The Emergence of Agility

The Zürich Kammerorchester, one of the most famous orchestras in Europe, is playing to an audience that is sitting on a yoga mat – with several kids, on average 1 year old. They are experiencing their first classical concert – a so-called “nuggi-concert.” Director Michael Bühlers, who initiated this concept, was convinced that this was the answer to a dwindling number of visitors. Consumer preferences had changed and it was difficult to fill the auditorium on a Saturday evening. Five years after the concept was introduced, performances are now typically sold out. While musicians were initially resistant, they now realize that it was their own limiting self-concept that had prevented them from experimenting with alternatives. The necessity for change was obvious but it was difficult to endear themselves with playing in front of whining babies. Once musicians had resolved their “competing commitment”,¹ they loved the new business model and the orchestra benefited from improved financial health.²

In today’s increasingly complex world, it has become ever more challenging for firms to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. For instance, the “topple rate” at which big companies lose their leadership positions has more than doubled, suggesting that “winners” have increasingly precarious positions.³ Product vitality rates, which measure the percentage of revenues coming from new products introduced over the previous three to five years, are going up, suggesting higher dynamism and industry change.⁴ Finally, the average lifespan of public companies in the US has decreased from around 55 years in 1965 to 32 years in 2015; and there is currently a 1 in 3 chance that a public company will perish within a 5-year period.⁵

To survive under these conditions, companies need to react quickly to rapidly changing circumstances and accelerate activities on critical paths. They have to utilize highly dynamic procedures and processes in their operations to the extent that they invent themselves anew in some cases. In short, companies need to become more agile. There is good reason that agility scores high on the agendas of both managers and consultants.⁶ In a management world that has long held the belief that strategic planning in its different forms can anticipate future developments and make them more predictable and manageable, the very essence of how we deal with complexity and uncertainty has changed. In times where actions and consequences are increasingly disconnected and unpredictable, people strive for solutions and tools for dealing with uncertainty. That’s why agility is so en vogue, seen as a capability that can help organizations deal with uncertainty; not necessarily by planning, but by nimbly adapting as needed. But is agility just a management fashion like many others?

Studies of management fashions have contributed to our understanding of the forces underlying the rise and fall in popularity of new management techniques. A management fashion is a relatively transitory collective belief, disseminated by management fashion setters, with large numbers of organizations jumping on the bandwagon.⁷ Over the last few decades, we have seen wave after wave of management fashions, including total quality management, business process engineering, management by objectives, management by walking about, balanced scorecards, organizational learning, knowledge management, and the like. While these concepts have generated a lot of buzz in the business world, some were genuinely helpful, several were short-lived, and some were even discredited.

Management fashions are cyclical phenomena triggered by both endogenous and exogenous forces. Such triggers are likely to have been in place for the emergence of agility in management. Numerous new competitors have turned up on the global landscape, such as emerging market firms that have challenged the dominant players, as well as small niche market companies that have entered the market with accelerated speed. New industry definitions require cross-boundary knowledge, for instance, in optoelectronics or multimedia, that are fertile grounds for agile processes. Endogenous triggers may have also spurred the emergence of agility in management. Work priorities are changing. Companies are transforming employment contracts towards more fluidity. Project-based temporary work often substitutes for a life-long company affiliation. Hierarchies are seen as less important than entire talent pools – both inside and outside of the company. Companies have to reinvent themselves or their focus more often, moving away from the notions of structures, to focusing on processes, communication, and cross-boundary collaboration.

What is Agile Thinking?

The concept of “agile” can be traced back to several roots in sociology, educational theory, and manufacturing, but it began to gain attention in management through agile methods in software development, which date back to 2001 when several developers thought about new ways of software engineering.⁸ “Agile” was seen as a set of values and principles, guided by self-directed, low-risk, and adaptable step-by-step development for the delivery of IT projects. Instead of suffering from time-consuming, inflexible, highly complex and inefficient procedures, agile methods (such as Scrum or extreme programming) provide more flexibility to adapt to changes over time. An agile approach is different from traditional processes, such as the “waterfall approach,” which follows a step-wise linear planning sequence. The Agile Manifesto of 2001 suggests the following four principles:

• individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• working software over comprehensive documentation

• customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• responding to change over following a plan.

