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Discussion Reply on the below thread: 275 words and 2 peer reviewed articles from (2017-2021):

It can be argued that never has there been a time in our history that necessitated an organization to create an agile business model like in today’s business world. With the expansion of global markets and even pandemic influences, an organization must remain agile to survive. Rebar (2019) describes an agile organization as one that is able to move quickly to accelerate growth and has strategic and organizational goals that align with agility. Rebar notes that organizations must be able to adapt rapidly, learn from failures, and move on. In this discussion, the concept of an agile organization, agile leadership, the pandemic influence on agility, and future research opportunities with be detailed.

Realistically, organizations must build agility into their business models, so they are not reactionary, but proactive in today’s marketplace. Joiner (2019) writes, “Organizational agility has become an imperative for companies around the globe, who want to be competitive and add value in today’s business environment of hyper change and complexity”. Joiner tells us that VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) is an acronym which leaders must understand and know these factors influencing their business is not going away. Leaders who build organizations with these factors in mind, will be able to compete.

Joiner (2019) writes it is not enough to just have an agile organization, an agile leader is needed to implement the organizational plan. Joiner describes an agile leader as one whose behavior demonstrates their ability to have pivotal conversations, lead teams, and lead organizational change. Denning (2018b) writes that senior executives, tasked with becoming agile, need the ability to deliver customer focused innovation and digital sophistication. Denning found leaders with an agile mindset allows them to be nimble and flexible, but also focus on four elements of an agile mindset: 1) delighting customers, 2) descaling work, 3) enterprise-wide agility, and 4) nurturing culture. By consensus, the agile mindset, comprised of these four elements, was developed by members of the SD Learning Consortium (SDLC), whose members include Barclays, Microsoft, and Vistaprint, to name a few. SDLC website describes them as a nonprofit organization whose members are committed to develop advanced agile goals, principles and practices and disseminate them globally.

Even with extensive planning and modeling, most would agree the majority of organizations could not have prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. The lockdowns caused by this pandemic saw a reinvention of the way most organizations operated as most were forced to either shut down or have employees work from home. van Looy (2021) wrote that this pandemic drastically changed the way organizations and employees perceived working. Organizations had to adopt policies and technology to allow employees to work from home and yet, provide a high level of customer services to clients. van Looy notes that most employees resist such drastic changes, but the nature of the pandemic reduced the challenges of the changes and possible failures.

The Covid-19 pandemic also forced regulators of health care, Covid-19 treatments, and develops of vaccines to become more agile to allow innovations to be approved for use in this pandemic. Bolislis et al.(2021) writes about the agility in which regulators engaged to make and adopt crucial steps to raise awareness and provide guidance to stakeholders on how to navigate the Covid-19 pandemic. Regulators adopted processes to streamline clinical trials, ensure continuous availability of medical supplies, and engaged in global collaboration to reconcile worldwide clinical trials for a vaccine. The ability for regulators to become agile allowed the medical and health community to react expeditiously to help the public in dealing with this pandemic. Through this process, Bolislis et al., notes that regulators found practices that can survive post pandemic to ensure agility for future events, should they be necessary.

With the constantly changing global market and economy, and the possibility of future pandemics, much research is needed for continuous improvement for organizations to create a truly agile organization with effective agile management. From the Covid-19 experience, Bolislis et al. (2021) recommends studying the successes of the regulators for future applications. These include identifying specific regulator successes and lessons learned, accelerating product development and innovation, addressing manufacturing bottlenecks, and increasing international cooperation.

The SDLC recognizes that the agile process is ongoing, and they have no definitive answers to define agility. Their work will continue to make the workplace better for employees and organizations, disseminating any new findings or processes as they are developed. Joiner (2019) suggests research on assessments, coaching, and training that focuses on leadership agility. Gomes et al. (2020) adds that future research should focus on the process and components that includes agile logic (openness and nonconformity), agile learning (search, interpretation, and sense-making) and agile actions (responsiveness, flexibility, commitment and co-ordination).

The definition of organizational agility seems to be constant. The need to be agile in today’s marketplace is the consensus among large organizational members of the SDLC. The way to move forward in developing an agile organizational mindset and management will be a continuous process improvement. The agility to adopt these new processes is key to surviving our evolving, global marketplace.

References

Bolislis, W. R., de Lucia, M. L., Dolz, F., Mo, R., Nagaoka, M., Rodriguez, H., Woon, M. L., Yu, W., & Kühler, T. C. (2021). Regulatory Agilities in the Time of COVID-19: Overview, Trends, and Opportunities. Clinical Therapeutics, 43(1), 124–139. doi.org/10.1016/j.clinthera.2020.11.015

Denning, S. (2018b). How major corporations are making sense of Agile. Strategy & Leadership, 46(1), 3–9. doi.org/10.1108/sl-11-2017-0104

Gomes, E., Sousa, C. M., & Vendrell-Herrero, F. (2020). International marketing agility: conceptualization and research agenda. International Marketing Review, 37(2), 261–272. doi.org/10.1108/imr-07-2019-0171

Joiner, B. (2019). Leadership Agility for Organizational Agility. Journal of Creating Value, 5(2), 139–149. doi.org/10.1177/2394964319868321

Rebar, J. (2019, May 3). It’s the Same, Only Different. SIOP. https://www.siop.org/Research-Publications/Items-of-Interest/ArtMID/19366/ArticleID/1639/It%E2%80%99s-the-Same-Only-Different

van Looy, A. (2021). How the COVID ‐19 pandemic can stimulate more radical business process improvements: Using the metaphor of a tree. Knowledge and Process Management, 28(2), 107–116. doi.org/10.1002/kpm.1659