What do you consider most important to your company’s future? Probably the most talked-about concept today is digital transformation. Yet digital transformation, including growth through new digital products and services, can’t happen without this one key ingredient:organizational agility. In other words, the ability to react quickly and effectively to what’s happening in the market, while continuing to drive innovation across the whole organization.
No one can predict the future and the seismic shifts that can rapidly arise in their industry. That’s why for the long-term survival of any company, the most important thing is its ability to manage the unexpected.
Because this issue is so important in today’s world, we conducted “Organizational Agility at Scale: The Key to Driving Digital Growth,” a global study of 998 business leaders across a number of industries. The purpose of our study was to identify how companies are (or aren’t) creating new digital products and services, building net new revenue streams from them, and developing business models that underpin them; and then, to understand how those who are seeing the most success leveraged organizational agility to drive their digital growth.
We identified five key behaviors that are crucial to organizational agility, and then grouped survey respondents based on their level of adoption of these behaviors. Leaders (15 percent of respondents) achieved high performance across all five of the behaviors, while Aspirers (30 percent of respondents) achieved high performance in four of them, and Laggards (55 percent) achieved three or fewer of the behaviors.
Here are the five behaviors that are necessary for organizational agility: