Learn more about organizational agility on our Management Kits Blog

Defining agile organizing and key issues to be solved

• The agile organization - how to define and design it: Agile organizing comprises the models, designs, and practices that enable more adaptive management structures based on an increased decentralization of decision making and organizational alignment.
• Towards a canvas for the agile organization: How do you build an agile organization, meaning an adaptable organizational structure based on increased levels of decentralization and self-management? While not aiming at a definitive answer (for now), we suggest a good starting point are crucial issues raised by innovative forms of organizing.
• To build a purpose-driven company, get this one thing right: There is one key common denominator that connects recent contributions on purposeful and purpose-driven organizations and sets the current debate apart from earlier discussions of business vision, mission, and company values. This common thread is an emphasis on individual meaning and sensemaking and, accordingly, the broad and dynamic basis for this purpose in the organization. 
• For key insights for the organization of the future
• Why the future of work will start with autonomous teams
• Responsive organizations may have no managers - but a lot of structure

Cases, examples, and models

• Five key learnings from an HR unit’s self-management experiment: A case study where we were involved with some key practitioner insights.
• Why do companies engage in new forms of organizing? Discussing a number of different reasons why companies have experiments with self-organizing teams and innovative forms of (self-)management in general.
• Can self-managed teams create ideal work environments? If good bosses make work great and terrible bosses make work hell, what happens if you get rid of bosses overall and move to radical decentralization? The answer depends on a number of factors which should be considered for each specific context.
• The challenges of lateral self-governance – a review of Holacracy
• Reinventing “teams” (and renaming them at the same time)

On decentralization

• Decentralized organizations: traditional and radical approaches: One key idea behind decentralization is to give decision-making power to those who know best. Traditional approaches embed decentralized authority into a rigid framework of centrally defined checks and controls. Radical types of decentralization, on the other hand, extend the scope and the depth of decentralized decision-making in organizations.

On hierarchy

• Dealing with organizational high nobility
• The difficult quest to replace managerial hierarchy

Deep dives

• The role of HR in promoting organizational agility: Organizational agility is a top priority for senior leaders to enable continuous adaptation to a changing environment. Human resources has a key role to play in building the agile organization. We identify five levers at HR’s disposal to promote organizational agility.
• How to address organizational fragmentation: Highly hierarchical organizations often suffer from organizational fragmentation. Decentralized structures can reduce the symptoms and drivers of such fragmentation and lead to quicker decisions and dynamic cohesion.
• Five reasons why new forms of organizing and digitalization go hand in hand
• Organizational agility: a precondition for successful intrapreneurs?
• On transparency in the workplace: Getting transparency in the workplace right - easier said than done, The What, How, and Who of transparency in the workplace, and Two powerful practices that increase workplace transparency
• How (not) to run “one firm” initiatives
• Can design thinking promote organizational responsiveness?
• New forms of organizing – the role of context
• How to manage complexity through organizational structure
• Two patterns of change