Still, despite the popularity of agility, there is no precise or commonly accepted understanding of the term. The dictionary meaning of “agile” is “having the faculty of quick motion; nimble, active, ready”.⁹ Researchers talk about agility as the ability of organizations to offer fast and effective responses to unexpected variations in market demands.¹⁰ Others mention that agility resembles adaptability and flexibility.¹¹ What all these definitions have in common is that something out there is so complex that firms need to be able to break free from their daily routines and inertia and incorporate ongoing change into their operations. In order to increase its agility, a company should orchestrate a variety of options, reflect on them, and act on an ongoing basis rather than allowing inertia and sunk costs to define its trajectory. From this perspective agility is also the freedom and the capability to “act otherwise.” Since having different organizational configurations and capabilities from competitors is key to sustainable advantage,¹² agility is of strategic importance.

Strategy consulting firm Bain and Company notes that “agile isn’t just one more approach to creative thinking or iterative prototyping. Rather, it’s a well-developed holistic system engineered to overcome more than a dozen common barriers to successful innovation”.¹³ While it might seem at first sight to be simply a management fashion, agility has become influential precisely because it is able to facilitate not just innovation but also shape a variety of other organizational functions and even entire organizations, as shown for example by the company illustrations in the Learning Consortium report.¹⁴ Agile has become far more than a management buzzword: It offers change and project methodologies; it challenges hierarchies and empowers individuals and teams; it puts customers center-stage and fosters ongoing collaboration; it uses methodologies such as design thinking, Scrum, or Kanban. From its origins in software development, agile has become a corporate-wide approach for transforming businesses.

When the term first appeared in management, the focus was more on process improvements, speed, and adaptability. Agility was considered as more is better. In recent years, with the integration of leadership and soft scale organization change issues into strategizing, and the increasing insight that complexity requires different tools and methodologies from those used in the past, a revised understanding of agility has emerged. Rather than running after competitors, striving to always be first, reacting to the hectic nature of daily business life, companies have now discovered what we call Agility.X, which incorporates the notions of less is better as well as different is better. For instance, a company may decide to preserve some of its traditional values as well as change some others. It may decide to preserve its product but change its processes. If such decisions are based on robust strategic thinking, they can reflect a high degree of agility. That is, a timely, effective, and sustainable response on an ongoing basis, that is not necessarily based on speed and radical transformation. Further, truly agile companies are different from the masses of competitors, benefiting from the strategy insight that sustainable advantage comes not from imitation but from having unique organizational configurations or offerings.

As traditional, linear planning and decision-making tools are no longer enough, the ability to engage with and develop this type of flexible decision-making and adjustment capability is vital. It involves a higher degree of experimentation, playfulness, and tolerance for ambiguity. Eventually, agility prepares executives for managing under uncertainty. Agile thinking helps to negotiate at least three tensions whose reconciliation is important for succeeding in volatile environments:

• Both individuals and organizations: Individual agility depends on organizational contingencies and vice versa. Agility requires motivated, engaged employees, together with leaders who can motivate and train the workforce in order to master timely knowledge and skills. At the same time, corporate development, design, and identity shape whether an organization can engage with the transformation towards becoming more agile.

• Both method and setting: As agility is predominantly a process concept such as learning or knowledge management, it is potentially open for application in different settings (e.g. industries, types of companies, and functional areas). While agile methods are in theory applicable to various settings however, the predominant conditions in those settings may be consistent with or hostile to agile thinking. Both method and setting dimensions need to be evaluated and aligned to effectively implement agility.

• Both stability and change: While an important element of agility consists of accelerated action to benefit from first-mover advantages where relevant and to stay ahead of the competition, the concept is much broader. Agility requires companies to identify and to reflect on the degree of the desired and appropriate change. This could involve organizations maintaining a stable identity, or honoring continuity in the types of products and services that they offer. McKinsey, for example, has defined agility as a combination of “dynamic capability” together with “stable backbone”¹⁵ and found that only 12 percent of organizations in their sample combined speed and stability.¹⁶

Three Dimensions of Agility: Leadership, Strategy, and Organization

Moving beyond software development and innovation functions, agility can be seen from a strategic perspective as a dynamic capability¹⁷ that pertains to the whole organization. The driving force for agility begins with leadership. Agile leaders are able to sense environmental signals, evaluate their implications, take initiative, and drive things forward. Leadership action is interweaved with the second dimension, organizational agility. Agile organizations experiment, learn, and collaborate. They can re-allocate resources as needed, and actively strive to reduce inertia. Organization change however should be aligned with the strategy, the third dimension. Agility can be manifested in the strategy via, for example, an adaptation of the business model towards one that can survive and thrive in changing conditions. It also involves a balancing of tensions such as speed and stability. IBM’s progressive shift from predominantly a hardware company throughout its history to a services and software company over the last 15 years exemplifies this shift in business model.¹⁸

