The ability to react quickly and at low cost.  To have purpose of movement, gracefully executed with economy of effort.

It’s unlikely any business would argue against wanting more of that.
Yet this agility is not always easily come by.  Lots of areas might feel like they need attention.  Where to start ?

The Business Agility Institute identifies a range of capabilities and behaviours which help an organisation understand its current state and build inititiatives for improving agility where needed.

In this way, the aspiration of ‘Business Agility’ breaks down into practical small changes.  These can be run as experiments, observed and measured for their impact and effectiveness.

Here’s an example

One of the 5 domain areas the BAI identifies is called ‘Value Based Delivery’

Within that, one of the 4 named ‘capabilities’ looks at the way the work flows through the system – basically, who does what and how they do it from one end to the the other.   The BAI calls this “Unleash Workflow Creatively”

(The other 4 capabilities here cover Prioritisation, Faster Value Delivery and Emergent Opportunities)

Within that ‘Unleash Workflow’ capability, behaviours for enhancing it include:

– how well impediments are removed (removed, not worked around)

– learning how to safely limit the amount of work in progress to make everything flow faster

– building processes around people

In this way, manageable target areas can be identified and worked on for improvement.