from 6 Principles to Build Your Company, Harvard Business Review, 09.2021
Strategic agility is the ability to improve performance — not just survive but thrive — amid disruption. Strategic agility can be broken down into six guidelines to help organizations leverage disruption proactively to our advantage.
Principle 1: Prioritize speed over perfection
Opportunities come and go quickly during a crisis, so organizations need to be ready and willing to act quickly, even if they sacrifice quality and predictability in the process.
Principle 2: Prioritize flexibility over planning
Strategy is often seen as a cascade of choices that are built into strategic plans, in turn devised and approved over a period of several months, and then executed over three or five years, before the cycle repeats. However, in a crisis, a strategic plan can easily become an anchor that locks an organization onto a path that is no longer relevant, instead favour flexibility.
Principle 3: Prioritize diversification and “efficient slack” over optimization
Many organizations struggle — and some fail— not because they are not agile or innovative, but because they are felled by a single devastating blow. To avoid this, ist is best to cultivate diversification and underemphasis efficiency and optimization.
Principle 4: Prioritize empowerment over hierarchy
Systems are most vulnerable at their weakest points. A hierarchy, for example, is most vulnerable at the top. Empowered teams, by contrast, are inherently robust. Since they are decentralized, no single strike or crisis can take them all out. The key is to maintain open and regular information flows so they work from the same page.
Principle 5: Prioritize learning over blaming
Organizational cultures that reward risk taking and tolerate failure move more quickly that those that don’t. If people are criticized for failing, they are less likely to take risks; in a crisis, this can be fatal.
Principle 6: Prioritize resource modularity and mobility over resource lock-in
Since it is difficult to predict how the future will unfold in a crisis, it is hard to effectively plan the allocation of resources. Thus, it is important to build resources that are modular and/or mobile so they can be reconfigured or moved as needed.
In short, incorporating avoidance, absorption and acceleration can be the difference between survival and collapse.