Leadership Agility

Welcome to the second in our series of 3 articles on How to Survive in a VUCA World. This article explores Leadership Agility - an imperative for a VUCA world.

This new VUCA environment is taxing even the most able of leaders who may find their skills growing obsolete as quickly as their organisations change.?Leadership agility and adaptability are now required if organisations are to succeed in this strange new world. ?Leaders must make continuous shifts in people, process, technology, and structure. This requires flexibility and quickness in decision making. Organisations today must shift their business models- and their leadership skills- to become “adaptive’.?Adaptive organisations can adjust and learn better, faster, and more economically than their peers, giving them an “adaptive advantage.”

The term ‘adaptive advantage’ maybe new to business but it’s not new to the military.?There are few who would argue that modern warfare is unpredictable and that VUCA is the reality. However, this does not mean that the military, and in particular the Special Forces who often operate at the height of VUCA, are incapable of action, rather they embrace it.??

The Special Forces train their teams to face VUCA and understand the implications, and not to use it as an excuse. They place even greater importance on planning because of the very uncertain nature of the environment. Their planning is not about creating a perfect critical path, it is about how to react and respond to changes. The Special Forces train their people to expect things to go wrong and then use such scenarios to practice what they should do. They test all their ideas ‘to destruction’ before they implement them because they know that a failure, that could have been foreseen is wholly unacceptable.

The Special Forces are masters at coping with environments that are volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous because they go to great lengths to select and recruit people who have learning agility.?

What is learning agility?

We refer to those individuals who open to change and who thrive on new experiences, as ‘learning agile’. Because demands on us are changing every day, the behaviours that carried us through yesterday are not necessarily those that will help us tomorrow. This means that those individuals who are quick to learn from experience and move forward with new ideas will be better prepared to succeed in tomorrow’s world. This is especially true of business leaders.

Learning agility is made up of a number of key behaviour patterns. They include:

• ?Flexibility – Willingness to try new things;
• Speed – Rapidly grasping new ideas;
• Experimenting – Testing out new ideas;
• Performance Risk Taking – Taking on challenges;
• Interpersonal Risk Taking – Asking others for help;
• Collaborating – Leveraging the skills of others;
• Information Gathering – Increasing our knowledge;
• Feedback Seeking – Asking for feedback;
• Reflecting – Taking time to reflect on our effectiveness.

In a VUCA world individuals who have strong learning agility are better equipped to be successful. They are open to learning from experience. They can quickly recognise better ways to get things accomplished. If we hold on to the way we always do things - stay in our comfort zones - we cease to grow intellectually and behaviourally. The higher up individuals go within an organisation, the more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous the job becomes. To develop the potential for our next role in an organisation, especially a leadership role, we must apply learning agility in our approach to challenges.

This article was brought to you by PRISM - the online behavioural profiling tool - a revolution in understanding human behaviour. In the last article in this series we will look at how to develop learning agility.