**2.2 Agility**

About 320 B.C.E., a Chinese General, Sun Tzu, wrote 'The Art of War' which is the earliest available description of the art and science of effective action in ambiguous and contested situations [23]. Tzu argued that, in warfare, leaders must direct and mobilise capabilities, mindsets, skills, processes, risk assessment processes and strategic flexibility. He advised that leaders should "avail yourself of any helpful circumstances over and beyond the ordinary rules. According as circumstances are favourable, one should modify one's plans" [24].

Tzu's description of the capabilities required for effective action in situations that are now described as being VUCA (volatile + uncertain + complex + ambiguous) is quintessentially Agile. His Middle-Range Theories of Action advocate gaining advantage by acquiring, upgrading, reconfiguring and directing specific sets of capabilities and using carefully considered stratagems to respond effectively, quickly and proactively to the circumstances of the moment and focus on winning, despite opposition and difficulty.

Five insights from Tzu's conceptualisation of Agility are relevant today, specifically:


• Prudent caution is a necessity. Risks, dangers and challenges are real. Agility cannot win every battle.

Today's scholars of military strategy continue to explore how the leadership qualities outlined by Tzu can be developed. Alberts and Hayes [26] provide valuable insights from North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) studies explaining that: "Agile organizations must be able to meet unexpected challenges, to accomplish tasks in new ways, and to learn to accomplish new tasks. Agile organizations cannot be stymied when confronted by uncertainty or fall apart when some of their capabilities are interrupted or degraded. Agile organizations need to be able to tolerate (even embrace) disruptive innovation. Agile organizations depend upon the ability of individual members and organizational entities to get the information that they need to make sense of a situation and to combine and recombine as needed to ensure coherent responses".

### *2.2.1 The Agile Paradigm*

In the late 1980s structured methods for Agility-Orientated Organisation Development began to be formulated. The context was a worsening crisis for manufacturing companies in the USA. Asian rivals had gained comprehensive competitive advantages and entire industries in the USA were at risk of collapse. Many generic weaknesses were identified in American companies, including slow responsiveness, a lack of flexibility, high costs, intractable quality problems, a weak capacity to reconfigure resources rapidly, ineffective project-based management and an inability to undertake rapid value-creating innovation [27].

A government-funded, but industry-led, think-tank was created to find ways to reinvigorate American manufacturing. It was located in the Iacocca Institute in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania [28]. It so happened that Bethlehem was the best possible backdrop for an effort to reset America's industrial trajectory, as the city had been once one of the world's great steel-making centres but was now scarred by rusting and silent furnaces and acres of decaying machinery.

The Iacocca task-force had 100 top managers from America's industrial giants, along with consultants and academics, working for about six months to analyse problems and prepare a report to address the woes of the industrial West [29]. They concluded that American companies needed to be reconfigured radically, so that they became Agile, meaning that they: (i) were quick to create and seize opportunities; (ii) able to customise products for individual customers; (iii) were early and capable adopters of hard technologies (like digitalisation) and (iv) soft technologies (like quality control) and (v) utilised fully the latent talents of employees through directed empowerment. This combination of organisational attributes was dubbed by the Iacocca taskforce as the 'Agile Paradigm' and methods for a form of Agility-Orientated Organisation Development were designed to embed it widely. In the years that followed many companies in the USA and Europe adopted aspects of the Agile Paradigm to enable them to react faster to changing customer needs.

### *2.2.2 The Agile Manifesto*

Agility-Orientated Organisation Development took a great leap forward in 2001 when a group of friends gathered in a lodge in Utah to enjoy skiing and discuss organisational solutions to the problem-ridden process of developing large software

### *Untangling the Relationship between Innovation and Agility DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112557*

solutions. Collectively they produced a set of guidelines that advocated a radically different managerial approach that they called the Manifesto for Agile Software Development [30]. Derivatives of this approach, often described as Scrum, are now used extensively including in twenty first century enterprises, like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Spotify, that have created vast and inherently Agile commercial organisations drawing from principles embedded in the Agile Manifesto [31].

### *2.2.3 Requisite Agility*

Over the past 20 years a research programme into the practical management challenges of adopting Agility as a strategic capability has been undertaken in CENTRIM where researchers found that some organisations did benefit from adopting the Agile Paradigm or the Agile Manifesto whereas others used different approaches, such as investing in technology, establishing skunkworks, moving R&D facilities into dynamic ecosystems or acquiring new capabilities (by purchasing dynamic start-up firms etc.). In short, CENTRIM's study found that 'one size does not fit all' [32] and that adopting Agility as a system-wide strategic imperative can be dysfunctional [33].

Possible dysfunctions include: (i) having too much or too little Agility; (ii) adopting a sub-optimal type of Agility; (iii) being Agile in the wrong places; (iv) prioritising short-term Agility without developing sufficient resilience to cope with future challenges and (v) failing to acquire the foundational capabilities required. For these reasons, it has been realised that a prudent managerial aim is to strive to become *Requisitely* Agile, meaning 'not too much, not too little, of the right type and delivering wanted deliverables'.

Requisite Agility depends on possessing, or being able to access, and then using wisely and effectively agile-enhancing leadership and managerial capabilities and specialised (agility-enabling) portfolios of Dynamic Capabilities that enable an enterprise to be (i) proactively situationally adaptive; (ii) prudently opportunistic; (iii) effective in identifying and mitigating threats and (iv) actively preparing the organisation for a different future.

Overall there is a consensus in the third decade of the twenty first century that the need for Requisite Agility is growing as the forces driving competition are becoming stronger, more formidable and increasingly disruptive [34]. Requisite Agility requires the acquisition of capabilities, including human capital, that can be readily reconfigured to seize short- and long-term opportunities and, a high degree of intelligence, willingness and boldness amongst decision-makers to take advantage of the circumstances of the moment whilst avoiding the pitfalls that often beset the hasty.

New approaches to Agility-Orientated Organisation Development continue to enhance our understanding of how a high-level ambition to be Requisitely Agility can be achieved and the required specific capabilities can be developed. Of particular importance has been the realisation that socio-technical developments, such as the use of the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence, provide hitherto unavailable opportunities to increase Agility and the tools in the Lean Start-Up enable responsive micro-level strategic Requisite Agility. More recently, the EAfA (Exploiting Agility for Advantage) methodology has provided a comprehensive step-by-step process for developing Requisite Agility, identifying that the real management challenge is not to adopt agility principles universally but selectively, in ways that strengthen an organisation for both short- and long-term advantage [15].

## *2.2.4 Requisite Agility in context*

Agility is a construct located in the realisation that aspects of the world are, and will always be, ruled by Darwinian forces where harsh competition, unexpected events and ongoing evolutions and revolutions are normal conditions [5]. Note that we use the phrase 'aspects of the world' as some organisations operate in less dynamic or relatively uncontested environments. For this reason, Agility needs to relate beneficially to three other grand driving forces that shape organisational capabilities. These are a need for: (i) order, (ii) alignment and (iii) prudence. Organisations need to be *orderly* so that they are understandable, efficient and predictable. They need *alignment* as parts cannot pull in divergent directions, so must be directed, just as a magnet causes iron filings to be oriented in the same direction. *Prudence* is the last of the grand driving forces as it combines a pursuit of economy with an enduring concern to fight tendencies towards unwise of excessive risk, neglect or systemic weaknesses.

## *2.2.5 An Agility Litmus Test*

As a quick Litmus Test, we can describe Requisite Agility as having seven characteristics.

