thrive in the 21^st. century.

This quality empowers individuals, teams, and companies to innovate, satisfy customers' changing needs and desires, and swiftly adapt to market shifts. Essentially, it is the ability to move quickly and smoothly. Being agile isn't just for tech start-ups. Many types of companies are making the shift. It helps organizations navigate constant change in disruptive and fast-moving markets.

Agility is the ability of an organization to renew, adapt, change rapidly, and succeed in an ambiguous, turbulent, rapidly changing environment, and grow with change. This ability to adapt to today's volatile and complex market can lead to major competitive advantages if you can react appropriately to changes. Organizations that embrace business agility can easily react and respond to market opportunities and threats while remaining customer-centric; and they can adapt to situations much faster than the competition.

Organizational agility revolves around strengthening relationships between managers and direct reports and giving them a working environment to improve collaboration, innovation and growth-conversations enabled by technology A high degree of agility helps organizations react successfully to the emergence of new competition, technology and shifting market conditions. Essentially, if your organization is not nimble, you risk losing relevance. I urge you to not risk getting sidelined by change. Why is agility an important skill for facing workplace change? Because it helps us to respond to change better, be more resilient, see the positives out of every change and learn and grow from every opportunity, even when we fail. In fact, it is when we fail that we can often learn the most and being agile helps us to see those opportunities as learning moments. There are 3 main reasons why and organization should be agile:

1. To Improve Productivity.
2. To Manage Changing Priorities More Effectively.
3. To Increase Innovation.

Agility puts accountability at the forefront and forces the organization (or team) to acknowledge reality and the impact of decision making. It requires you to look at the time, cost, and scope together and understand how changing one affects the others. Accountability also plays a role in the “stop the line” mentality. Well-developed agile leadership at all levels of an organization has four major benefits: Leadership bench strength improves, the ability to lead a company through times of change is enhanced, retention of high potential talent increases, and business performance improves.

Agility makes the organizational processes flexible and the response time of the organization to the critical issues reduces to a great extent. Agile organization is quickly able to take advantage of the opportunities and protect itself against the threat. It is a value that organizations can cultivate by embracing a mindset of curiosity, openness to change and discovery. It is this mindset that allows us to reflect with our customers and discover better ways to solve problems. It is this mindset that will allow us to improve the way we deliver value. You can encourage agility by:

• Setting clear objectives.
• Prioritizing effectively.
• Having clear role responsibilities.
• Empowering teams and individuals.
• Working collaboratively.
• Seeking and acting on feedback.
• Learning from experience.
• Proactively anticipating the evolving needs of potential changes.

Organizational agility is characterized by the flexibility and ease with which an organization restructures and modifies its practices and processes when faced with unprecedented changes in its environment.

Assessing agility helps companies realize its current position. Our organizational agility assessment considers 3 enablers:

1. Market forces – Highlighting Customer Experience.
2. Internal practices and processes – Pointing up Leadership; Strategy and Innovation
3. People management – Strengthening Employee Experience.

Knowing the maturity level of these 3 drivers will help you understand your strengths and opportunities to face the dynamic changes in the environment and to stay competitive, and to understand how to leverage your resources and act proactively to capitalize on these changes.

The organizational agility assessment will help you to recognize your current position, identify gaps, and get ready to thrive, building a sustainable business that will give you the expected results.

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