In my spare time I coach basketball. There are a lot of skills we seek to develop in our athletes, one of these is Agility. It is also an important skill for an organisation to develop to become resilient.
Just for something different, let me offer a couple of dictionary style definitions to start. These are from Wikipedia
“In sports, agility is described in terms of response to an opposing player, moving target, as seen in field sports and racket sports. Sheppard and Young (2006) define agility as “a rapid whole body movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus.”
In business, agility means the capability of rapidly and cost efficiently adapting to changes.”
- I like the second sport one best, changing the speed or direction of the entire entity in response to something happening.
- No matter how much we invest in redundancy and other risk mitigations, the fact remains we are unable to reduce the probability of a risk being realised to zero. Therefore we are going to get that stimulus and need to be able to react.
- The resilient organisation also needs to be able to deal with the realisation of a risk they had not previously considered
In particular, agility relates to the unplanned response. There is a very good outline of this idea on Jan Husdal’s blog – the post talks about the concepts of agility and flexability.
The need for Agility is significant in supply chain risk thinking. Hau Lee wrote a definitive article on this subject called “The Triple-A Supply Chain”. Triple-A being Agility, Adaptability and Alignment. All worthwhile attributes we need to develop on our journey to improve resilience in our critical operations.
More on this tomorrow.
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