Measuring and Building Organisational Agility

Patrick Hoverstadt
Lucy Loh
21 januari 2019

Organisational agility is now a relatively hot topic, which it wasn’t when I first talked about this subject at SCiO 6 years ago. Since then, we’ve significantly developed and extended the model for measuring agility, so will be talking about the latest developments.

We’ll start with the need for business agility, going beyond the hype to look at the business reality and strategic importance of agility. We’ll then go on to look at the different aspects and elements of organisational agility, an overview of how we measure those and then go on to talk about the need for balance across the different aspects. We’ll then go on to look at different approaches to increasing agility and the use of agility metrics as an organisation design tool.

In the process, we’ll link the work both in terms of theory and practice to VSM and some other systems models and approaches. In particular we’ll look at the working of the 3,4,5 homeostat in VSM and the critical role that plays in organisational agility. We’ll link the modelling and practice of the homeostat through to some new developments in neuroscience and show how these are important both in terms of agility and in reference to Boyd’s OODA loop.