What Is Strategic Agility?

Strategy agility is a crucial and powerful tool that enables a firm to stay at the top of its games.

How so?

It is like a tree planted; if it is solid and deep-rooted, no matter how fierce the storm is, it will only temporarily disrupt the tree, but the tree will inevitably return to its original position.

Strategic Agility?

In practical terms, strategic agility refers to an organization’s ability to withstand, process, and quickly react to unusual situations as they maintain poise, focus, and flexibility.

These unusual situations may originate internally or externally. 

How To Build Solid Strategic Agility

Here are ways to build strategic agility for a company:

1. Pay Attention To Diversification 

Many organizations have struggled during the pandemic, and some have failed not because they weren’t agile or innovative but because a single, devastating blow defeated them.

Sometimes, the root of this problem was either insufficient diversification or too much emphasis on efficiency and optimization.

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2. Have A Good Connection In The Organization

Clear, constructive feedback is essential to high-performing teams, regardless of employee generation.

When employees provide feedback in a timely and productive manner, it helps keep employees aligned with organizational progress as a whole.

Fostering connection starts with having a solid vision that your people can believe in and feel good about, and it also requires providing honest performance feedback regularly.

An employee can’t buy into your vision of success if they don’t feel connected to the organization as a whole.

3. Be Flexible

You must be able to adjust your organizational structure or environment to accommodate the evolution of the market in which you operate.

Be flexible and open to redesigning business processes and procedures as new market demands emerge or the business changes.

In a crisis, strategic agility can quickly become an anchor that anchors the organization to a path that is no longer relevant.

Firms build choices into strategic plans drafted and approved over several months and then implemented for three to five years before the cycle repeats.

4. Be Clear

Have a vision of success that your employees and clients can understand, making it much easier to have all employees on the same page over time.

When you have a picture of success rooted in clarity, there is little room for interpretation. Everyone in the organization has an accurate understanding of the company’s ideal trajectory and will therefore make the best decisions day by day and moment by moment to help the organization achieve its goal.

Keep in mind that when communicating the rationale for a destination, you need to establish how it will benefit customers and employees.

Employees do not make immediate or reactive decisions based on the organization’s primary financial goals.

Cultivating strategic agility begins with clarity about what success will look like.

Without a clear picture of victory on the vision board, employees and the organization run the risk of running in several different directions, especially when faced with unexpected changes.

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5. Focus

Employees in charge of the day-to-day delivery of your product or service can quickly lose focus of the bigger picture the organization is moving.

It is essential to help them stay focused on the goal by constantly communicating the organization’s definition of success in several ways and as precisely as possible.

If clarity about success is the starting point for strategic agility, then it’s getting your people focused on the goal that drives how you get there.

6. Act Quickly

Opportunities come and go quickly during a crisis, so organizations must be ready and willing to act soon, even if they sacrifice quality and predictability in the process.

You need to respond to customer needs, either internal or external, faster than your competitors.

Ant possible scenarios and determine if contingency plans are necessary.

7. Always Anticipate

You must shift your focus and begin looking beyond the immediate state of the business.

You must also consistently monitor or review the needs of your internal and external customers and what they might need in the future.

8. Be Alert

You must keep a pulse on market conditions, industry changes, and forces that can affect your business or customer needs.

You must also be observant of trends and anomalies in your workplace, with your customers, and within the industry.

It is essential to call out patterns in data and objectively analyze the information you are receiving.

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9. Be Ready For Change

Change can cause disruption, difficulties, and new or unexpected challenges.

Individuals and leaders who can successfully think and manage change can maximize the benefits and opportunities that arise when change is needed. To be more strategically agile, you must be willing to embrace and support change.

10. Strategic Thinking

You can improve your strategic thinking by thinking outside what you feel is normal and identifying what forces are at play and which might enable or hinder your progress.

Then analyze your plans and strategies with the broader organizational strategy.

After all, thinking means taking a bigger view of your work, being conscientious about what shapes it, and devising ways you can amplify your results. You can improve your strategic skill.

11. Take Calculated Risks

You must take sentiment out of the risk to see things more clearly.

Understand the risk involved.

Look at risk as another calculated go-or-no decision point.

Understand your definition of risk and how it affects your decision-making.

Risk can evoke a lot of emotion, but the risk is also a missed opportunity.

If you want to build your strategic agility, you must incorporate the ability to see risk, calculate risk, and decide what appropriate actions to take about risk. Risks should be managed, not feared.

Conclusion

For a firm to stay relevant, it must develop strategic agility.

It means they must be able to identify potential threats and address them on time before it gets worse.

This process denotes that the top managers communicate freely and quickly as they conclude with practical ideas to preserve the organization’s future.