Usher in the era of Agility

2021 is the year of agility


Vidhi Kumar
Director - People Capability 11 Jan 2021

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Usher in the era of Agility

2021 is the year of agility

At the outset, a very happy New year to everyone. Never has it felt like such an achievement! The last year felt like a Ninja obstacle course, what with the ongoing pandemic, series of lockdowns and varied protests across the world. No doubt, we have all emerged better, stronger and more grateful on the other side but it’s now time to look ahead at what this new year could bring for us.

2020 has prepared us in a journey towards agility. Our response time and resilience in the face of crisis was tested in so many different ways last year. Almost every business had to think differently. In some situations, it was just important to turn up and engage with employees and customers. Even if the response was not optimised, our last-minute agility demanded that we reacted and adapted. Many of us felt the repercussions spill into our personal lives and interpersonal relationships too. Every day of the year, we were adapting to the situation, to the present. But now it’s about adapting to the future.

No matter what the soothsayers say about 2021, there’s one thing we will all agree upon. This year will belong to the agile. To those who stay strong yet flexible. Those who demonstrate speed in evaluating the circumstances. To those who act with courage but care. To those of us who stay focused on the goal, rather than how we get there.

While Oxford English Dictionary defines Agility as the “ability to move quickly and easily”, being agile is about having a growth mindset. James Highsmith puts it best that being agile includes the ability to:

Agility cannot be built in the absence of information – particularly about the changes in the environment and hence engaging with the situation is a key first step. Decentralised systems and processes allow for faster and greater exploration. Breaking down silos and creating opportunities for frequent ideas sharing and knowledge transfer goes a long way in resolving issues and increasing agility. This helps in building an adaptive leader or a culture that quickly blends in the changes.

Indeed, unless agility is part of the organisation’s deep-rooted culture, it will only take the next crisis to throw the ship off. Since 2000, ‘agile’ has increasingly been used as a management practice in project management and technology implementations. However few organisations took actionable measures to build an agile culture, develop agile leaders within and respond to their customers and changing markets with agility.

2021 is the time to really build our muscle and put agility into action, in all aspects of our lives – personal and professional