General Electric might seem like an unusual organization to use as an exemplar of agility. However, taking a historical perspective, the tenure of Jack Welch from 1981 to 2001¹⁹ exemplifies all three agility dimensions. As a leader, Welch was always seeking to move things forward and embrace learning. His philosophy is exemplified in such quotes as: “How can we learn from companies that are achieving higher productivity growth than GE?” “GE should be a boundary-less company, with an open, anti-parochial environment, friendly towards the seeking and sharing of new ideas, regardless of their origins.” And, “the GE leader sees this company for what it truly is: the largest petri dish of business innovation in the world. We have roughly 350 business segments. We see them as 350 laboratories whose ideas are there to be shared, learned, and spread as fast as we can.”

From a strategy perspective, Welch sought to de-clutter GE’s corporate scope and focus it on the businesses where GE could lead. He asked his managers to make their businesses number 1 or number 2 in their industry; they could fix or, if not possible, sell or close these businesses. From an organization perspective, Welch started a program called “work-out” in the late 1980s to remove bureaucracy and instill a culture of “speed, simplicity and self-confidence”; as well as a program called “best practices,” which aimed to benchmark and learn from excellent competitors. From a leadership perspective, at the same time he initiated a program called “redefining leadership” involving rigorous 360-degree assessment, management development, and a focus on both performance as well as internalizing company values.

In the early 1990s, Welch aimed for “boundary-less behavior,” which meant the removal of internal barriers to the spread of good ideas regardless of their origins. Returning to strategy, in the mid-1990s Welch led the shift of focus from manufacturing businesses to service businesses, recognizing that growth and margins would be higher in service sectors. At the same time, organizationally GE embraced Six Sigma Quality, with a focus on defining, measuring, analyzing, improving, and controlling quality. Returning to leadership, in the late 1990s Welch promoted “A” players with “4 Es”: energy, ability to energize others, competitive edge, and execution.

The above initiatives also demonstrate effective management of the three tensions we outlined above. With respect to the individual and the organization, individuals had clear goals and an understanding of what GE expected of them; and the organizational context was conducive to reaching those goals. Further, with respect to method and setting, particular initiatives and processes were spread throughout all operating divisions of GE, adjusting them as needed in the process. Finally, with respect to stability and change, GE demonstrates continuous change, underlined by relatively more stable elements such as the company identity, and slower-shifting values. Despite all the changes, during Welch’s tenure the values of speed, simplicity, and self-confidence were a constant. Even though cultural shifts also had to take place, this was nowhere near as swift as other organizational and strategic changes.²⁰

The two decades that Welch led GE can be seen as an exemplar of the three dimensions of leadership, strategy, and organizational agility. The market capitalization of GE over those two decades went up by a factor of 36. The agility process started from Welch’s leadership, and integrated seamlessly with strategic and organizational dimensions.

These three categories are central to the structure of the book. Part I reflects on the first dimension, agility through the lens of leadership. Part II concentrates on the second and third dimensions, agile strategy and organization design. Part III focuses on agility in practice, where we examine how organizations are pursuing agility, and we hear from executives describing their journeys and challenges.

Leadership Agility is one of the core elements for transforming organizations. Leadership needs to provide both stability and trust but also needs to encourage experimentation and failure. It should help preserve and exploit existing advantages, structures, and values and at the same time it should foster exploration into new arenas of business, whether these are new product development, new markets or new mindsets, or even a new organizational culture. The chapters in this section provide different facets of this duality.

Bill Joiner develops the concept of leadership agility as the capacity of an organization’s leaders to foster strategic and operational agility, and to adapt personally to changing, interdependent conditions and aspirations on a daily basis. In his research, he found that companies whose leaders and leadership cultures exhibit higher levels of agility also have greater agility. At its core, leadership agility is the ability to engage in “reflective action” – to step back from one’s current focus, gain a broader, deeper perspective, then re-focus and take action that is informed by this larger perspective. Leadership agility, then, is a core capacity, a “meta-competency,” that significantly enhances effectiveness and reduces burnout in complex, rapidly changing environments. It can manifest itself on three levels (catalysts, achievers, experts), with each level encompassing and going beyond the skills and capacities developed at previous levels.

