Framework for Business Agility

Agility in an organisation’s culture,
​leadership and governance ​
enables​
Agility in its capability to operate,​
change, and support its business​
and optimises​
Agility in its delivery of value to its​
customers, its ecosystem and its people

Agility in strategy ensures that
the organisation maintains a focus​
on delivery of value

The Framework for Business Agility (FBA) has been developed and evolved through our work with organisations who are striving to be adaptable and deliver value in their context. It is a set of lenses that can be used to assess the agility of the organisation, and to look for ways of improving. It is not a model that can be implemented. The FBA has been used as the basis for the Agile Business Awards, and has supported applicants, and reviewers, in identifying good practice and signalling potential improvements.

The framework is not relying on any method or development framework, so is agnostic. Also, because it is a set of lenses, it is scalable. It can be, and has been, used to understand a department, an enterprise, a change programme, a team, a supply chain. It helps with understanding of the situation, and identifying and prioritising potential areas of improvements.

Customer

Value Customers of the organisation

• The primary focus for the delivery of value for most organisations should be their customers.
• The most successful organisations will be those that sustain delivery of value in a VUCA world (characterised by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity)
• To survive and thrive in this regard it is important to organise in a way that enables the business to constantly deliver value to customers, in a changing world, with changing customer needs.
• Everyone in the organisation needs to:
• Know the customer and the value they deserve so that all decisions are focused on adding to that value.
• Understand the customer’s “why”, to help anticipate their needs. In public sector organisations, the citizen is the valued customer.
• Sustainable shareholder / stakeholder value can only be achieved as a result of knowing, understanding, championing and serving the customer. That is critical to the success of the organisation and must be the primary driver.

Ecosystem

Value the Ecosystem in which the organisation exists

• No organisation exists in isolation. It lives in:
• An organisational ecosystem of regulators, suppliers, competitors, partners, innovators and innovations.
• A social ecosystem of individuals, communities, rules and customs.
• An ecological ecosystem of resources, energy, and nature.
• To survive and thrive requires an organisation to understand its role in its ecosystem with success defined by how it delivers customer value while contributing positively to the ecosystem in which it lives.

People

Value the people within the organisation

• People are the powerhouse of every successful agile organisation – one that is able to survive and thrive in a world characterised volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
• Trusting people, allowing them to develop and show their talents in the organisation, and engaging them through purpose, is critical to ensuring the sustainable success of an organisation.
• Collaborating talents, happy with their work, focused on delivering value, and supported, but not constrained, by processes and technology, are the core of a resilient, responsive, agile and thus successful organisation.
• People learn and adapt faster than systems: They
• Learn and adapt most easily when they feel safe
• Are more creative when powered by diversity
• Grow naturally when learning from each other

View more about Agile People.

Cultural Agility

• An organisation’s culture reflects its personality – one that’s influenced by a range of factors, including its size, geographic spread, beliefs, and values. People and events also affect an organisation’s culture.
• An agile culture provides an organisation with a set of core values, behaviours and practices that allow it to prosper in a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
• Its success also comes from promoting, encouraging, rewarding and harnessing the flexible and innovative behaviour of people within the organisation, by nurturing the three components of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
• There are seven elements that combine to form the DNA of an organisation’s agile culture, for which there is a Development Matrix for Agile Culture describing five levels of agility for each of the seven elements.

Please feel free to use the Matrix and the associated Pulse Survey to understand and enhance your organisation’s agile culture.

View more about Agile Culture.

Leadership Agility

• Individuals within an organisation are typically identified as leaders as a result of one or more of: Their knowledge and experience related to what they are leading; their competence as a leader; and/or their position within a hierarchy.
• To create and sustain flexible, resilient and adaptable organisations, agile leaders seek to develop others as leaders at all levels, believing that everyone has the potential inherent in a growth mindset to deliver on a shared purpose.
• To be credible and effective, agile leadership requires a willingness from those who lead to ensure that they extend their own competencies, capabilities and thinking to ‘being’ agile rather than just ‘doing’ agile.
• There are nine principles for agile leadership that are aligned with the agile themes of communication, collaboration and commitment. These principles should be embraced by any leader wishing to harness the power of collective effort – regardless of the scale of the change or the authority they inherit from organisational structure.

Find out more about Agile Leadership.

Agile Governance

• Agile governance represents a dynamic, value-driven approach to decision-making and oversight that enables organisations to remain aligned with their purpose and regulatory requirements, while adapting rapidly to changing conditions. Rather than governance that minimises harm through rigid controls, agile governance creates conditions that enable business agility and sustainable value creation.
• This approach distributes authority to where information and expertise reside, with clear boundaries that prevent doing wrong things inadvertently, whilst keeping within the regulatory boundaries. It operates through empowerment at the lowest responsible level, alignment with organisational purpose, and transparency that enables trust and effective coordination.
• In principle, governance is universal, pervasive and scaled. It is based on:
• Empowerment – reliant on informed decision making, at the lowest responsible level, that is responsive and at pace.
• Alignment – with the purpose and values of the organisation and any appropriate legislation.
• Transparency – easy for people internal and external to the organisation to see what is going on and when intervention is needed. Providing an auditable record of activity where needed to demonstrate compliance and appropriate management of risk.
• Agile Governance applies minimal viable governance—just enough to ensure effectiveness and compliance, with each mechanism justified by the value it adds. It values radical transparency, trusted autonomy, collaborative responsiveness and informed judgement. ,It requires active commitment and participation throughout the organisation to enable decisions by those who know, rather than those with positional power.
• Agile Governance is facilitated by principles-based approaches that create consistency without requiring uniformity. Dynamic adaptation ensures governance frameworks remain agile, evolving as organisational needs change. Focus is on delivering value to customers, people, and ecosystem, rather than creating bureaucratic artifacts.

