A Widespread Need

Seven out of 10 executives say that their organizations experienced disruptive change during the last year. And more than 80% say that the pace of change is speeding up in organizations all over the world [American Management Association 2018 survey].

Understand Key Factors

Psychologists have identified some of the factors that make a person resilient, among them a positive attitude, optimism, the ability to regulate emotions, and the ability to see failure as a form of helpful feedback. Key to resilience agility is the ability to work with ambiguity.

Key Definitions

Agility

• The capacity for moving quickly, flexibly, and decisively in anticipating, initiating, and taking advantage of opportunities and avoiding any negative consequences of change.

Resiliency

• The capacity for resisting, absorbing, and responding, even reinventing if required, in response to fast and/or disruptive change that cannot be avoided.

Balancing Attention to Agility and Resiliency

It is tempting to think that the pace of change can best be matched by building agility, while the disruptiveness of change is best matched by building resiliency. In this scenario, fast-paced markets are met with speedy product innovation, and severe setbacks are offset with robust response management. However, it is risky to overemphasize either agility or resiliency to the exclusion of the other. The strong correlation between the two concepts in our study indicates that they are different but indeed linked. Agility and resiliency are both essential, and they must both be actively developed, although the relative emphasis given to each may vary over time as the relative pace and disruptiveness of change varies. The task is gauging which of the two is needed most at a point in time. To do so requires having multiple, explicit, agreed-upon metrics and indicators of when agility and resiliency are being excessively pressured due to environmental conditions. Gaming and simulations of a variety of extreme situations, along with taking every opportunity for candid debriefs of actual failures and poor performance, become important ways of identifying those indicators.