Why Agility Cannot Stand Alone

When the competition launches a new product, how you react says a lot about you as a professional and your company as an organization. But it is likely that you act quickly and decisively to address the changing factors and conditions after they’ve occurred.

This is called agility, and we often utilize agility to change directions and head the competition off at the pass. But what if you could skip that pivot altogether?

Think about some of the most powerful and industry-disruptive products and services that have changed the game through today, and try to put them in context with the concept of agility. For example, do you think Kickstarter became the dominating force in the growing crowdsourcing industry because it was agile? Was agility the driving force behind Uber’s dominance in ridesharing? Of course not, because agility is a form of reaction to an outside force, a knee-jerk reaction to change, so to speak.

What you and your organization need to realize is that many problems are solvable before they become problems by way of anticipation. To be anticipatory means to pay attention to the Hard Trends that are shaping your industry, both from within and outside of your industry, and then utilize what you observe to pre-solve your problems before they become big issues.