Why do so many organizational change efforts come up short? Between all the smart consultants, the change mongers, and the volumes that have been written about organizational change, you’d think we could readily answer this question. One place to look for the answer is in the definition of change: “To make radically different; to give a different position or direction.”

Compare that with the definition of agility: “Marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace; mentally quick and resourceful.” Often, when executives ask for change, they are actually hoping for agility.

Agility allows us to anticipate, to make quick surgical adjustments and be more proactive in an uncertain and changing business environment. In fact, a lack of agility may be the reason organizations feel the need for the large-scale change projects that typically prove disappointing.

The first thing to recognize is that agility cannot reside just at one level of your organizational chart. Each individual, team, and business unit needs to be comfortable with the intellectual and emotional agility they’ll need to respond to changing market demands and opportunities.

An organizational culture that embraces agility is one that’s comfortable with paradox. With a paradox, it’s never about either/or, it’s always about and/both. This is a difficult concept for some managers. You’ll need managers and consequently an organizational culture that can simultaneously grasp, appreciate, and live with the following paradoxes:

Top-down and bottom-up. You need to encourage independent decisionmaking at the lower end of the hierarchy. You will need to clearly define purpose, direction, and strategy and be able to be both directive and participatory depending on the situation. The appropriate people need to have the authority to make decisions with support from the organization.

Flexible and stable. You need to be aware of business forces driving your organization to adapt and change while attending to the systems that are imperative for the integration and coordination of work across the organization. This is complicated by inherent personality preferences that value organizational structures, rules, and policies versus those that view such structures as barriers to adaptability.

Action-oriented and reflective. Making decisions quickly, often with less information than you are comfortable with, and stopping to reflect on what is working and not working is another paradox of agile organizations. Taking time to reflect on what can be learned from an action is very different from hesitating to engage in the initial action.

External and internal. Look outward to your customers and the marketplace, and inward to your people and processes. A manager can be excellent at one of these perspectives while remaining out of touch with the other.

Each of these surface contradictions is a balancing act that comes with practice. The goal is to keep both perspectives in mind and allow one to act as a check against the other. No wonder that research from the Center for Creative Leadership defines the ability to manage complexity and uncertainty as one of the hallmarks of effective emerging global leaders.

Ask the right questions
Developing an organizational culture that supports and reinforces agility is not a simple task. First, you’ll want to make sure you have honest answers to some significant questions.

How does your organization treat failure? As managers and teams struggle to challenge the status quo and anticipate the unknown, they will make mistakes. Punishment restricts their willingness to take risks and reinforces a culture of caution. When a mistake is met with analysis and thoughtful response, the culture begins to develop a mindset of thoughtful action—a precursor to agility.

How good are you at managing people through the transitions associated with change? Do you understand how your employees respond to change? Do you understand that people follow predictable patterns as they respond to the unexpected, and the way you manage them influences whether they become resistors to, or supporters of, change?

Do you speed through decisions without seeking input from the right people or building commitment for implementation? In building agility, you may assume that faster is better, but the key is really to slow down enough to give proper attention to the people involved and the necessary details, so that you don’t lose time fixing things that weren’t done right the first time.

Do you hire or promote people who are agile or simply people who like change? People who just like the excitement of chasing new ideas may very well be an asset, but they must be balanced by people who will question the consequences of change and implementation.

Armed with an honest assessment of your starting point by asking these questions, you’re ready to start working toward building a culture of agility, one challenge (or opportunity) at a time.

1. Focus on the right problem or challenge. We all know the frustration and lost time associated with earnestly working on a problem only to discover that it’s the wrong problem. Narrow it down to the exact thing that needs changing and isolate it from peripheral issues.
2. Involve the right people. Make sure you have the right people in the room—and no one else. Organizations that include everyone and stage excessive meetings are not agile. If the right people are the entire team, then include the team. If it only involves one person, only include that person.
3. Seek appropriate information. Make sure you have good information, but also know when enough is enough. If you get 80% of the information you need, don’t waste a lot of time trying to get the other 20%. This is also a function of involving the right people. Know where to find the information you need.
4. Commit to the idea of implementation. Often your idea people are not good with implementation. In fact, they may believe that once they have conceptualized something, the work is done. Also, they may not be effective at anticipating the consequences of their ideas when implemented. Agile organizations are always thinking about implementation.
5. Create accountability. This includes determining a reasonable time frame for completion and creating a detailed, step-by-step schedule of tactics and milestones for the implementation to have the best chance of success. Don’t just agree that a change is necessary; you have to assign tasks, create accountability, and set schedules.
6. Stop to measure and make adjustments. As you move through implementation, and after the conclusion of the project, remember to evaluate the progress you are making toward your goal. You’ll also want to re-evaluate the goal to ensure that, in a quickly changing marketplace, it’s still something worth achieving.

The path to agility is a thoughtful one. You’ll need to take the time to carefully plan and execute each step to ensure that you can go full speed later on; that you won’t need to backtrack and fix problems that could have been avoided by a little more attention during the planning phase.

In agile organizations, change is not a goal or event but an aspect of organizational culture that anticipates and facilitates adaptability. Such organizations are home to agile leaders and employees who work together toward a common purpose—to address new challenges and opportunities as they arise, with clarity of purpose and intent.

Chris Musselwhite is the author of Dangerous Opportunity: Making Change Work and the CEO and founder of Discovery Learning, Inc., a leadership development products and consulting company (www.discoverylearning.com). He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .