WHAT IS YOUR AGILITY SCORE?
“You are free to choose, but you are not free to alter the consequences of your decisions.” ― Ezra Taft Benson.
The brief introduction to this article is based on the acceptance that previous management models, which encompass leadership, organisation, management, and culture, are inappropriate in continuously changing environments. Many studies and solutions have been proposed involving radical organisational changes to modify the enterprise across the elements described.
First, it is worth noting that the mindset and the leadership approaches are required to shift towards new ways of developing a strategic vision, completely different from “classic” systems. The dynamics of resisting and prospering are only based on the company’s ability to perceive, anticipate and act according to the changes.
One of the other critical points is that due to continuous rapid changes created by the external environment, the mindset and, as a consequence of it, the organisational development needs to shift away from paradigms, culture, and leadership of the past.
The dynamics of resisting and prospering are only based on the company’s ability to perceive, anticipate and act accordingly to the changes.
Agility is a word that is linked to the concepts of adaptation to new customers’ needs, reactions to competition, and technology that can support maintaining or creating new competitive advantages.
As previously clarified, the concept of Agility is not AGILE: The misconception between AGILE and Agility is that the former requires a whole transformation, while the latter is to use Agility as a method. The approach for Enterprise agility can support companies to look at what is happening in the external environment and develop dynamic capabilities involving physical and intangible assets.
However, I prefer to drive the dialogue with new prospects and companies which want to test as a complimentary activity our assessments and then decide about Agility yes/Agility no, starting from what are the two critical areas for a company:
Have you the capabilities to grow your business? -
GSF ©-GROWTH Capabilities Self-assessment
and
How capable are you of making your business strategy effective?
BSCA © Business Strategy Implementation Capabilities
Why?
The actions and capabilities for these two assessments resonate immediately familiar with Directors, Executives, and Senior managers as they are related to the business but not directly to Agility. As sales & marketing and strategies agility score will make more sense when presented.
The research
The Companies we have assessed with our Growth and Business strategy dynamic capabilities for Digital Transformation capabilities, RPA capabilities and even for a simple focus on Marketing-Sales and competitive advantages have created some critical data which support the relevance of Understanding and why Bringing Agility in business.
Population:
179 businesses,
· 81% B2B,
· 19% B2C
Size: 88% medium enterprises; 12% Large enterprises
The growth capabilities sit in the ability to enhance resources and think about how to reach new customers.
The Business Strategies capabilities give the level that can sustain in a classic mode, what the company has decided about going to market and if there are the elements to pursue the goals.
The results from 179 companies show that they work anyway to think about how to be more competitive, but with low capabilities to be effective on how things can be done to be successful.
It is also evident that while an increased focus on elements of marketing innovation, segmentation and strategic approach, attention to value and not only price appear. It can also be said that experiences during COVID-19 have brought more awareness and knowledge development of the new growth parameters.
On the other side, business strategy capabilities reveal low identification and knowledge of what competitive advantages are in the new world, what is needed and how to align efforts to make the business strategy effectively applicable internally.
The first actual red flag considering the context of this article, is the level of reactivity: a company can increase or recover revenues and get a higher market share than before (the company is sailing across the ocean with no storms in sight) but without having other navigation instruments and foresee if a storm could come and when the company is likely to be strongly exposed to some disruption in the navigation and its structure.
Where is the Agility Score for Sales- Marketing, and Business Strategy?
The results of growth and business strategy capabilities can be conveyed into a better and more realistic visualisation of the implications on a sales/marketing and strategy to get the two agility elements:
The two main meta-dynamic capabilities for Agility are “sensing” and “responding,”- following the terminology used in business and academic literature.
In TRANSFORAGE TCA Ltd, we have made them more understandable from sales, marketing and business strategy with “Strategic Insight and Trend Detection (SITD) ©”, which brings to light a strategic understanding and active identification of changes or trends involving competitors, customers feedbacks and “Adaptive Evolution and Strategic Overhaul.” (AESO) © as the way of a continual process of adaptation and change (adaptive evolution), as well as significant flexibility in strategy development and implementation when required (strategic shift).
Let’s allocate the elements required to create dynamic capabilities from (ex-sensing) SITD and AESO (ex-responding)
As you can see, the results reveal that.
1. Competitors OVER AVERAGE will win the game (and promising is better but is not yet the final point)
2. If the storm arrives, more effort will be required by human resources and structure in an attempt not to be either disrupted or lose market shares.
3. The structure may require additional resources, also from the financial point of view, to maintain the organisation alive and quickly try to fix structural gaps to sustain BUSINESS CONTINUITY.
Other research results: reasons why Agility could be the only way ahead.
I collected some research results done in 2021-2022 across Europe to identify the perception of the reasons why Agility could be the only way: What can make you think you should have more Agility?
· Increased competition levels
· How to acquire and sustain a competitive position.
· How to Identify and monitor trends.
· Identify and foster what the competitive advantages are.
· How to understand in advance when markets can become saturated
Now I am sure there have been other attempts to detail other aspects (or triggers) for introducing Agility (and not agile) in the companies but starting from the concerns of a larger population, it seems that the issues are pretty similar at a high level to the elements considered for Agility score calculation and coming from another perspective.
What can be concluded?
1. Diverse activities create Agility.
2. Agility considers activities that are part of BAU (Business-As-Usual) but with an eye to a new, continuously changing environment without expecting other types of possible rapid changes or disruptions. Any recommendations that can be made or decisions need to consider the acceptance of Agility as a structural way of setting up and working in a company.
3. Being average cannot be afforded by any business.
4. We analysed the part of Sales & Marketing and Business Strategy. To fully understand what or where Agility can have gaps considering companies’ culture, management styles, Leadership, and Processes, reveal where to act to make Agility a practical competitive advantage at the ENTERPRISE LEVEL.
Note: with the aim to both create awareness about a different way of work, before making decisions, we offer a complementary activity for determining your Agility Sales & marketing/Strategy score.
We increase our progressive research with new data to monitor any possible (hoped) evolution and critical reflection.
