Business agility isn't about frameworks but mastering five capabilities: sensing and responding, decision velocity, structural flexibility, distributed authority, and a learning orientation. These are the organizational muscles needed to survive and thrive in a volatile market.
Implementing AI won't magically solve your problems. It acts as a powerful amplifier. In an agile company, it speeds up value creation. In a bureaucratic one, it aggressively exposes structural flaws, leadership gaps, and brittle decision-making processes.
Many companies confuse adopting agile practices like standups with achieving true business agility. This "agile theater" creates an illusion of progress, confirmed by a BCG study, without improving bottom-line results like time-to-market or revenue.
Spending time managing dependencies is a waste because it’s a symptom of a flawed organizational structure or technical architecture. The solution isn't better project management, but using structural flexibility to reorganize teams and systems, thus eliminating dependencies entirely.
Hot debates in tech, like team topologies or whether agile is dead, are not just technical squabbles. They are proxy wars over fundamental business capabilities like structural flexibility or decision velocity, just framed in a language the CFO won't understand or fund.
The idea that you need a massive framework to scale agility is a lie. Agility doesn't scale; bureaucracy does. To increase speed and responsiveness, you must relentlessly de-scale the organization by breaking down silos into smaller, cross-functional, autonomous units.
Stop reporting internal process metrics like velocity or predictability to leadership. These are vanity metrics. The only two things that truly matter and should be on an executive deck are your impact on market share and tangible customer outcomes. Anything else is a distraction.
Executive dashboards often present a "watermelon" status: green on the surface due to vanity metrics like velocity, but red underneath when you examine actual business outcomes. This false sense of security hides deep-seated performance issues and punishes those who look deeper.
When a company repeatedly fails to evolve despite clear data, the root cause is not a faulty process or lack of agility. It's a personnel problem—leaders who are unable or unwilling to make correct decisions. Business agility only makes these blockages transparent; it doesn't solve them.