Practicing Agility: Proposing an Agile Organization Design Manifesto

Other conference contribution, 2022

The interest in business agility and agile organizations is high on CEOs’ agendas in response to rising degrees of uncertainty and change. In line with dominating management theories, agility is typically positioned as an organization’s capability to be flexible, and agile organizations are entities which successfully leverage this capability for managing turbulent environments. In this paper, we develop an alternative to this agility as capability paradigm, focusing instead on what it means to practice agility from the inside. We draw on Mary Parker Follett and the experiences of managers and employees in a case study of an organization “born agile”, designed according to the principles of the Agile Manifesto, to outline the agility as practice paradigm, which gives primacy to people and relationships rather than focusing on assets, methods and tools. Based on the tension-embracing agility as practice paradigm, we develop a Manifesto for Agile Organization Design and discuss implications for managers and employees navigating the agile organizational space. In essence, this manifesto requires all organizational members to adopt, embrace and enact a creative and experimental attitude that seeks to collaboratively find new ways forward, seeing tensions as opportunities for finding a new common ground, leadership as distributed, strategy and organization design as emergent and structures as flexible.