In today’s business arena, chaos and disorder are the norm: geopolitical situations are constantly changing, the climate crisis is sounding alarm bells, new technologies are emerging like mushrooms after rain, and customer demands are also changing rapidly. In this chaos, if an organization wants to stand firm, it must have sufficient agility to quickly carry out innovation and efficiently deliver projects. But then again, what would it look like if organizational agility could be properly implemented and deeply integrated into the company’s culture?

Regarding organizational agility, the views in the business community vary greatly. A 2022 survey by PwC showed that more than half of the leaders are well aware of the importance of flexibility and resilience. However, only one-third of the executives believe that their own organizations perform well in terms of agility. To ride the wave in this business transformation, company management must embrace new work models and empower teams to cope with changes.

Next, let’s delve into the various issues that arise in this process and how company, team, and project leaders can break through the numerous challenges and fully unleash the powerful force of agility.

I. Decoding Organizational Agility: Why Is It So Highly Regarded?

An agile organization is like a “chameleon” on the business battlefield, capable of acutely and quickly adapting to unpredictable internal and external changes. These changes may impact or disrupt the normal operations of the enterprise in various forms. Business leaders often ponder: How can we be more customer-centric? How can we meet the market’s eager demand for innovative products? And how can we speed up product delivery? These questions are like puzzles in the fog, full of uncertainties, and the key to successful solutions lies in the ability to effectively address these challenges.

Traditional static organizational structures and management methods are like cumbersome old machines, often unable to quickly adjust processes and outputs. In sharp contrast, an agile organization is like a nimble dancer, able to quickly respond to changes and continue to thrive in the wave of change. Such organizations not only embrace change with enthusiasm but also transform agility into a competitive advantage by continuously improving overall performance. From the leadership style, we can catch a glimpse of organizational agility. They continuously iterate their capabilities and culture, reshape and reimagine the business, and thus enhance their resilience in the ever-changing environment.

For some people, “agility” may just be a trendy buzzword, and they don’t really understand its inner essence. In fact, only when agility is clearly defined and translated into practical actions can it exert its great power. The benefits brought by organizational agility are clearly visible: higher customer satisfaction, a people-oriented operation model, faster execution and delivery speed, and better product quality.

II. Obstacles on the Path to Agility: Why Do Some Organizations Struggle?

In the journey of pursuing an agile response to market and business changes, we have discovered several key hindering factors.

(I) “Intestinal Obstruction” in Team Collaboration

The lack of efficient coordination and collaboration between teams or departments is like the various parts of a machine failing to work in harmony, resulting in the overall operation not running smoothly. There are various reasons for this situation: the processes are cumbersome and lack standardization, each team is like an isolated island, lacking cross-departmental support, and the execution quality is also unsatisfactory. In addition, different teams act independently, and their work methods lack consistency, which has given rise to the phenomenon of “shadow teams,” that is, some informal small groups act on their own without formal authorization. These factors are intertwined, seriously hindering the organization’s rapid and high-quality execution. Employees often feel frustrated because of this, and their enthusiasm and participation are greatly reduced, ultimately leading to a decline in productivity and inefficiency.

(II) “Muscle Weakness” in Change Management

Successful change management is not just about making employees passively adapt to new changes. It also requires providing them with the necessary support to help them succeed in the new environment. However, many organizations are short of change management capabilities. Those organizations that integrate change management capabilities into their organizational structures can cope with these challenges more calmly.

It can be seen that if an enterprise wants to achieve organizational agility, it needs to establish appropriate cultural benchmarks and basic requirements, including promoting cross-departmental cooperation, simplifying and standardizing processes, improving execution quality, and effectively managing organizational change. These benchmarks and requirements will endow the organization with greater flexibility and adaptability, enabling it to better cope with the rapid changes in the market and business.

