From Disruption to Opportunity: How Leaders Can Embrace Agility

Disruptor: A company that changes the traditional way an industry operates, especially in a new and effective way. Can also be applied to the way the company operates as well.[1]

Imagine that you a leader in an organisation either looking to compete or are competing with other companies in a volatile marketplace. How might we disrupt the market or how might we disrupt the way we work for the better?

This is a big question though perhaps a bigger question might be WHY would we want to be disruptive?

In a market that may be congested or has a decent degree of uncertainty, looking for opportunities may create visibility of how the system or systems work and its inherent constraints[2]. We may see adversity and contention or scarcity of people or resources or product. [3] Often, these disruptions (in a macro negative sense) tend to sit outside of our control. Conversely, where we are looking to seize an initiative, breaking down the barriers to that initiative sits with us. One way is to understand the feedback loops that exist in that space. The shorter and tighter the feedback loop(s), the quicker we can learn. The quicker we can learn, the quicker we can ‘disrupt’. The quick we disrupt (mindful of the impact of changes that my impact the organisation internally), the quicker we can create a new norm that potentially allows for better innovation, better product, quicker time to market, better responsiveness to customers and so forth. This is essentially business agility or agility of the business.

One aspect of disruption of the way we work (which might be uncomfortable) is moving towards more adaptive planning based on the quicker information from tighter feedback loops in conjunction with an organisations’ longer-term strategies. This begins with understanding and articulating the intent of what we are doing, empowering multiple levels of leaders where appropriate to achieve clarity, buy in and enhancing of plans adapting to what information we receive through our disruption activities.

The essence of this is what some might call agile. Agility is predicated on four values with one of them being “responding to change over following a plan”[4]. This value encapsulates adaptation, design, disruption, feedback loops and information and at its core, innovation. In order to respond to the market, we need to innovate to some degree. With this in mind, we now have the potential to move from creating disruption to seizing opportunity. This takes time but allows us to be more effective in the way we work and in the way we compete in the market.

The move to thinking about becoming more agile (and note, I am not talking necessarily about Agile frameworks. They are vehicles to enable agility to occur) is one key aspect to becoming better and nimbler in the way that we work.

The WHY we would want to think about disrupting, becoming more agile, increasing effective information through quicker innovation feedback comes back to how see our relationship with customers, employees and our product offering. There are many examples of companies not responding to change[5] or seizing the opportunity to improve.

The question then becomes as an organisation, do we want to fail to become a leader? Do we want to fail to win?

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