The role of organisational agility on sustainable performance

Disruptions have increased organisations mortality rate and some get in panic mode whenever there are distractions in their environments because they did not build dynamic capabilities to adapt quickly and thrive.

Covid- 19 pandemic and economic shocks are clear case studies that demonstrated that organisational agility maturity level of many organisations are relatively low. The current volatile, uncertain and complex business environment requires organisations to be responsive in meeting the expectations of their stakeholders consistently. This environment requires organisations to redesign their business models, reconfigure their teams, acquire future skills, adopt best practices, build a flexible culture and modernise their people management approaches.

However, many organisations have more than 10 years without renewing themselves despite the fact that the fourth industrial revolution brought new ways of doing things and opportunities of renewal. As a result, these organisations are not progressive, incur high operational costs, are unable to retain their customers because of poor services and they have unstable performance. Seventy years ago, Albert Einstein called this insanity because you cannot keep on doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

This week, we discuss how to break organisational rigidity in order to build an agile organisation that consistently attains sustainable excellence performance. Organisational agility is the ability of the business to renew itself, adjust, change rapidly and succeed in a VUCA environment to capture opportunities more quickly than rivals do and neutralize threats.

Organisational agility is a current core competency of high performing organisations and is measured by organisational flexibility in handling disruptions and environmental shifts within a tolerant speed using dynamic capabilities. The proposed dimensions that need to be transformed are organisational structure, processes, governance, culture and employees. Generally, organisational structures are not meant to be static because they have to be altered whenever there is a new strategic plan or strategic direction and they can also be influenced by tactical response to competition such as reconfiguring the existing business model to cut costs and shorten the value chain and surpass the expectation of customers. Furthermore, governance system is an important principle that determines agility in the organisation because it determines what decision have to be made and by who, the speed at which they have to be made in response to sudden opportunities in the market or terminal threats. Tactical plans of developing governance competency is to embrace collective leadership and empower teams and workers by delegating certain level of authority to them.

In the modern competitive world, work is performed better when it is structured around teams and this means organisations should be aware of the current team models like self- directing teams and cross- functional teams that have autonomy to start and finish strategic projects or activities competently without supervision from management. This is how to build collective leadership and inculcate high performance spirit required in creating a resilient organisations. This means it is a bad practice for organisations to be still structuring work on individual employee basis and rewarding individual employees rather than teams. That is how rigid organisations culture, silos, competition and disgruntlement are created leading to employees’ disengagement.

Furthermore, the agility of the organisation is highly influenced by the level of flexibility of its culture. Although culture takes a long time to change, developing cutting edge mental models of teams and management improves their logical ability to handle circumstances quickly and make instant quality decisions. Building an agile culture requires organisations to create an enabling participative environment to address issues on their real time before they change into problems. This is imperative because research specify that management know only five percent of organisational problems, while 15 percent of problems are known by supervisors and the rest 80 percent of problems are known by employees.

Moreover, a culture is not agile if it does not embrace creativity and innovation of workers and instead of strictly enforcing rules and policies all the time some problems and challenges can be better resolved through a creative process. Business processes is one of the dimensions that have to be addressed in building agile organisations. There are readily available operational technology and management systems to automate business processes and improve their agility. However, it is very important to conduct thorough process assessment and deal with processes pertinent issues through process reengineering and realignment.

Organizational agility is very important and its indicators are improved implementation speed, learning speed, level of responsiveness, improved capability to cope with complexities and improved organisation problem solving ability.

The Author is a member of African Excellence Forum, Holds Master of Science Degree in Strategic Management and is a Certified Manager of Quality and Organisational Excellence from America Society for Quality. Six Sigma Greenbelt, ISO 9001: 2015 Certified. Contact: 72211182, Website: www. iqm. co. bw Email: veronmosalakatane@ gmail. com LinkedIn: Veron Mosalakatane