III. The Dilemma of Missing Goals: Why Is Execution So Difficult Without a Common Vision and Goals?

Creating a common vision and goals is the key engine to drive any form of agile organization forward. However, it often happens that at the top level of the organization, and even within different functional departments and teams, the vision and goals are either vague or not clearly set at all. If these visions and goals are not effectively communicated, understood, and recognized, chaos will follow. This uncertainty will make employees feel like sailing in the fog, difficult to clarify their work scope, and unclear about the connection between their daily work and the high-level strategic goals. It is conceivable how difficult it is to execute a goal that one doesn’t even understand well.

Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that everyone understands and认同 the common vision. This can make employees invest in their work from the bottom of their hearts. This emotional investment will become their motivation to work actively every day, stimulate innovative thinking, and promote continuous improvement.

An effective approach is for leaders to involve the employees who actually perform the work in the definition and coordination of the common vision and goals. Even if they are not involved from the very beginning, participating in formulating the organization’s strategy and goals and adjusting them according to the specific situation and needs of their own teams can make employees truly feel that they are closely connected with the organization’s goals and enhance their sense of belonging.

This approach can not only promote the implementation of agile practices at the team level. When some teams show such positive behaviors and carry out their work in a more efficient way, other teams and employees will also be infected and follow suit. This change from the inside out is the foundation for building and maintaining organizational agility.

IV. The Way to Introduce Agility: How Can Projects and Teams Take the First Step?

Even if the entire organization has not fully transitioned to the agile model, there are still ways to gradually cultivate agile habits and behaviors. We have witnessed many successful cases and personally practiced some simple and immediate methods. For example, having a 15-minute stand-up meeting every day is a rather standard practice. It greatly improves the transparency and communication efficiency among teams and lays a foundation of rigor and discipline for daily operations.

Regular reviews are also a commonly used method. Management will regularly stop and conduct a review of the entire project: “What have we done well? What can be adjusted to achieve better results?” In addition, insisting on demonstrations is also indispensable. Product managers often give demonstrations to customers, and project leaders also need to show the progress of the entire project and the team’s work results. When the project is about 75%, 80%, or 85% completed, show the results to stakeholders and give a detailed explanation: “This is the development direction of the team. We hope that team members can participate at the appropriate time, provide feedback, and help the company complete the subsequent work faster and better.” This approach has achieved remarkable results in improving transparency and promoting collaboration.

There are also some seemingly insignificant but meaningful details, such as setting up a praise board or a display board to make team members feel that their work is recognized and valued. For the leaders of various functional departments and sub-organizations in large and complex organizations, these small measures are practical and can have a significant positive impact. Others will notice these changes. For example, when attending an all-staff meeting and seeing the praise board, they will feel the positive effects brought by these simple strategies and then be inspired to adopt similar methods. It is these subtle changes that gradually lead to major changes in habits and behaviors. If it is not possible to drive change across the entire organization, then finding and implementing some simple methods to gradually lead the change is a viable strategy.

V. The Challenge of Integrating into the Culture: The Dilemma of Organizations in Embedding Agility into the Company Culture

We have noticed that although many organizations are well aware of the necessity of promoting agility, in actual operations, many people just blindly follow the trend. Seeing other organizations doing so, they do the same. This phenomenon is particularly prominent in large-scale transformation projects. However, the key lies in deeply understanding the underlying reasons behind the transformation - why agility needs to be adopted. Once the leadership truly understands these reasons, the consistency and firm commitment they show are crucial. This is not only the starting point for supporting the transformation but also a continuous and comprehensive investment.

For example, in digital transformation projects, in many cases, the transformation first starts in the IT department. However, only changing at the technical level is difficult to achieve maximum benefits or return on investment. Agile transformation needs to cover multiple business and technical teams such as human resources, sales, marketing, and finance to ensure that all departments of the organization can move towards the new work mode. When the entire organization collaboratively builds an agile framework, the organization’s agility will be comprehensively improved, enabling it to respond more quickly to market changes, thereby expanding market share and customer base.

