Agile = legitimised panic

The ‘agile business’ is very much of the moment. Wherever you look you find consultants promoting it and business leaders adopting it (or at least exhorting their troops to become it). The need for agility is usually linked to the ‘rapid pace of technological change’ and that other concept du jour ‘disruption’ (the need to either avoid it or become it).

Here is a slightly disruptive thought. What if our obsession with agility is a present day manifestation of the fact that in the past, not enough organisations spent enough time thinking about the future?

Here is another one. Businesses don’t become successful by being disruptive, they become disruptive by being successful.

I wouldn’t disagree with the claim that we are living through a technological revolution, but we have had this thing called the internet for more than 20 years now. For sure, it has caused huge changes – but they have panned-out over that period of 20 years. Most of the fundamental forces that have shaped those changes have been apparent from the earliest times – if people chose to study them. The problem has been that many organisations have spent their time ignoring what has been going on and therefore find themselves now living in a state of perpetual crisis management – a condition which they have sought to dignify with the term agility.

The real problem is that the future is not what it used to be. Dealing with a changing future does not depend on agility, it depends on thinking. In writing this I am reminded of a piece I wrote almost exactly 12 years ago (The future is not what it used to be). This was a series of ten, semi-serious predictions designed to get people thinking about how the digital revolution might change things. Almost none of these have panned out exactly as predicted (or within the time-frame predicted), but I look at them quite proudly because they did a pretty good job at nailing the fundamental direction of required thinking. If, as a brand, you had spent some time thinking in this way 12 years ago, you wouldn’t currently find yourself looking down the barrel of disruption while desperately trying to do the agility dance.

Businesses that think about the future don’t need to be agile. Agility is something we have invented to put a positive spin on panic. It is time we started to Think.

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