Strategic agility is an organization’s ability to think ahead of the market, quickly mobilize itself, adapt to market shifts, fill capability gaps, capture new revenue ahead of the competition, and even create new markets. Strategic agility requires going outside of systems, structures, and processes, and allowing fluid organization of teams to achieve loosely defined missions. It is an innovation playground.

Let’s break this down into the three things that strategic agility requires. First, is the ability to bring speed (sense and response) into the system, not only through turning ideas into prototypes, but also by employing speed in key decision points. 

The second requirement is clarity and stability. Clarity, in this case, is about identifying innovation hot spots and the key hypotheses that we are trying to validate. Stability refers to permanent and committed spaces and resources so that it’s not a one-time play. 

The third key to strategic agility focuses on deleting or suppressing organizational memories. These are legacies that, 99% of the time, actually prevent a company from moving forward and reinventing themselves.