VI. Precautions for Integrating into the Agile Culture: Key Points for Organizations to Actively Promote

(I) Communication - The Bridge of Change

Communication plays a crucial role in any transformation and the process of building a high-performance team. It cannot be overemphasized. Especially after the pandemic, team members are located in different places, and we are committed to getting employees back to work. At this time, the clarity of communication is particularly important.

(II) Competency Development - The Transformation of Employees

We must ensure that employees are well-prepared for change because simply and brutally forcing change cannot bring long-term positive effects. Although forced change may have a certain impact in the short term, it will soon encounter resistance because employees may feel threatened, oppressed, or even suffocated. In the long run, this sense of pressure may lead to employee turnover, especially the loss of key talents, which is extremely unfavorable to the organization’s sustainable development. Therefore, cultivating employees’ capabilities to enable them to naturally accept and support changes is a crucial link.

(III) Departmental Collaboration - The Power of the Whole

It is crucial to ensure that all functional departments of the organization can actively participate in and strongly support the change because it involves all levels within the organization. For example, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) needs to understand the financial benefits brought by the change; the human resources department should know how to treat teams or individuals more fairly in terms of evaluation, compensation, etc. Only when all departments work in synergy can the organization’s agility truly take root and发挥 its maximum effectiveness.

VII. Case Analysis: Practical Experience of Large Organizations in Improving Agility

In a recent human resources department optimization project, the goal was to improve processing efficiency, especially to shorten the response time to the inquiries of a total of 400 employees in the company’s operations in the Philippines and Malaysia. To achieve this goal, the company took a series of key measures to improve overall agility.

First, conduct an in-depth analysis of the existing work processes to identify and eliminate inefficient links. By introducing a Kanban management system, restructure the team structure to promote more efficient collaboration and communication, which significantly shortens the task cycle time.

Further, update the used technical systems and adopt new software with high transparency. This change enables team members to view and independently select the work orders to be processed in real-time, which not only improves the processing speed but also enhances the team’s autonomy and flexibility. In addition, this new work model breaks the original geographical and market restrictions, and global team members can participate in the work order processing according to the actual situation, further improving the efficiency of global collaboration.

Finally, through these measures, the company not only optimized the business processes but also significantly improved the job satisfaction and work-life balance of team members. We know that the well-being of the team is a key factor in ensuring long-term success. Therefore, while pursuing customer satisfaction, we also attach great importance to maintaining the well-being of team members.

These updates in technology and processes have effectively enhanced the agility of the human resources team, enabling the team to respond more quickly to internal needs and market changes, thereby improving the overall business performance and team morale.

VIII. Embracers of Change: How to Cultivate Team Members to Accept and Embrace Change?

(I) Cultivating a Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is about how team members can better cope with the resistance encountered in the process of change. For change promoters, usually, it starts with overcoming employees’ resistance to change. In the team, we will encounter several different attitudes: some people are pioneers, ready to embrace change early; most people follow the trend; and some are more conservative and are reluctant to change unless they see the benefits of change with their own eyes. To cultivate a growth mindset, we can encourage the trial of new methods, such as implementing Minimum Viable Product (MVP) projects. These projects can last for 12 weeks. If it is proved that they will not have a negative impact, they can be considered for promotion.

(II) Emphasizing Transparency

Project leaders should advocate transparent reporting and communication methods, especially avoid the “watermelon report” - seemingly everything is normal on the surface (green), but actually there are problems inside (red). It is recommended to use appropriate tools for real-time reporting instead of relying on traditional Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint, which may be manipulated with numbers and data. Real-time dashboards can help team members understand the real progress of the project in a timely manner.

(III) Listening to Every Voice

We must ensure that no dominant individuals in the team overshadow the voices of others and listen to the opinions of every member. In this way, we can cultivate a strong mindset of collaboration and growth, inspiring the team to succeed. Emphasize that teams should focus on collaboration rather than internal competition because the real competition should come from the external market, not within the team.

All the above strategies revolve around a core concept: by cooperation rather than competition, stimulate the common growth and success of the team. This culture will help the team adapt to market changes more quickly and strongly promote the realization of organizational goals.