Designing sustainably agile and resilient organizations

This article proposes that so powerful are the various forces for change in the business environment, in particular technological advances, that organizations must develop their adaptive capability-or agility-if they are to survive and thrive. An agile organization is one that can intelligently and proactively seize opportunities and react to threats and make timely, effective, sustainable changes that generate competitive advantage and give them some leverage in the marketplace or in their ecosystem. Yet scaling up for agility remains difficult, not least because the quest for agility calls into question organizational paradigms of various kinds-strategy, change management, the nature of leadership, and organizational design. The author provides a practitioner perspective on both the difficulties and the possibilities of developing organizational agility and proposes an adaptive approach to organization design and development that may offer a way forward for organizations wishing to become more agile.