Part 3: The Complete Guide to Business Agility as a Driver for Innovation

How Agility Enables Innovation??

Agility is an enabler for innovation. The pace of innovation, while not easy to achieve, has become the ultimate competitive advantage as we all need to adapt quickly to evolving environments, the digital age and increasing pressing needs. ?

The reality is that agile thinking is?changing the world?whether we decide to adopt it or not.

Those who succeed at this are ahead of the game.?McKinsey research suggests that agility is a critical factor for organizational success.?The Organizational Health Index?(OHI) assesses various aspects of organizational health, including agility, and examines how these factors correlate with business success.

An increased organizational health is linked with more resilient, adaptive, and high-performing organizations that can better navigate complexity, drive innovation, and achieve strategic goals.?What is even more interesting is that agile organizations are best at balancing both speed and stability, and these are also the companies that rank highest in the organizational health index. ?

The research goes even deeper and identifies a series of management practices that differentiate the most from the least agile companies. ?

As you can see, there’s more to business agility than meets the eye and a few sprints just won’t cut it. ?

However, if we look at the agile principles, there are several ways in which they can enable innovation:

• They bring an?empirical process control?approach, which emphasizes transparency, evaluation, and adaptation. ?
• They?enable experimentation and learning?as teams are encouraged to test hypotheses, validate assumptions, and learn from both successes and failures. This experimental mindset is essential for innovation.
• They are about?adaptive planning processes?that allow teams to adjust their priorities, strategies, and product roadmaps based on emerging opportunities and threats.
• They emphasize?customer-centricity. By focusing on delivering value to customers through continuous delivery and customer feedback loops, you make sure your innovations meet real market demands and solve genuine problems.
• They?encourage?cross-functional collaboration?and self-organizing teams, bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise. ?

That's it for this week. In part four of this series you'll discover three examples of agile organizations, and the tenets of agile organizations.

If you're eager to read all in one go, the full article is available on Viima's blog.