Strategic Agility

❝STRATEGIC AGILITY❞ is the ability to IMPROVE PERFORMANCE— not just survive, but thrive— AMID DISRUPTION. 

MICHAEL WADE and others share in last HBR “Special Spring ’22” 𝐒𝐈𝐗 PRINCIPLES to Build Your Company’s Strategic Agility

1️⃣ Prioritize SPEED over perfection 🚅 
Opportunities come and go quickly during a crisis, so organizations need to be ready and WILLING TO ACT QUICKLY, even if they sacrifice quality and predictability in the process.

2️⃣Prioritize FLEXIBILITY over planning ↔️
Strategy is often taught in business schools as a cascade of choices around where to play and how to win. However, in a crisis, a strategic plan can easily become an anchor that locks an organization onto a path that is no longer relevant.

3️⃣Prioritize DIVERSIFICATION and “efficient slack” over optimization. 
Many organizations struggled during the pandemic not because they weren’t nimble or innovative but because they were felled by a single devastating blow. The root of this problem, in many cases, was either a lack of diversification or an overemphasis on efficiency and optimization.

4️⃣Prioritize EMPOWERMENT over hierarchy 🙋🏻
SYSTEMS ARE MOST VULNERABLE AT THEIR WEAKEST POINTS. A hierarchy, for example, is most vulnerable at the top. Empowered teams, by contrast, are inherently robust. Since they’re decentralized, no single strike or crisis can take them all out. 

5️⃣Prioritize LEARNING over blaming 👨🏻‍🔬
It has been well established that organizational cultures that reward risk taking and tolerate failure move more quickly that those that don’t. If people are criticized for failing, they are less likely to take risks; in a crisis, this can be fatal.

6️⃣Prioritize RESOURCE MODULARITY AND MOBILITY over resource lock-in 🩴
Because it is difficult to predict how the future will unfold in a crisis, it is hard to effectively plan the allocation of resources. Thus, it is important to build resources that are MODULAR and/or MOBILE so that they can be reconfigured or moved as needed.