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How to Develop Strategic Agility in 2020

Updated: April 1, 2022

Today’s business landscape rewards those that can exhibit change and flexibility. In order to keep up with the rapidly changing market conditions, enterprises must improve their strategic agility by integrating data and manpower to find opportunities to improve their operations and processes.

Companies need help innovating in order to be more efficient in their operations at speed and at scale.

Since Strategic Agility also involves planning for the unknown, executive leadership must also build productive flexibility into their strategy. However, it may be challenging to offer flexibility without inviting waste. The key here is to change your mindset.

You must learn how to let go, trust, and empower your team to consistently deliver innovation—fast. To develop strategic agility and make way for innovation, here are some things you can try:

 

Stop believing in perfection

Having an incessant need for perfection is only sabotaging your efforts. Perfection doesn’t exist. Things change, and they do so constantly. The fear of failure tends to force leaders to over-rotate on systems and processes that destroy the flexibility required to create disruptive innovation. You should put a stop to this destructive belief because it’s only holding you and your company back.

 

Provide a measurable goal, but do not follow a specific framework

While clarity is essential for your team to deliver on projects and meet your bottom line, it doesn’t mean that you have to spoon-feed them everything and tell them exactly what they need to do. You hired smart, capable people, and they have the capacity to figure things out on their own. Give them the credit they deserve. Offer them room to create and rise to the level of their genius.

It’s important to communicate a specific, measurable goal, but not in the way that you have to provide a paint-by-number plan or destination. Just give them guidance and direction. This objective measurement already provides all the control you need. It offers a framework where teams can create but still have enough constraints to deliver on the goal established upon without deterring innovation. You should also build checkpoints to coach and adapt.

 

Consider strategy sprints instead of annual planning

In case you haven’t noticed, Agile is all the rage these days. While it’s mostly used in the development, it can also work for strategy. It’s possible to have a sound strategy that is flexible and adaptable without losing focus.

Studies show that annual planning cycles and formal strategic planning don’t always work. It’s because this process takes too long to make decisions, and once they’re made, they’re already irrelevant. Instead, adopt iterative strategy sprints to keep up with the fast-paced business environment.

You don’t want to cause disruptive changes, but you do need to embrace a more strategic agile approach where you use these traditional planning cycles to decide on a direction. You can then conduct planning sprints to tweak closer to real-time to address market dynamics.

 

Conclusion

The ultimate goal of strategic agility is to surpass the competition, anticipate disruption, and discover the hidden genius to thrive in the ever-evolving business environment.

Should you need help in integrating Strategic Agility into your team? Get in touch with our experts in Melbourne at SKILLFIRE now.