See our White Paper on Agility in Governance.

Operational Agility

• Agility in business operation, business change and the internal support of these are at the heart of every business that is able to survive and thrive in a VUCA world (one characterised by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity).
• Operational agility is the organisation's capacity to adapt day-to-day value delivery as customer needs, markets, and ecosystems evolve. Most agile methods and frameworks operate here, enabling teams to respond to change while maintaining sustainable value creation. (Agile) Product Management typically sits in this part of the FBA.
• In a VUCA world, what customers value, or what people and ecosystems require, shifts continuously. Value delivery processes must be adaptive to ensure sustainable, cost-effective delivery. Organisations balance operational efficiency with the capability to respond rapidly when what's valuable changes.
• This occurs through customer-centric delivery, experimental methods including MVPs (Minimal Viable Product) and proof of concepts, flow-based working, and empowered teams working within clear boundaries. Consider methods or frameworks such as AgilePM, Lean, XP, DA / DAD, LeSS, SAFe, or AgileDS for digital products and services. Scrum and Kanban can be applied across areas depending on context and are not specifically focused on digital delivery.
• When pressure for change exceeds operational capacity, or when there are needs beyond improving products and services (for example, when entering new markets, or when people need to change their behaviours), the Business Change Agility lens (described later) provides more appropriate guidance.
• These capabilities exist on a continuum. Operational agility depends on the organisation's culture, leadership and governance—foundational elements that enable or constrain delivery effectiveness.

Business Change Agility

• Where pressure for change exceeds the capacity and capability of operational agility, a special response may be needed. This is achieved through agility in business change that exists in a continuum with operational agility.
• Examples of such changes may include: Changing the way the organisation operates to comply with new regulations; bringing new products or services to market; moving existing products and services to new markets; and transforming the business – either to meet a new purpose or to achieve an existing purpose in a significantly different way
• In order to be successful, these larger changes, often need to be organised alongside the day-to-day operation of the business in a way that allows the value of the change to be delivered incrementally and as early as possible but without creating turbulence that risks overwhelming the operation.
• Transformational initiatives to develop significant new products, services or capabilities and ensure that the value of these are fully realised, e.g. by changing operational value delivery processes, support processes, and/or bringing about change in culture, governance and leadership often need to be managed as agile projects or programmes.

Business Support Agility

• Agile Business Support processes enable the organization to deliver value to People, Customers and Ecosystem. They don’t directly deliver value themselves.
• Business Support Agility transforms enabling functions, such as Finance, HR, Procurement, Marketing, Facilities etc., from constraints into accelerators of value delivery. While these functions don't directly create customer value, their agility is essential for organisational responsiveness and growth.
• Agile support functions enable rapid response to opportunities and challenges, foster growth mindsets, enable strategic pivoting through flexible resource allocation, and support value delivery through streamlined processes.
• Support functions can create constraints: inflexible financial processes can prevent resource reallocation, restrictive HR policies can inhibit collaborative work, rigid procurement can limit relationship adaptability, overly structured marketing can miss new opportunities, inflexible facilities can inhibit collaboration, etc.
• Agile Business Support functions address these potential constraints systematically. Finance moves toward flexible approaches like Beyond Budgeting. HR develops policies encouraging collaborative work while building the required competencies, recognising work in teams and M-shaped functions. Procurement develops adaptive partnerships. Marketing maintains openness to new opportunities. Facilities support effective collaboration. As a starter for change in these functions, many start by using SCRUM or Kanban as collaborative working methods.

Agile Strategy

• Agile strategy represents the organisation's capability to continuously adapt its strategic direction as conditions change, while maintaining focus on delivering value to customers, people, and ecosystem. It consists of guiding principles communicated throughout the organisation that generate consistent decision-making patterns and enable learning and adaptation in a VUCA environment.
• Rather than fixed plans implemented from the top down, agile strategy operates as an organisational competency. This happens through defining strategic hypotheses and testing them via lean experiments, holding regular (at least quarterly) strategic retrospectives, following dynamic cycles of defining-realising-measuring-adapting, and maintaining transparent information sharing that enables rapid course corrections and speed to market.
• Strategy becomes a distributed competency guided by a shared North Star. This allows people throughout the organisation to make decisions and allocate resources using strategic principles.
• Consider using approaches such as Agile Portfolio Management (AgilePfM) for strategic resource allocation and risk monitoring and response. Foundational approaches like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) support the setting of goals and measurement of progress, and enable pivoting when hypotheses prove invalid. Running strategic experiments and regular retrospectives provide the rhythm and structure needed for adaptive strategic management.
• Agile Strategy requires effective agility in culture, leadership, and governance. These foundational elements enable distributed strategic thinking and rapid strategic adaptation throughout the organisation.