Lessons learned on agility from the pandemic

Authored by  Kat Lee, EY Partner

Two years of pandemic pivoting has further transformed enterprises globally, requiring them to reflect on and accelerate their agility and adaptability. Organizations that empower people to make the call on day-to-day actions and decisions have opened new ways to increase both workforce resilience and profitable growth.

In brief

• Why is agility important now?
• How can organizations translate agility gained into future progress?
• What’s the bottom line on enterprise agility?

Why is agility so important now?

Agility’s been around for a long time. But a variety of environment and market factors has elevated the need for and the focus on the topic. By the numbers, nearly 90% of the world’s CEOs say their business has been impacted by the pandemic, according to the EY 2022 CEO Outlook Survey. As the initial COVID-19 crisis has receded, aligning internal people, processes, and technology to make agility central to the organization’s culture will help enterprises in any industry prepare for the next unforeseen shock.

Many organizations are emerging from the last two years with greater agility than they started with – simply because they had to. But what lessons can we capture to adapt and learn going forward? Unleashing that newfound agility through permanent changes in ways of working now can make a big difference going forward.

What’s the biggest mistake businesses can make today?

The biggest mistake an organization can make now is to underplay the role that people, mindsets and culture play in fostering agility. Many organizations have already started to realize that it’s not the processes and tools that will help the organization deliver on the promise of agility, it’s the people.

Typically, leaders are used to being the ones who make the call. However, agility comes from removing bottlenecks and hierarchy from decisions and empowering those who are doing and owning the work to be accountable for making the call. It’s about delegating authority and trusting that they know their work best.

Another mistake is that organizations and teams try to do everything all at once. The result is that nothing gets done because there is too much to do. That lack of prioritization is another downfall. There’s an agile mindset saying of “stop starting, start finishing.” If organizations are constantly trying to start new things, the list of things to get done never ends. Organizations end up spreading themselves too thin and then are unable to differentiate in their markets, with their customers and with employees.

How can organizations translate agility gained into future progress?

Keeping three learnings in mind can help you identify where agility has thrived in your own organization and capitalize on those areas to build additional business resilience and success:

1. Command and control fell by the wayside. During the pandemic, more people had to make decisions. This reality became an enabler for organizations. Without the need to endlessly filter ideas or choices up and down the hierarchy, teams at varying levels of the organization were able to seize the moment to make informed decisions quickly.

2. Prioritization became the priority. The sense of urgency businesses experienced over the last two years forced people to focus on what truly mattered most and let everything else go. Bridging more of that prioritization going forward can enable people to make greater progress faster.

3. Teams collaborated differently. It’s not enough to layer new software or tech tools into an organization for agility to really take hold. It demands a holistic approach. During the pandemic, people learned to collaborate virtually, innovate on the fly, and connect in ways that defied traditional office dynamics — like running into each other in the halls or elevators. Consider how you support that kind of non-traditional teaming to help these new, more agile strategies take root.

What’s the bottom line on enterprise agility?

Agility thrives when people come first and enabled by processes and tech — not the other way around. Just because you have an agile methodology, doesn't mean you're agile. It's mindsets over methods. So identify how your people naturally cultivated agility through the pandemic, and embed those small but impactful actions into your day-to-day work to flex on the road ahead.