Designing agile organizations
Historically, businesses have focused heavily on building high-performance cultures.
Their efforts have paid off: average performance scores are high across all organization sizes and industries.
Like performance, agility happens by design. The popular fixation on developing performance cultures above all else has hobbled responsiveness. The effort to build these cultures wasn’t wasted, but organizations need to orient themselves to a more balanced approach that includes agility.
Performance components
Alignment with company goals
Commitment to company goal
Understand roles and responsibilities
Employees trust each other
Open and honest communication
Address conflicts constructively
Safe sharing ideas
Safe innovating and taking risks
I can be myself
Diverse perspectives and backgrounds
Complementary skills
Invests in continual learning
Strong leadership
Great customer outcomes
Stick with my current organization
Getting agility back on track
Agility fuels growth, protects against disruption, and creates alignment across people, technology and execution strategy. Critically, agility is essential to maintaining the high-performing cultures that organizations worked so hard to achieve in the face of constant market change.
Every organization, regardless of industry, structure, or scale, has the ability to build it. The question is how.
Here’s a roadmap:
1 | Diagnose
Assess where agility is working and where it’s blocked. Use agility banding to evaluate teams, functions, and leadership tiers. Look for friction. Find the disconnects.
2 | Design
Build programs that prioritize agility from the start—leadership enablement, team structure, learning and development, and technology that makes movement easier, not harder.
3 | Execute
Tie agility to outcomes. Build it into KPIs. Incentivize it. Reinforce it through feedback, experimentation, and real-world metrics like retention, optimism, and delivery speed. Deploy resources and strategic thinking exactly where, when, and how it is needed most.
Agility delivers staying power through speed, clarity, and alignment
Any organization can achieve this. There are best practices. The tools exist. And you don’t have to do it alone. There are partners like Highspring who’ve done this work and who understand how to help organizations shift without losing what makes them strong.
This is a transformation you can start today.
