The Business Agility Institute, a global research and advocacy organization, defines the concept of business agility as, “a set of organizational capabilities, behaviors, and ways of working that affords your business freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose. No matter what the future brings.” While the concept of business agility was well established years before COVID-19 upended the world, the pandemic brought the notion into sharper focus and drove organizations of all sizes to formalize and advance initiatives around agility and change.
As business agility initiatives mature, the concept is evolving, and companies are seeking to expand beyond simply responding to unanticipated upheaval to addressing opportunities and challenges. To do this, they require greater self-reliance—the self-awareness and capability to identify and accept change into all aspects of the organization’s people, practices, and technology, so that accounting for it becomes second nature.
In our consulting practice at Isos Technology, we have the privilege of going into hundreds of companies of all sizes each year and working with them not only to solve today’s business problems, but partner with them in looking down the innovation curve and establishing a solid foundation for meeting their long-term strategic goals. In doing so, we use a proprietary framework we refer to as the Isosceles Agility Triangle™ to help organizations develop maturity around three key mechanisms that drive efficiency, evolutionary growth, and innovation, and ultimately help them gain agility and resilience. One of these mechanisms is technology, which serves as a foundation for the other two mechanisms— practices and people.
An important distinction of the Isosceles Agility Triangle™ framework is teaching organizations to become self-reliant, so that when faced with a challenge or decision point, they are able to self-diagnose and identify the correct mechanism—or set of mechanisms, since they are deeply interrelated—to lean into, in order to respond in accordance with their stated values and goals (i.e., in a resilient manner).
In this whitepaper, we introduce the Isosceles Agility Triangle™, then define and explore people, practices, and technology as the underpinnings of business agility.
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