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Overall, businesses in the modern world are becoming increasingly agile. But what exactly is an agile business? Why are so many businesses transitioning to this approach? And what steps can you take to create an agile business of your own?
The Basics of Agility
Agile methodology is an approach that requires you to flexibly adapt to new circumstances. In the world of programming, agile methodology is compared to waterfall methodology; in the waterfall approach, you design everything on paper, then build exactly what you designed.
By contrast, in the agile methodology, you start with a basic framework and gradually tweak it to perfection, incorporating new information and direction as necessary to make a better finished product.
In a business, agility means being able to incorporate new ideas, innovating regularly, actively responding to changes in your competitive landscape or target market, and sometimes pivoting your business entirely.
Why Business Agility Is So Important
Business agility is important for several reasons:
· Faster results. Agility begets faster results. If you want to change your business to appeal to a new market segment, or if you want to launch a new product, you need to incorporate new ideas and approaches as quickly as possible. If your business is stagnant with bureaucracy and inefficiency, it’s going to take you a long time to make any meaningful updates.
· Greater efficiency. Typically, being agile means doing away with processes that don’t work and doubling down on processes that do. Because of this, agile businesses tend to be much more efficient, spending less time, money, and energy to accomplish the same excellent work.
· Adaptability. Being agile means being adaptable. When there’s a new threat, you can work proactively to counteract it. When there’s a new opportunity, you can seize it before your competitors. When there’s a major change in your organization, such as the departure of an important leader, your business can remain flexible enough to handle it.
· Opportunities to learn and grow. Some businesses aren’t agile simply because they have a formula that works and they don’t want to abandon it. But this is a trap; if you stick to the same formula indefinitely, without changing, you’ll never have opportunities to learn and grow.
· Room for new technologies and processes. In line with this, agile businesses always have room for new technologies and processes. They’re constantly incorporating new devices, software, and techniques that make them faster and more adaptive.
· A competitive advantage. For all these reasons and more, being agile represents a massive competitive advantage.
Competitive Pressure and Agility
Businesses are increasingly agile, in part, because their competitors are becoming more agile. If your business operates in an industry where most competing organizations are constantly adapting to new circumstances, you’re going to fall behind unless you follow suit. In this way, business agility is functionally contagious; it becomes almost impossible to thrive in an agile environment without becoming agile yourself.
How to Make Your Business More Agile
So what can you do to make your business more agile and responsive?
· Hire the right people. Your business is only as agile as the people running it. If your leaders, managers, and employees all have fixed mindsets and are unwilling to learn, grow, or change, your business is never going to learn, grow, or change. That’s why improving business agility starts with hiring the right people for your organization.
· Foster an entrepreneurial mindset. Embrace an organizational culture that fosters entrepreneurial mindsets. Every member of your organization should be constantly thinking of new ideas and innovating their ways out of complex problems.
· Decentralize decision making. Don’t feed every decision up the bureaucratic ladder. Instead, decentralize your decision making and allow individual employees to have more autonomy over their positions. This way, you’ll always have a steady stream of new ideas and subtle changes keeping your business fresh and nimble.
· Stay flexible. This should be an obvious point, but make sure your business stays flexible. If someone on your team gets a great idea for a new product, is there room to develop it? If a new tech tool rolls out, would it be easy to implement it into your current technology stack?
· Reassess and redesign. Never get complacent with the way your business currently operates. You should be periodically reassessing your business, from first principles, and redesigning elements that can be substantively improved.
Transforming your business to become more agile isn’t always easy, especially if you’re fighting an uphill battle against traditionalists. But if you want to stay competitive in this increasingly agile landscape, agility is no longer an option. As more businesses convert to be more agile and flexible, stagnant businesses are going to start dying off in greater numbers.