Business Agility

“Business Agility is a set of organizational capabilities, behaviors, and ways of working that affords your business the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose. No matter what the future brings” (Business Agility Institute). We apply these concepts of Business Agility with a human-centric approach, sensing and responding to change while remaining aligned with the overall mission of the organization.

We help organizations chart the course for their agile journey using the Compass for Agility, which enables them to navigate uncharted waters. The metaphor of “sailing by compass” is a closer analogy for this type of organizational movement than the more traditional navigation by roadmap. We need drivers to now become sailors. This type of shift in both organizational and individual behaviors is our foundational cognitive approach to change, where we co-create the journey and help people embrace the journey by shifting their own behaviors.

We work with you to strike a balance of “tightly aligned, loosely coupled,” and we explore options like:  How do we empower groups and teams to make decisions based on new information and lessons learned through experimentation? And how do we ensure these changes in direction are scaffolding each other to achieve maximum impact?

As the name indicates, Business Agility leverages Agile frameworks and principles and yet Agile is not enough. Realizing Business Agility draws upon numerous—and sometimes contradictory—disciplines (Lean, design thinking, change management, systems thinking, organizational psychology, group dynamics, process improvement), each organization must shape its own journey by identifying the best combination of practices to meet its needs now, and in the future.

Part of our playbook

  • compass for agility

    Compass for Agility

    The Compass for Agility is a pragmatic and personalized approach to explore how and why behavior change (both individually and collectively) can lead to outcomes such as resilience, innovation, and equity. This builds fluency in experimenting, learning, adapting, and succeeding.

  • Trust Workshop

    Trust Workshop

    Trust can be hard to measure but we instinctively and measurably know that people do better in high-trust organizations. Look at the stream of business books based on this key topic as an indication. But how do you actually create and hold on to this key variable in the chaos of running an organization and delivering work?

  • Empathy workshop logo

    Empathy Workshop

    Explore the role of empathy as a trigger for change in achieving organizational outcomes such as agility, innovation, and resilience. Learn specific techniques to deepen and demonstrate empathy through their own actions. You will also be able to leverage gamification principles to cultivate empathy in your organizational culture.

  • Culture co-lab logo

    Culture Co-Lab

    Our signature culture collaboration laboratory sessions are designed to foster collaboration and experimentation within organizations. Our intent is to invite everyone into the culture journey instead of just relying on carefully selected tiger teams.

    Coming soon: Monthly Culture Co-Lab kits for three organizational outcomes — DEIA, agility and innovation. Each toolkit is designed to cultivate and reinforce targeted behavioral changes in bite size increments.

  • lean-into-lean

    Lean Into Lean

    Lean practices are unique in their ability to provide situational awareness at scale. However, too many Lean efforts gloss over the foundational elements of structure and shared understanding (blueprints) that enable organizations to pursue multiple transformation initiatives successfully.

    Learn more about our reimagined light-weight versions of classics include value stream mapping, gemba walks and more.

  • equitable agility

    Equitable Agility

    Our Equitable Agility workshop is designed for change agents and helps incorporate DEIA principles into Agile frameworks and practices. It is an experiential and pragmatic way to incorporate a dose of DEIA into achieving an Agile mindset.

    Discover how techniques from our DEIA toolkit can improve pain points like estimation, risk mitigation, and team cohesion, to name a few.

What drives us …

“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”

— Angela Davis