1007
OVERALL AGILITY LEVELS DECLINE
The first surprise in the second Agile Performer Index is that the level of agility, overall, declined. In 2017, the overall average agility level for European firms was 68. In 2019, overall agility for European, North American, and other regions was 65, implicating a decrease of 4%. For European organizations alone, the index dropped 6%, from 68 to 64.
Thus, part of the decline may be the addition of new regions to the sample. However, given the amount of attention and resources devoted to agility in North America and the proportion of North American firms in the sample, this doesn’t seem likely.
Why then, might agility be declining?
We offer two important and related concerns based on our conversations with executives in different countries and industries:
More and more organizations are considering and implementing agility transformations. The success rate of these transformations vary widely and leadership teams are learning about the complexity and pervasiveness of the change as well as the length of time required. Agility scores may decline because executives are coming to grips with the difficulty.
The amount of information about agility (and the learning described above) results in a “recalibration” of what it means to be agile. Two years ago, agility was a new concept and there were few benchmarks against which to judge an organization’s level of agility. Today, there are more cases of agility being discussed and an executive’s definition of “high levels of agility” may have matured. The agility scores have declined because there is a more sophisticated notion of agility.
AGILE PERFORMER INDEX 2 -
KEY RESULTS