What is agile?
"Agility is about being so good at the process of change that it becomes your competitive advantage. The essence of agility is the ability to respond quickly, to adapt to change and to what is emerging."
— Michael K. Spayd & Michele Madore (2020)
Few words in business are used as often, and as loosely, as 'agile'. Senior leaders invoke it in keynotes, strategy documents promise it, and management training programmes schedule it. The implication is always the same: the organisation should become more of it.
But what is meant by the word agile? First, the agile software development movement of the early 2000s gave us agile teams. In more recent years the word agile has also been used to describe functional units and entire organisations.
Agile is not a single method. It is a cluster of values and practices that share one common assumption: uncertainty and change are normal, and the right response is to learn fast and adapt, rather than to predict everything in advance. The question is how to achieve this.
We can use this framing to look at agile on different levels.
Agility at the individual level
How good are you when it comes to dealing with change and uncertainty? Some people are naturally better at it than others. The traits that matter are cognitive flexibility, the willingness to change one's mind in light of new evidence, and the tolerance to keep working when the path ahead is unclear.
It’s natural to want safety, security and certainty. Yet the only thing certain in the modern world seems to be that surprises happen. Agility asks us to treat that discomfort — of not knowing how things will go or what the right course of action is — as part of the work.
Kevin Kelly, a futurist and a co-founder of Wired magazine, captured this idea well in a recent article:
In our era of uncertain uncertainty, certainty will be the killer. In this era more downfalls will happen because of overconfidence than questioning. The key is to not get stuck on just one option. You have to become at ease holding multiple contradictory possibilities at once. (To prevent yourself from being swept away by the latest current and fashionable whim, this radical adaptability must be anchored on a steadfast set of unchangeable virtues...) The strategy for prospering in prolonged uncertainty must be one of constant, agile recalibration. In short, in our age of uncertainty, you have to get good at changing your mind.
Agility at the team or project level
Traditional project management starts from the assumption that the outcome and the path to it can be specified up front. This means project management is largely focused on executing a predefined plan. "We need to solve X, and this is how we are going to do it." That approach works when uncertainty is low. Then again, a lot of knowledge work is fundamentally uncertain. We simply do not have enough information to fully predict how things will turn out before we start working on them.
Agile starts from a different assumption: "We need to solve X, but we don't yet know what the solution will look like, or how to get there." We have ideas about where we want to end up, but the details will change as we learn more. Crucially, this learning takes place during project execution, not when the initial plans are being made.
Agile shifts the focus from executing a plan to structures and practices that allow the team to learn quickly, generate empirical evidence, and adjust the plan as they go. Project success is not measured by how well we stick to the original plan, but by how efficient we are at generating validated learning — new knowledge, ideally backed by first-hand evidence, that moves the team closer to the intended outcome.
Agility at the coordination level
Several agile teams working independently do not add up to an agile organisation. The bottlenecks simply move from inside the teams to the spaces between them — handoffs, dependencies, queues, waiting on a decision, unclear priorities when multiple teams want the same expert at the same time. So the question is how to make sure that work actually flows from initial demand to delivered outcome, across whichever teams are involved. For example:
Where do projects get stuck waiting for a decision, an approval, or a specialist?
How well are we matching the right projects to the right people, and the right people to the right projects?
When several initiatives compete for the same scarce expertise or equipment, how do we decide between them?
How fluidly do knowledge, methods, and tools move between teams that could benefit from each other's work?
How many things are we trying to do in parallel — and is that helping us or slowing us down?
When this layer is missing, every team can be doing its best and yet, somehow, we are not seeing a meaningful improvement in overall performance.
Agility at the organisational level
At the organisational level, agility starts to influence processes such as strategy development, portfolio management, resource allocation and budgeting. It also changes the way many functional teams have got used to operating.
Responding to change quickly requires that agile teams have more decision-making authority and autonomy than their traditional counterparts. To enable this, the approach of support functions shifts from controlling the work of teams to supporting it: embedded experts, coaching, clear guidelines within which teams can act, and faster turnaround on requests.
The yearly budgeting cycle is too slow for agile organisations. It tends to keep unpromising projects alive until their funding runs out, while genuinely promising new directions wait their turn for the next cycle. Funding in agile organisations looks more like venture capital: smaller initial bets, frequent re-evaluation, and willingness to redirect resources as evidence accumulates.
The OKR (objectives and key results) model is a good example of a more agile approach to organisational strategy: strategy gives direction, but OKRs enable autonomy in how that direction is pursued at different levels of the organisation. Quarterly key results enable quicker feedback loops than annual goals.
Agile teams are often more effective than their traditional counterparts when dealing with complexity and uncertainty, but organisational agility is what enables a true step change in performance. According to a 2021 McKinsey report, highly successful agile transformations have produced companies that rank first in innovation among their peers, achieve 5–10x improvements in decision-making speed, and roughly 30% gains in efficiency, operational performance, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement.
As an example, the drone industry in Ukraine has shown what can be achieved with agility at an organisational level and beyond: the time it takes for a new model to be designed, fielded, and evaluated is roughly seven days. If there's a problem, such as an increasing number of drones lost due to jamming, it takes about a week to have a solution ready to be tested. Compare that with the traditional timeframe of weapons development, which is counted in years, sometimes decades.
This is possible because frontline operators have direct contact with drone manufacturers: no need for tenders or requisition forms, no customer service representatives or ministry officials acting as proxies, but direct access to the people who build the drones. Likewise, the designers and engineers at the manufacturer have autonomy to make production changes so that they can be tested in real-life conditions as quickly as possible. The advantage that Ukraine has is not a specific cost-effective drone design, but the organisational system that enables rapid iteration based on real-life evidence.
Conclusion
Most discussions of agile focus on teams and projects. This is the common starting point in most organisations that want to become more agile, and a sensible one: that is where the day-to-day work happens. But agility does not start and stop at the team level. It is not just a set of tools or methods for leading work, but a way of thinking and acting that influences everything from culture to structure to processes and behaviour.