Your Advantage

It’s a fundamentally new era. The operating environment of most companies has rapidly changed. Unthinkable social and sudden environmental risks, high competition, disruptive technologies, and stakeholders with rapidly changing needs have created a hyper-dynamic business environment.

Business leaders around the globe are faced with the continuous need to adapt their management and organisations to this new environment. They develop capabilities that enable rapid, flexible, and sustainable responses to these challenges. We see people-centricity, agility, speed, and resilience as the bundle of strategic and dynamic capabilities that helps businesses successfully operate in this new era.

It’s a Paradigm Shift

Dynamic capabilities enable people to get work done. In a dynamic context, pre-formatted tips, tricks, ‘best practice’ clichés and general recommendations from the past will never work. People and organisations require well-developed dynamic capabilities that meet their needs and fit their context.

Effective interventions require the reinvention of management and the redesign of organisations in ways that enable rather than control what people do. The shift from traditional to dynamic is a paradigm shift. It’s a shift from a stable, rules-based management model to a dynamic and capabilities-based operating system.

Our research data shows that 78% of problems with performance, innovation, and growth in organisations can be avoided through dynamic capabilities. Like with humans, organisations have invisible 'viruses' that spread sporadically and uncontrollably. They lead to endemic chaos, limit performance, and prevent people from exploiting their potential. This is why interventions to address these interferences require altering behaviours and patterns. Introducing dynamic capabilities means changing dominant behaviours and patterns. Successful shifts to dynamic address 5 choices:

• People: How do we engage people? Self-responsibility vs. control?
• Organisation: How do we coordinate work? Self-organisation vs. bureaucracy?
• Stakeholders: How do we mobilise the energy? Purpose vs. detailed targets?
• Environment: How do we enable change? Capability vs. change?
• Management: How do we manage the company? Enabling vs. controlling?

A Shift with 6 Steps

Our research has identified 6 dominant steps which organisations can follow to make step changes in their design from controlling to enabling:

Organisations that have made the shift to dynamic capabilities will never return. They have ‘crossed the Rubicon’ to reach 6 benefits:

• Scaling: Rapid multiplication of practices, capabilities, and technologies.
• Diffusion: Actualisation of your purpose, strategy, and values.
• Alignment: Futureproof fit of people, organisation, and context.
• Effectiveness: Reliable capability to repeat performance.
• Efficiency: Relentless discipline and quality without waste.
• Sustainability: Reliable capacity to constantly renew and develop.

Step Changes in Performance, Innovation, and Growth

AGILITYINSIGHTS research proves that organisations with dynamic capabilities have reached impressive outcomes in comparison to traditional organisations. Notice the percentage advantages of dynamic over traditional organisations:

Your Competitive Advantage

Dynamic capabilities are a true competitive advantage. In traditional organisation, digital disruption and the speed of change rapidly erode competitive advantages. Dynamic capabilities are the only non-transient and sustainable competitive advantage in a dynamic environment. Here are five questions for your assessment and a next step:

• Does your organisation support people to get work done and create value?
• Is your organisation built for the specific context?
• Are your capabilities hard to copy?
• Is there no alternative to your capabilities?
• Are the capabilities deeply embedded in your organisation’s policies and procedures?

If your answers are yes, then your organisation's capabilities are likely a competitive advantage: Possibly dynamic?

If your answers are no, then you need dynamic capabilities.

Use our free AGILE SCAN and find out what you can do.

Talk to our experts