The Strategic Agility Gap

The Strategic Agility Gap: How Organizations Are Slow and Stale to Adapt in Turbulent Worlds. David D. Woods. researchgate

How can organizations cope with accelerating change in more complex worlds? The growth of capabilities produces expanded scales of operation, extensive interdependencies, new vulnerabilities, and puzzling failures. The result is the strategic agility gap where organizations are slow and stale in recognizing changing risks and fall behind the pace of change. The chapter addresses what factors drive the gap and what adaptive capabilities allow organizations to flourish in the gap. The result is a new paradigm for continuous adaptability illustrated in web-powered enterprises.

Organizational systems succeed despite the basic limits of plans in a complex, interdependent and changing environment because responsible people adapt to make the system work despite its design—SNAFU catching. The ingredients are:

• anticipation—seeing developing signs of trouble ahead to begin to adapt before the evidence is definitive (waiting till evidence is definitive almost guarantees being slow and stale);

• contingent synchronization—adjusting how different roles at different levels coordinate their activities to keep pace with tempo of events;

• readiness to respond—developing deployable and mobilizable response capabilities in advance of surprises;

• proactive learning—learning about brittleness and sources of resilient performance before major collapses or accidents occur by studying how surprises are caught and resolved.

balance expression of initiative as pressures wax and wane... prioritize some goals, sacrifice others when conflicts across goals intensify.

build reciprocity across roles and levels.

learn to guide adaptability through tangible experience of surprise. learn to recognize SNAFU... Situation Normal. Surprises reveal how re-prioritization emerges amid goal conflicts.

proactive study of existing resilience. Specifically, invest in learing from the small surprises. Especially by studying sets of surprises that reveal resilient performance—the SNAFU catching. Invest also in lightweight mechanisms to spread the learning about SNAFU catching across roles and levels.