Business owners have one common goal: make their company lead the back in their industry. But how do you do that when everyone else is trying to get to the top? This is where strategic agility comes in.
Now, more than ever, companies are required to transform and adapt faster in the ever-changing and highly-competitive market conditions. The best way to do that is by marrying strategic agility with your business data and team to help grab opportunities to help your business operate.
By doing this, your business will be able to identify and establish innovative methods that will boost your company’s processes, making you reach your business goals faster and at scale.
How Do I Improve Our Strategic Agility?
There are components and characteristics that you and your team should embrace to improve your business’s strategic agility. These critical components are the following:
Anticipate
One of the biggest ways to get ahead is by looking beyond your business’s immediate state by monitoring or reviewing your customers and what they require in the future.
Sense
The key to efficient strategic agility is being aware of the market conditions and all the changes in your industry. By observing anomalies, you’ll be able to call out patterns and analyse these data to incorporate changes in your processes and strategies.
Respond
Another efficient way to boost your strategic agility is by being responsive to your customers, getting back to them quicker than your competitors. This shows your customers that your business is quick and efficient in making decisions, allowing you to create effective contingency plans as needed. This includes your teams behaving in an aligned manner. We no longer think by department. Instead engage the customer in the most engaging and coherent manner, regardless of what team we’re part of.
Adapt
Lastly, it’s essential to remain flexible and open to change, especially when running your business. There are many ways to improve your business, such as your organisational agility, business structure, and more, which can benefit you and your customers in the long run. This is why we’re so passionate about the OKR Goal Setting Framework. It’s a key enabler of this adaptability.
What Are the Benefits of Strategic Agility?
1. Empowered Workforce
One of the benefits that your business can get from improving your business’ strategic agility is that your employees will be more engaged and empowered. With that, they’ll be able to adapt and take risks. This allows them to understand their purpose in your business and develop their skills, making them more capable team members.
2. Better customer outcomes
When your business applies rapid-iteration and innovative techniques, you’ll get better outcomes for your customer. Doing this will allow you to have greater customer retention and increased referrals / social credit. You’re literally growing your business and solving people’s problems all in one hit.
3. Resilience
One thing 2020 taught us was that every business needs to be ready to adapt. When we’re working with strategic agility, it means we can move quickly with outside events. This includes from a product and feature capability.
A classic example is everyones favourite dating app Tinder There was little innovation in the online dating scene before Tinder. By moving with market trends, the main players could have easily invested in better ways of connecting people. But they didn’t. They also didn’t respond with a revised product offering.
The result? From basic traction in the market to complete domination within just 3 months. THREE MONTHS! Be ready to move.
As a whole, these three benefits create a fantastic blend of enhanced employee engagement and client experience, allowing your business to flourish and adapt in a fast-paced landscape.
The Bottom Line: Improving your strategic agility now will do wonders for your business in the long run
Change can be scary, especially for established businesses. But to grow, you must welcome this change; however, you can lower the blow by improving your strategic agility.
This concept may be complex to many; that’s why it’s best to enhance your skill in this area and learn new knowledge by consulting with the experts to ensure that you’re taking the right steps to effective strategic agility.
How can SKILLFIRE help you?
If you’re thinking of improving your business’s strategic agility, but you’re not sure where to start, SKILLFIRE is here to help.
Our main goal is to help our clients create bolder companies, grow in a competitive marketplace, create clear strategies, set audacious goals with OKR, and forming high-impact teams.
Are you ready for transformative change for your business? Consult with us today!
Where can I find out more?
OKRs are the engine of strategic agility. It enables your team and organisation have clear goals which helps the business to move and adapt quickly.
Explore this topic with our introductory OKR blog – OKR made simple: A step by step guide or checkout our FREE training to get you started on your OKR journey!