The Agility Imperative

Published : 25 March 2009

The global Banking crisis of 2008-? has thrown the world into unpredictable turmoil. Welcome to the space publishing has been in for a decade and more. Now we practitioners of the black art of digital transformation can be comforted that everyone else has to live in a world which is unpredictable and where the old verities do not apply.

In retrospect no doubt, historians will trace the patterns which led to the present crisis and we will see logic and predictability in events to which we were at the time oblivious. Just as the perceptions of those submerged by events of the summer of 1914 ("out of a clear blue sky") were replaced by the retrospective concept of the Bismarckian Balance of Power system and its inexorable propulsion towards war; so too our recent twenty year old reconversion to free market economics has been blown apart inside twenty months. Events are the kaleidoscope of history: once shaken they assume a pattern which in retrospect seems inevitable.

Our digital futures are the same – yes, we can counsel close attention to value chains, user needs, workflow and community interactions. We may well be right. But equally we could be spectacularly wrong! 

This is why we counsel clients, as well as attending to the above, to pay attention to the "Agility Imperative" – the need to fashion company cultures with rapid reaction in mind. Which means - rapid development and evolution of products & services; quicker response to unpredictable market requirements and competitors ; learning and refining from user experience ; developing adaptable content and technology architectures etc

Raise the Agility Imperative to the same status as the “strategy” – it’s a means of copper bottoming a future which we can only guess at and which will not be defined by us but by users.