Constantine Andriopoulos focuses on the need for leaders to adopt an ambidextrous mindset and to focus on the simultaneous use of resources to support both routine processes as well as continuous exploration of new business models. This dual capacity of exploitation and exploration helps to leverage organizational tensions and to increase innovation. Reporting the results of a research study on New Product Design, Andriopoulos identified six practices that support agility: embracing dynamism and change; seeking out tensions that can be generative; instilling a need and dual capacity to work through tensions; constantly stressing both/and instead of either-/or-thinking; focusing resources and actions on both sides of a tension; seeking opportunities and guarding against excessiveness. As leaders work through contradictory demands, adopting principles of ambidexterity helps to conceive of strategic agility as an endless balancing act.

Haridimos Tsoukas argues that conventional thinking on agility does not sufficiently reflect the capabilities needed to cope with an unknowable external world; in particular, the concept of antifragility. Antifragility is a conceptual extension of agility that goes beyond resilience or robustness: the resilient or robust organization resists shocks and bounces back, whereas the antifragile organization thrives on volatility. It does so by generating options that incorporate ignorance, since it is not known in advance what will work, and knowledge in spotting and riding the upside. An antifragile system searches for variability, ascribes meaning to it, and retains the best options. In this line of thinking, the unknowability of the environment is not tackled through seeking more intelligence, since no intelligence will be large enough to measure up to the unknowable; but through more sophisticated improvisational performance, which will have been practiced and developed through earlier, less demanding and more familiar circumstances.

Mary Yoko Brannen and Terry Mughan argue that language, in all its forms and registers (national, functional, specialized, corporate, and so on), is a vehicle through which opportunities for growth and renewal are communicated, and thus is a critical factor in realizing agility. Both language-specific skills (those associated with tangible, easily demonstrable linguistic capabilities) and language-general skills (those that go beyond the tangible, explicitly demonstrable aspects of language to a much more nuanced and implicit or tacit dimension including semiology) have an important impact on agility. This is because sensitivity to the evolution of meaning of core practices and processes across a firm’s global footprint can lead to opportunities for innovation, growth, and sustainable strategic renewal. The authors provide an in-depth case example of leveraging language competence in order to realize agility based on the experience of Tesco PLC, the world’s third largest food retailer, as it leveraged learning from its worldwide operations.

Agile Strategy and Design are fundamental choices a company needs to reflect upon during agile transformation. While many people perceive agile and strategy as rather incompatible concepts, given strategy’s longer-term import and agile’s ongoing, processual focus, it is unlikely that strategic planning will be abolished. In fact, the practice of strategic planning has been adapting to environmental turbulence,²¹ and the field of strategy-as-practice²² has advanced process and practice-oriented understandings of strategy. The practice of strategy exists in different shapes, being more or less emergent or directive. The chapters in this part introduce the development of agile thought coming from software engineering and project management and elaborate on both the duality of structures (‘ambidextrous’) and experiential designs through play for pursuing agility. A recent study conducted by Capgemini highlights the current challenges and pitfalls of preparing organizations for agility.

W. Alec Cram and Susan Newell apply concepts from management fashion theory to understand how organizations mindfully (or mindlessly) adopt agile methods. However, rather than simply evaluating if agile is a management fashion, the authors seek to understand how organizations adopt and use agile methods. Based on 42 interviews with system developers and managers, they identify three categories of organizations that distinguish between agility adoption patterns: Crusaders, who exclusively adopt agile in a pure form; Tailors, who integrate agile and traditional approaches to fit their specific circumstances; and Dabblers who employ a few largely ceremonial agile activities alongside a traditional approach. When considering the broader implications of this research to contexts outside systems development, findings suggest that managers should remain mindful of how and why organizational agility initiatives in leadership, strategy and organizational design are undertaken; and whether these are substantive or superficial.

Costas Markides, Daniel Oyon, and Mael Schnegg analyze how control systems can support agility. An oxymoron? Well, not quite. As the authors argue, agility requires the ability to identify changes and the ability to respond to them quickly and decisively. Many information and control systems help to do just this. However, controls have also been criticized for promoting the exploitation of the current business (at the expense of exploration) or analysis-paralysis and inertia. Insights from 189 senior executives illustrate that firms that were heavy users of control systems as well as successful in exploration were collecting a wider variety of information and were putting in place a supporting infrastructure that promotes and supports the response actions that need to be taken. The authors also found that companies operating in an organizational environment that promoted behavior supportive of innovation were more profitable. Agile companies use their control systems to allocate resources in a dynamic way, both to their core business as well as to new opportunities. This balance, or “oscillating pendulum” approach, requires ambidextrous leadership skills, such as the ones previously outlined by Andriopoulos.

