Strategic Agility

Knowledge Center

Description of Strategic Agility. Explanation.

Definition Strategic Agility. Description.

Strategic Agility is a company's ability or capacity to continuously adjust and adapt its strategic direction by identifying and decisively seizing major, game-changing opportunities when they arise. Like other forms of agility, such as operational agility,  portfolio agility  and organizational agility, the underlying idea is being quick on your feet, nimble, responsive, always alert. However in the case of strategic agility the focus is on the need for flexible, fast adaptive strategy formation.

A major challenge with achieving strategic agility is to balance this ability to respond and adapt quickly to changing market conditions with having a relatively stable direction (strategic vision) and key corporate resources.

Typical examples of this type of organizational agility are:

• Rapidly establishing and scaling up a new business (Compare: Business Incubator).
• Aggressively entering a new market (Compare: First-mover Advantage, Time to Market).
• Betting heavily on new technologies.
• Making significant investments in capacity.

Specific organizational capabilities to be strategically agile include (Donald Sull in HBR, February 2009):

• Strong capability to finance big bets.
• Flexible governance structure.
• Long-term perspective by shareholders and executives.

Other organizational capabilities to be a strategically fast company are (Jocelyn R. Davis ad Tom Atkinson in HBR, May 2010):

• Align senior leaders to strategic initiatives.
• Innovation teams capture and communicate lessons learned.
• Develop the ability to explore new technologies rather than improve quality or lower costs.

In their book 'Fast Strategy: How strategic agility will help you stay ahead of the game' (2008), Yvez Doz and Mikko Kosonen formulate 4 Key Enabling Capabilities for Strategic Agility:

• Strategic Sensitivity (seeing and framing opportunities and threats in a new way, in time)
  • Casting a wide net.
  • Multiple levels of analysis.
  • Including understanding of one's creeping and binding "lock ins".
• Collective Commitment (collective decision-making and commitment)
  • Keep the top level meetings focused on strategy.
  • Create culture of holistic accountability instead of silos.
  • Make time for full information sharing and interaction.
  • Treat personal objectives and concerns as critical inputs.
  • Have a FAIR process that allows for needed UNEQUAL resource allocation.
• Resource Fluidity (fast and efficient resource mobilization, redeployment)
  • Some resources are more fluid (money, brand) than others (key people, fixed inputs, special relationships with clients).
  • Challenge is cognitive and political rather than procedural or financial.
  • Generative growth (on the edges) is key.
  • Maximize knowledge sharing with outside parties (Compare: Co-Creation).
  • Experiment.
• Management Depoliticization
  • Most top teams are, for natural reasons, collections of independent individuals with strong opinions rather than inspiring and innovative teams.
  • Teams need to be organized for mutual interdependencies, with incentives to match.
  • Cognitive diversity is a key precondition to high-quality internal dialogs (Compare: Cross-Functional Team)
  • Use young rising leaders as a shadow management team focused on the future.
  • Have an OPEN strategy process.
  • Leaders must learn to ASK and ADAPT rather than to DECIDE and TELL.

Special Interest Group - Strategic Agility Special Interest Group (157 members)

Forum - Strategic Agility   Here you will find interesting and educational discussions.   Is Agility a Long Term Strategy? (1 reactions) Should agility be treated as a long-term strategy or is it <...           Some Principles for Being Agile I recommend to consider the following pricnples for being ag...           Strategic Agility Means Speed of Action (4 reactions) The key to agility is speed, quickly acting on and deliverin...           The Transformative Business Model (Kavadias c.s.) A business model represents a plan or recipe for the success...           What is Strategic Agility? Definition (1 reactions) The ability to continuously adjust and adapt strategic direc...           Agility is Based on Competition and Survival The theory of agility is framed on the concepts of competiti...           Studying the Role of Early Adopters and Early Majority Strategic decision making of agile firms must be based on an...

Best Practices - Strategic Agility Here you will find the most valuable ideas.   Competitive Agility. Importance, Benefits and How To's (51 reactions) In our survey report 'Competitive Agility - Anytime, Anyw...           Developing an Agile Top Management Team (33 reactions) Nowadays any company has to be strategically agile -- able t...           Speed is not all in Strategic Agility (2 reactions) For me strategic agility will be the by-product of know-how ...           Strategic Agility in the Culture (3 reactions) I feel this strategy of agility should be adapted as a cultu...           Awareness of the Impact of Agility (3 reactions) To me the adaptation to agility of organizations starts w...

Expert Tips - Strategic Agility Here you will find high-quality advice from experts.   How to Become a Self-tuning Enterprise: Advanced Experimenters Organizational Agility, Strategic Agility, Real Options, Emergent Strategy...       How to Design Experiments to Support Decision-making on Strategic Innovations Strategic Innovation, Strategic Decision-making, Strategic Experimenting, Experiments, Strategic Testing, Innovation Tes...       Process Steps for Organizational Agility Organizational Agility, Enterprise Agility, Corporate Agility...       Narrative-based Scenario Planning Scenario Planning, Strategic Agility, Anti-Fragility...       Entrepreneurial Strategies in Emerging Markets Strategic Agility, Emergent Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Innovation...

Resources - Strategic Agility Here you will find powerpoint presentations, micro-learning videos and further information sources. Your Organization Needs to Change its Strategy Implementation Method Strategy Execution, Strategic Change, Change Management, Strategy Implementation...   Two Recent Trends in Leadership Leadership Development, Leadership Styles, Coaching, Mentoring, Servant Leadership, Vision, Business Model Innovation...   Organizational Agility and the Role of Information Systems Organizational Agility...   The Essense of Organizational Agility Organizational Agility, Strategic Agility...     News about Strategic Agility         Videos about Strategic Agility         Presentations about Strategic Agility         Books about Strategic Agility         More about Strategic Agility

Compare with: Operational Agility  |  Portfolio Agility  |  Organizational Agility  |  Anti-Fragility (Taleb)  |  Organizational Absorption  |  Agile Absorption  |  Strategic Risk Management  |  Scenario Planning  |  Game Theory  |  Real Options

Return to Management Hub: Change & Organization  |  Decision-making & Valuation  |  Strategy

More on Management  |  Return to Management Dictionary  | 

This ends our Strategic Agility summary and forum.