Assessing Organization Agility: Creating Diagnostic Profiles to Guide Transformation

By Christopher G. Worley, Thomas D. Williams and Edward E. Lawler III

In-depth agility evaluation for a more efficient response to change

Assessing Organization Agility provides a clear, concise roadmap to improved implementation of change. Written by two organizational researchers at USC's Center for Effective Organizations and a management consultant with Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company), this book provides the means for assessing an organization's agility and formulating an improvement plan. Beginning with a discussion about the meaning of "agility," the authors enumerate the various contributing factors that affect how quickly an organization responds to change, and the efficiency of the response. An agility survey shows readers how their own organization compares in terms of both perception and implementation, allowing the formulation of an "Agility Profile" that can point out strengths while highlighting areas in need of improvement. Case studies demonstrate the real-world impact of effective agility strategy, and example scenarios illustrate improved responses by each agility "type."

Eighty percent of large-scale organizations fail to meet their objectives, and poor agility is often to blame. Organizations respond to changes in the marketplace, economy, and society by implementing changes in their processes and procedures, but planning and implementing change takes time. During that time, the context of the initial decision frequently evolves, leaving the organization one step behind. Agility is the ability to quickly implement change without sacrificing strategy, and Assessing Organization Agility helps readers to:

• Discover the organizational/operational factors that contribute to agility
• Assess current agility from all perspectives, highlighting areas for improvement
• Implement processes and procedures that streamline change events
• Maintain forward trajectory with adjustments to strategy and implementation

The current pace of technical, competitive, and environmental change is faster than ever before, and response requirements are far more complex and sophisticated. In this turbulent environment, agility can mean the difference between success and stagnation. Assessing Organization Agility asks the questions and provides the answers that lead to better organizational reflex and more effective response.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Dec 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118847053

Book preview

Introduction

If you are like us, you are never stunned to see a book or article on organization change begin with the observation, Research shows that 80 percent of large-scale organization changes fail to meet their objectives. It’s become an annoying cliché.

There is nothing useful or new about hearing that organizations struggle to make effective responses in the face of constant marketplace, economic, and social changes. Organizations make decisions to change what they make and how they make it in a context that reflects what is happening today and a hopeful guess about what might happen tomorrow. However, the process of change planning and implementing takes time, and during that time, the context can change—and usually does.

If the change does not get implemented fast enough, a new context can emerge so quickly that the change becomes irrelevant. In the late 1990s, Toyota and General Motors faced the same context, the same changing demands in the same industry at the same time. They may have had different perspectives, but both firms had access to the same data about what was going on and what the future might hold. One chose to launch the Prius and one chose to purchase the Hummer brand. Both organizations made decisions that promised success, but when fuel prices and attitudes toward climate change shifted, one company looked brilliant and the other company looked foolish.

There is no denying that the current pace of technical, competitive, and environmental change is faster and the types of responses required are far more complex and sophisticated than they ever have been. We live in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Under these conditions, no one should be surprised when organizations that worship at the altar of efficiency and reliability are a little slow in developing a response to significant business and environmental challenges. Nor should anyone be surprised when a context change happens that renders pointless all the hard work on the original response.

An organization’s lack of success in a turbulent environment can be explained in many ways. The two most common explanations are poor, slow, and ineffective change processes and ineffective leadership. Unfortunately, neither of them addresses the real problem.

When the finger-pointing begins over why a change failed, the most common target is how the change was managed. Organization development and change management practices are described as too slow, too concerned with people’s feelings, and ineffective at onboarding, communicating, readying, and pulling people through a transition. The common prescription: Use more efficient organization and culture change processes.

However, it is hardly fair to say that change management processes are ineffective when the environment is changing faster than the organization can adapt. Under VUCA conditions, the conclusion that organization change programs are not effective seems misdirected, premature, or inaccurate. It is not a matter of effort; it is a matter of organization design. Declaring change management ineffective misses the point: the problem is not that the change or its management is misguided, but that we build organizations to be stable.

The second most common proposal for speeding up change—calling for more transformational leaders—also misses the point. It is the same tired call we always hear whenever organizations struggle and the reason for the struggle is unclear. It is an unfitting solution in most cases. It asks good people to sacrifice their lives in service of the impracticable objective of hastening adaptation. All the charismatic and motivational visions, all the big hairy audacious goals, and all the unconscionable incentive compensation plans are not enough to overcome the inertia in most large organizations. Even more frustrating, in the rare case when change is successful, we put the CEO on a magazine cover, glibly proclaim that it was their leadership that led to success, and succumb to the cult of personality. We point to the exception and claim it’s the rule without noting that it was a change in the context that did much of the heavy lifting.

Making change management processes more effective and leaders more transformational is not the key to more effective change. The world is not calling for faster change processes; it’s calling for organizations that can change faster. We don’t need leaders to speed up change in traditional organizations; we need to create organizations that change quickly.

The right approach is to create agile organization designs that can adapt as quickly as their environment changes and are resilient enough to absorb the inevitable ups and downs of the economic cycle. It is the reason organizations like Nike, Campbell’s, Honda, and GlaxoSmithKline have been able to sustain above-average profitability for decades. That is, some organizations do make timely and effective changes that allow them to not only survive but thrive despite various disruptions and environmental jolts along the way. They have been able to face the biggest challenges and not skip a beat.

Organizations that are nimble, adaptable, and agile have the ability to respond quickly to opportunities and threats, not once but repeatedly. It sounds so simple, but it is not. Our research over the past seven years has shown that agility is an advanced organization capability that requires a complex organization design. For organizations that want to become agile, it requires a deep understanding of their existing organization’s strengths and weaknesses and the patience to engage in a significant organization design process.

The purpose of this e-book is to describe the process of assessing an organization’s current