Loizos Heracleous and David Oliver argue that a dominant logic, while important for guiding strategy, can also engender inertia and blind spots that prevent both organizations and individuals from being agile. They discuss a facilitated management technique – serious play – that can help challenge paradigms and habitual ways of doing things. Serious play is a projective technique that involves groups of executives constructing elaborate objects that embed extensive metaphoric, analogical content, and thereby stimulate deeper reflection and dialogue than is possible using more conventional talk and chart-based facilitation techniques. Drawing on Kahneman’s concepts, the authors argue that serious play enables leaders to consciously shift beyond System 1 (heuristic) thinking to conscious System 2 thinking, and question their taken-for-granted paradigms, when the situation demands it. The generative power of serious play derives from its bridging of three dialectics: individual–collective, internal–external, and construction–deconstruction. Using the example of a Europe-based multinational company that produces building supplies for the construction industry, the practice of serious play is illustrated.

Christina Wawarta and Loizos Heracleous conceive of agility as a dynamic capability supporting adaptation in response to environmental change. Management must be able to sense environmental changes in a timely and ongoing fashion, and to respond effectively by reconfiguring the organization accordingly in a way that enhances its adaptability. The authors draw on a recent study conducted by Capgemini Consulting that investigated to what degree the companies across 10 industries were agile in terms of the above definition. Surprisingly, results showed that agility in sensing was generally lower than those for agility in responding. While academic theory confirms that acting on intuition to deal with complexity is commonplace, organizations may also prioritize other processes than sensing and environmental scanning; or lag behind in digital transformation that would enable higher degrees of sensing. Organizations can also influence their own agility levels by adapting their organization structure, culture, processes and IT along relevant lines; and the survey shows that roughly half of the companies investigated have a need for doing so.

In our third section – Agility in Practice – we highlight managers’ practical experiences with agility in the high-tech automotive and media industries; and also show how appropriate sensitivity to and use of language plays an all important role in defining and implementing agility. Based on interviews with top executives and consultants, we find that while the concept of agility only resonates with a few, ideas about flexibility, adaptation, and change are omnipresent. One of the underlying tenets is the need to find ways of coping with unpredictable environments and to maintain an ongoing stream of innovation development.

Edward Krubasik and Christiane Prange focus on the importance of agility during times of technological disruption and uncertainty. Krubasik, a former member of the corporate executive committee of Siemens AG and former director of McKinsey & Company, highlights that we are in an age where many surprises can happen and developments such as converging science fields, digitization, and accelerated innovation have become increasingly challenging. Many adjacent technologies are influencing each other and there are more innovations “in between” the original technology fields. Companies have to be more perceptive in dealing with the manifold options they face, and look for new concepts and ways to better manage uncertainty. One such concept relates to the decoupling of old structures and new business units to foster innovations (see for example Markides, Oyon, and Schnegg in this volume for the notion of structural ambidexterity). Other companies have to challenge traditional tall hierarchies with many decision levels and go through associated culture change; yet others are strong in terms of outside knowledge and technology absorption and need to provide financial and strategic resources to take advantage of such knowledge. In most scenarios, agility is the central skill to quickly react to new technology and market trends.

Douglas Terrier, Loizos Heracleous and Steven González reflect on the journey to agility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC). JSC is based in Houston, Texas and focuses on manned space flight, conducting space research and development, providing mission control and training of US astronauts. In 2013, a change program was revealed with the objective to transform JSC’s culture into one that is more reliable, progressive, innovative, and adaptive to change. Douglas Terrier, Chief Technology Officer at JSC at the time of the interview (and currently CTO of the whole agency in Washington DC), shares insights into how JSC’s processes, both technical and organizational, can and should become more agile. Most importantly, sensing and evaluating what happens in the external environment is key because it’s a necessary condition for agility. Doing the same thing better and better than in the past is simply not sufficient. Instead, for institutions that believe they practice rocket science, it is important to also challenge their own internal paradigm but obviously not at the expense of safety first. This is why, ultimately, transformational change has to occur incrementally and over time in this particular institution.

