These days, everywhere you go in the corporate world, there’s one word you’ll definitely hear: agility.
“We need to be agile.”
“The organisation must be agile.”
“We need agile leaders, agile teams, agile processes.”
At some point, I wanted to raise my hand and ask, “Errrr… Can someone please explain what agile actually means… in normal human language?”
Because sometimes, it feels like one of those corporate buzzwords that everyone uses, but not everyone fully understands.
Is this a new requirement now?
When I first started working more than 20 years ago, the words we heard were different.
Hardworking. Reliable. Committed. Team player. Deliver results… Those were the things that mattered.
Now, the words have changed!
Agile. Digital. Innovative. Pivot. Adaptive. Disruptive!
Sometimes I feel like the corporate dictionary gets updated every year, and we all have to keep up whether we like it or not.
So yes, I think agility has become a new requirement; not officially written in our job description, but very much expected. The world moves faster now. Business change direction faster. Technology changes faster. Even the way we communicate and work has changed. So maybe, agility simply means this: the ability to not get stuck.
But what if we’re not agile? This is the scary part, right?
What if we don’t really understand what agility means?
What if we’re used to doing things a certain way, and suddenly, everything changes.
What if the younger generation coming into the workforce seems to move faster, learn faster, adapt faster?
It can be intimating. Especially if you’ve been working for more than 20 or 30 years, and suddenly you’re told you need to learn new systems, new tools, new ways of working, new reporting formats, new communication platforms… sometimes, all at once.
There are days when I look at a new software or new processes and think, “Do I really have the energy to learn this again?” But then, I remind myself, we HAVE been adapting our whole lives. We just didn’t call it agility back then.
Think about it for a sec…
We adapted from letters to emails.
From emails to WhatsApp.
From face-to-face meetings to Zoom and Teams.
Front printed reports to dashboards and live data.
From working strictly 9 to 5 in the office, to working from home, from cars, from cafes, from everywhere!
If that’s not agility, I don’t know what is. Maybe the difference now is that agility is no longer optional. It’s expected.
What does being agile look like, really?
Agility doesn’t always mean doing big, dramatic changes. Sometimes, it’s very simple things at work: it’s when a plan suddenly changes and instead of saying, “This is not how we’ve always done it,” we say “Ok, let’s see how we can make this work.”
It’s when a younger colleague suggests a new way of doing something, we welcome it by saying “Teach me.”
It’s when a project goes wrong and instead of playing the blaming game, we ask, “What can we do differently next time?”
It’s when we are asked to do something outside our job scope and our first reaction is NOT “That’s not my job!” but “Ok, this will be strange and uncomfortable, but maybe I’ll learn something.” Agility, maybe, is just being willing to learn, unlearn, and relearn, without letting our ego get in the way.
Honest question: do we (read: I) still have the energy? LOL!
When we’re not that young anymore, when we already have families, responsibilities, aging parents, growing children and bodies that get tired more easily than before; do we really have the energy to keep upskilling, keep adapting, keep changing? Penattttttt!
I don’t know the best answer. But what I do know is… the alternative to that is NOT CHANGING AT ALL, and that’s probably harder in the long run! Because the negative side of not being agile? We will slowly, quietly… become irrelevant. Not because we are not smart or not hardworking, but because the world moved and we chose to stand still. Scary much?
My reflection?
So, maybe being agile is not about being the fastest, the youngest, or the most tech-savvy person in the room. Maybe being agile is simply about having the humility to admit we don’t know everything, the courage to try new things even when we might fail, and the willingness to keep learning, no matter how long we’ve been working.
After more than whatever years in the corporate world, maybe agility is not about changing who we are. Maybe it’s about not becoming a rigid version of ourselves. Because the world will keep changing. Companies will keep changing. Systems will keep changing.
So, maybe the real question is NOT “Am I agile enough?”
Maybe the real question is “Am I still willing to learn?”
Written by A.
Balancing duty in public service and care at home, she writes from the heart of both worlds.