Why is agility so important for businesses today?

Dr. Hans-Joachim Gergs, Senior Consultant and Organizational Developer in Change Management at Audi AG in Ingolstadt and lecturer in Organizational Behavior at the Technical University of Munich and the University of Heidelberg, sheds light on a current demand on corporate management.

Dr. Gergs, why has agility become the top word in corporate management?
Hans-Joachim GergsBecause this describes characteristics that are decisive for the self-assertion of both large and small companies in the fast-paced global market: Open-mindedness for new things; innovative work by cutting off old habits and slaughtering sacred cows in the familiar and conventional; un-bureaucratic action through flexibility in operational processes, ways of acting and reacting. The changes in their action environment triggered by digitalization require companies to open up to completely new rules of the game in terms of offering habits, presentation of products and the design of their business models and to act in accordance with them, in other words, to be agile. And according to the dictionary, this means to be highly mobile, agile and nimble. In an agile company, this is demonstrated by proactive and anticipatory thinking and behaviour in response to the demands and development trends of the market.

Characteristic for an agile company is thus?
Courage and the will to try out new ways of organising the business, internal cooperation and market presence. At the same time, however, beware of tearing everything apart and overturning it all at once, thereby plunging the company into instability. Practical examples show this clearly, hasty "agilization" makes unstable! And not only that, where everything is thrown over at once, the result is disorientation. The whole company starts to lurch. The workforce goes crazy. Agility as a definitely important operational objective is not achieved through hasty and permanently self-corrected change processes, but through a consciously ongoing operational self-renewal. Agility grows out of a corporate culture in which transformation = change is the result of alert internal attention in every respect and in all matters.

What does that mean in practical terms?
A workforce that understands and practices its actions, be it with regard to customer contacts, be it with regard to the processing of tasks, as an ongoing process of knowledge and learning. In other words - who always mentally link all operational activities or steps with the consideration of what could be made simpler, less complicated, smoother, faster, more cost-effective. Basically, it is the constant thinking in terms of suggestions for improvement that contributes to the continuous self-renewal of the company and keeps this process alive. The awake workforce is at the heart of operational agility. This alertness is the operational probe into what is happening. It is the key source of the insights that then become the continuous drivers of operational self-renewal. In other words, a workforce that goes to work every day with this self-image is the mental basis of operational agility.

How do these insights become new offerings? Continuous operational self-renewal is by its very nature a constant beginning through critical alertness, not a new beginning limited in itself. This also applies to offering/product development. In other words, unlike in the past, the agile enterprise no longer spends much time analyzing and asking how to proceed and where best to start to do so. Under today's conditions, which demand quick recognition and reaction, this traditional approach becomes a risky game with time. Opportunities that present themselves only remain opportunities if they can be used from the current situation. And if this process of using opportunities is already used again to find market opportunities to be exploited in the future. Of course, in order not to get carried away in this speedy procedure, monitoring and inspection bodies are needed to draw attention to steps in the wrong direction.

And what would those be?
Feedback loops that are not too long apart and that are firmly built into the development processes. These feedback loops are the analyzing and controlling view on the developing process. If they are to fulfill their task and definitely warn against wrong development steps, this requires fault tolerance from above. Without fault tolerance, no one has the courage to point out discrepancies courageously and without fear of risk. Nothing paralyzes the operational joy of development as much as the worry of possibly making mistakes and the fear of addressing mistakes that have been made or recognized. And nothing releases more explorative innovative operational forces than fault tolerance. A company freezes if errors or mistakes are automatically equated with incompetence. If a company has slogans like "If you don't do anything, you don't do anything wrong" or "First wait and see what is desired from above", "The first one to move has lost!", then this company needs, par-don, a brainwashing.

Does this indirectly mean that excessive pressure and innovative agility are not compatible? That's exactly what I was getting at! The demand for operational agility is not only the answer to the speed and unpredictability of modern markets, but also to the resulting pressure to perform, which must be taken into account. This external pressure to perform automatically creates internal pressure to perform. If this unavoidable pressure is additionally increased by an excessive demanding leadership, which by the way also includes absolute freedom from errors, this is to the detriment of the company's liveliness and innovative spirit. Excessive pressure to perform is, from my practical experience, a very dangerous opponent of operational agility. If a fulfilled more automatically becomes the next even more, this leads to fatigue, unwillingness and further to feelings of being overtaxed. Creativity and the spirit of innovation are highly sensitive to excessive pressure. If the level of inner tension is too high, the person blocks. We must understand the agile company as a company that is restless in a positive sense. If this positive restlessness is to be maintained, then this requires subtle systems thinking, especially in management. And thinking in the system means considering the consequences beforehand.
of courses of action.