David Schoch and Christiane Prange continue the discussion of the importance of changes in the external environment. What has worked in the past is not going to work any longer, and companies need to develop capabilities to pivot and react to these changes. This is how Ford interprets agility and it is explicitly encouraged and facilitated by the company’s culture of transparency and openness. But change is not easy and requires stability at the core, while at the same time inputting new ideas that challenge the status quo from the outside. With the separation of the two strategies (stability and challenge), it is possible to preserve the existing core, the identity of the company and its governance, as well as the spirit of continuous reinvention that requires both a different mindset and a different control system. Teams that are focused on exploration, that can pivot and quickly react to market tendencies, need to be set apart from the governance and hierarchical structures of the core company. Their decision-making can then be quicker with a closer eye to customers. Management supports such fast decision-making, which implies making choices, including inevitably making mistakes.

Ard Weiher and Christiane Prange talk about the digital future through agile innovation. For the media company Axel Springer, the digital era has changed nearly everything and AS IDEAS, as an internal service provider, works on those challenges by developing innovations. Right from inception, the company was formed with a clear focus on agile work principles in order to be more competitive with respect to cost pressure and flexibility. AS IDEAS works with different ways of organizing work, a variety of leadership principles and highly flexible approaches to developing new products. This is important because innovations normally emerge from within an experimental context with high degrees of trial and error. Starting from agile methods like Scrum, AS IDEAS has continuously been working on improvements in agile project management and leadership because they have realized that being agile and doing agile not only requires the mindset, but also the energy and competence to implement it. Team responsibility and small teams dedicated to innovation are some of the important drivers of the company’s success.

Tom Doctoroff and Christiane Prange reflect on changes in the advertising industry, and discuss whether agile can work in China. J.W. Thompson is a global advertising network with offices all over the world. While the media and entertainment sectors, in particular, face several barriers to sustained profitability, China holds enormous promise not only because of its sheer size but also because of the uncompromising urge of consumers to participate in wealth creation. Several of these triggers have paved the way for agile strategies and new business models. However, agile in China is different from agile in other countries. In a country where relations and status in society matter, people need a framework within which to act. This stability then facilitates experimentation and change. On the other hand, there is a cultural imperative that is not conducive to individualism, open communication, and criticism. Agility, then, in this context, refers to encouraging people to build strengths within their frameworks and cultural boundaries. At this deeper level agility implies change in an evolutionary and gradual manner.

Robert Marshak and Loizos Heracleous advance one of the topics initiated in our leadership section – the role of language. They talk about how leaders, organization development practitioners, change managers, and others can use language to implement particular organizational agility programs, or to enhance the agility of their organizations more generally, as a long-term capability. In that regard, organizational agility is considered to be a linguistic label that acts as a slogan, a loosely defined desired state, and a generative image to stimulate people to think about what is needed without having to impose specific instructions. In particular, explicit and implicit metaphors such as those related to agility frequently reveal unspoken or even unconscious mindsets that shape or invoke how people think about things and what they then do in response. Leaders often talk about a change using language inconsistent with the required change, which can be on a subconscious level and can be misleading about what is needed. Conveying what is desired, such as enhancement in organizational agility, especially if it is different from the past or current mindsets, requires the artful and intentional use of language that invokes in the minds of the intended organizational audiences the desired ideas that lead to particular behavioral responses.

Oliver Fischer and Katrin Adt report on a project Daimler embarked on in 2016. Like Ford, Daimler had to strengthen its core business while promulgating new technology development given new challenges such as connectivity, autonomous driving, shared ownership, and electric drive systems that all have the potential to shake the foundations of the industry. The executive board at Daimler was conscious that these changes would affect the core of the organization, and almost every single individual working for the company. Decision-making and budget allocation processes, as well as organization design characteristics were altered, and emphasis was placed on the willingness to tolerate ambiguity, yet respond quickly and decisively when the time is right. The very identity of Daimler, its reason for existence, what it does and how it does it, has been subject to renewal, and not just once. This change process was akin to a cultural revolution and agility is considered central at the organizational, team, and individual levels. Looking into the future, learning agility will become essential.

Through the collective works in this volume we aim to offer a multi-faceted, nuanced view of agility that is informed both by multiple conceptual perspectives, as well as by events in the trenches, the perspectives of executives and consultants who work with the concept in their everyday experience. We aim to stimulate thinking on what agility is (and can be) in particular organizations, and how agents can move their organizations toward a more agile state.