Blog: 5 Ways To Improve Agility

Organisation design is fundamental to agility

Agility – the capacity to make effective and sustained organisation changes to maintain performance advantage over the longer-term – is a critical success factor for organisations today. While there are multiple factors that contribute to agility – individual and leadership capabilities, an effective strategy, responsive management processes and so on – organisation design is one of the fundamental building blocks. It is also a critical skill for HR and organisation leaders to understand and master. Read on for five practical tips on how you can use organisation design to improve agility in your business.

1. Clarify what ‘agility’ means for your organisation
   At CRF we distinguish between agility as a strategic organisational capability and Agile as a set of project management processes which deliver work in a speedy and customer-focused way. A lot of the airtime around agility tends to focus on these project management processes, characterised by rapid experimentation and terminology such as ‘sprints’, ‘squads’ and ‘backlogs’. While these processes can be important enablers, designing the organisation for agility needs to focus on developing the core organisation and leadership capabilities that support long-term performance advantage.

2. Consider where agility will work best in your organisation
   HR should focus on creating the best possible model, deploying different design solutions in different parts of the business when required. In practice, this could mean choosing to design for agility in one part of the organisation and focusing on a different design priority (such as scale) in another. For example, consumer goods businesses often optimise their models through focusing on agility in their core product innovation processes. Knowing where to design for agility requires HR to have a deep understanding of how the organisation currently works.

3. Develop leaders who will champion agility
   Leaders are a critical part of designing for agility;  HR should support leaders to develop their capacity to handle complexity, work collaboratively, lead hybrid teams, and create organisation capacity to adapt in unclear environments. To support this, HR may need to rethink criteria for selecting future leaders and strategies for developing them in a changing business context. Leadership role-modelling is also a critical part of the broader development of agility; employees are quick to spot inconsistencies, such as when leaders continue to demand perfection whilst also seemingly wanting to encourage experimentation and learning.

4. Prioritise cross-functional working
   Bringing together cross-functional teams, focusing on outcomes, constant feedback, adjusting and monitoring of progress, should be at the heart of agile working. To achieve this, identify the key capabilities that need to come together to solve the customer problem (whether technology, product, sales, operations) and then look at how they can collaborate better. Understanding the flow of money, how capital is allocated and how this helps or hinders cross-functional working can also help accelerate the adoption of agile.

5. Start small and find ways to engage employees
   Smaller experiments with quick feedback loops using sprints are a good way to test viability, incorporate learnings and demonstrate progress. These can be used to test novel organisation designs on a small scale before rolling out more widely across the organisation. Also identify barriers to adoption and use existing organisational symbols and routines, such as leadership townhalls, company celebrations or employee awards, to build new habits and routines. These are are powerful ways to build an atmosphere of trust, the bedrock of agility.

The increasingly complex business landscape and impact of emerging technologies and new Generative AI tools such as Chat GPT will require organisations to operate with growing agility. Organisation design is foundational to this and HR will need to think holistically about the business to decide where agile processes will best work, and then ensure the development, culture and systems are in place to support agile approaches.

Want to learn more about agile performance to unlock your organisation’s potential? Check out CRF’s Agility 2.0 International Conference Hub here.