what-is-Agility?
“Agility” can be understood as a maxim used by management and business consultants to turn sluggish organizations of the industrial age into nimble and agile companies in a digitized society. Under the banner of greater customer proximity, corporate mission statements should be oriented to “agility” just as much as production processes; formal structures in companies should be be handled just as “agilely” as staff management. This is all easier said than done. What makes it so difficult?
External vs. internal Adaption
Not only do companies realize that they need to change in the 21st century to stay aligned with their external environments, the markets. They also realize that they have internal environments that are not easily changed. The non-decisional premises of management decisions (“corporate culture”) are just as difficult to dispose of as the normative beliefs of the workforce (“beliefs”). And despite agile management, the interests of production remain notoriously different from those of sales.
The inherent complexity of the organization, which has been the guarantor of the company’s success in the markets under other environmental conditions, leads a stubborn life of its own and continues to exist not only during but often also after change processes – and sometimes even endangers the success of the company.
Resistance due to self-organization processes
What is the reason for this? In a nutshell, it is due to independent, self-organized processes not only within an organization, but precisely through an organization. All social systems, including companies, are not only systems in an environment, but they are also self-organized systems. And like all social systems, companies also react to parameters that emerge by themselves in the process of organized behavior – behind the actors’ backs, so to say. Change processes in particular are therefore more difficult to control than management often wants to admit, and the agility maxim would have us believe.
AGIL – an acronym for self-organization.
At MESH® RESEARCH, we translate the discussion about “agility” into a scientific context.
AGIL here no longer stands for a management maxim, but for an acronym in the context of a self-organization theory of human action (Talcott Parsons, Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory, 1977). Originally discovered in task-oriented small groups (Robert Bayles, The Equilibrium Problem in Small Groups, 1953) and later applied to large-scale systems such as organizations (R. Jean Hills, Toward a Science of Organization, 1968) and entire societies (Talcott Parsons, The System of Modern Societies, 1972; Richard Münch, The Structure of Modernity, 1984), such theories assume that the interrelationship of several actions, i.e., the establishment of a system of action, can be established in the long run only if exactly four functions are fulfilled:
- The gaining of control over the means by which a group of people can better adapt to conditions in their environment through their own behavior: Adaptation
- The balancing of conflicting social processes: Cohesion
- The definition of goals that are to be bindingly achieved for a collective of people: Goal achievement
- The maintenance of value commitments to which people feel obligated in a self-evident way: Maintaining implicit value patterns.
The acronym AGIL is derived from the first letters of the English names of the four functions of an action system:
Adaptation
Goal Attainment
Integration
Latent pattern maintenance
An example of the scientific reformulation of “agility” in companies
Many of the actions recommended in the context of agile management relate to the four functional aspects of an action system. For example, both the shift to iterative and incremental (production) processes and the breaking down of organizational silo structures through the installation of agile project teams fulfill the function of better adapting internal corporate roles and corporate behavior to changing demand in markets (Adaptation).
In order to not simply enforce the defined goals of the company hierarchically against its own employees, but to achieve those together with them if possible, a parallel change in the authority resources of a certain collective in the company – managers – that are recognized as legitimate can also be observed. More and more, a hierarchical management style is being supplemented at least by such attempts to lead employees not only from “above” but also from “the side,” i.e., laterally (Goal Attainment).
“Agility” is furthermore also relevant for the coordination of actions and the integration of loyalties among employees. For if it is true that in the “New Work” employees must be able to adapt to rapidly changing, confusing situations on a daily basis on the one hand, but on the other hand they have no reliable basis for decision-making and, moreover, numerous alternative courses of action (“VUKA”) to cope with them, not only would their own behavior be unnecessarily inhibited, but coordination with the behavior of others would also be immensely difficult if de facto social norms had not been established in every company that provide employees with information about which “agile” behaviors are considered compatible with each other in which situations – and which are not. After all, not every behavior that promotes itself as “agile” can count on social support from colleagues (Integration).
In turn, these change processes are accompanied by a gradual change in the corporate culture. “Agility” is increasingly becoming a value in companies that is not only claimed as a source of legitimacy for changes in organizational structures and management styles and is presented externally in mission statements. “Agility” is also a value pattern that is gradually being internalized by employees in the digitized world of “New Work” – not least due to the “home office”. In the process of making the everyday orientation of employees to the value pattern of “agility” (which is by no means easy) self-evident – i.e. by establishing an “agile mindset” – companies can preserve their structural identity in times of radical change – if you will: their “DNA “ – (latent pattern maintenance).
Management fashion vs. management method
At MESH® RESEARCH, by focusing on a scientifically founded theory of the self-organization of human action and preparing it in a practical way for personnel and organizational development in companies, as well as for in-service training and further education, management tools of the present do not simply get a greater intellectual depth. As shown in the example of AGILity, specialists and managers learn not only how they can proceed in order to possibly achieve an effect, but for what reasons they have to turn which adjusting screws in their companies in order to achieve sustainable success. In this way, they learn to distinguish between mere management fads and real management methods.