12 Highlights from the Insights Report 2025
Foreword
Behind every agile organisation are people making conscious choices to adapt, learn and lead. The 2025 Agile Business Awards celebrate these organisations, not for following frameworks but for embracing agility as a way to thrive in a complex and unpredictable environment.
From this, emerged 12 key insights about how business agility is being practised in organisations today. Read on to find out what they are!
Introduction
Business agility is helping organisations to be sustainably better in an ever-changing world. We see organisations becoming increasingly better at balancing “being agile” with “doing agile” in order to provide value.
Top-performing organisations recognise that culture change requires intentional design. They invest in psychological safety, learning mindsets and experimentation. Their leaders are visible, collaborative and distributed, demonstrating that leadership belongs across all levels of the organisation. Governance is evolving too; principles are enabling empowered teams to make fast, informed decisions within clear strategic boundaries.
12 Key Hightlights
1. Frameworks serve, they don’t lead
Business agility has grown into a strategic, organisational competency.
It is no longer about implementing a playbook or framework. Successful organisations develop adaptive capabilities that span all of the Framework for Business Agility, rather than forcing methods that fit the framework.
2. Culture needs crafting
Cultural transformation does not happen by accident; it takes intent and must be sustainable.
High-performing organisations deliberately build collaborative mindsets and encourage learning through explicit social structures, embedding feedback loops, fostering psychological safety and enabling inclusive communication. They are not leaving culture to evolve by chance.
5. Supporting functions as transformation partners
Business agility thrives when HR, Finance, Procurement and other supporting functions are part of the transformation journey.
Support functions are no longer bystanders. These groups increasingly serve as crucial enablers of organisational agility with rolling forecasts and competency-based HR practices leading the way.
6. Change is never done
Organisations that treat change as continuous, yield better results than treating it as a finite project.
Regular strategic iteration and adaptive planning cycles replace fixed multi-year plans This kind of responsiveness creates organisational resilience that lasts.
7. Strategy is an enabler, not a separate initiative
High-performing organisations treat strategy as
a dynamic flow of hypotheses testing and embed agility directly into their strategy rather than treating it as a parallel or separate effort. It is supported by quarterly reviews, OKRs, and transparent information sharing. Business agility delivers the best results when directly tied to strategic initiatives.
8. People lie at the heart of progress
The best organisations know that people are not a cost, but they are the core.
Those that viewed talent development as central to business success created stronger engagement and performance. They invest in role development which equates to higher engagement, lower attrition and lasting, sustainable performance.
9. Co-creating with customers accelerates value delivery
Direct engagement with customers through design partnerships, feedback loops, and joint experimentation consistently delivers better outcomes. Aligning operational teams around customer outcomes and empowering them to deliver creates better results than function-based organisational structures. Value flows faster when customers are part of the design.
10. Agility beyond your borders
Ecosystem agility emerges when organisations move from isolated operations to collaborative partnerships that extend beyond boundaries.
The most adaptive organisations actively collaborate with suppliers, partners, and even competitors, recognising that "you can only be as agile as your least agile business partner."
11. Value metrics over activity metrics
The most mature organisations are shifting how they measure success. they focus metrics on the value delivered rather than activities completed. This is supported by Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that connect individual contributions to strategic objectives.
12. AI needs agility to thrive
AI is a powerful enabler to success, it is not a shortcut. Organisations with mature business agility practices demonstrate greater success in experimenting with and integrating AI technologies as an enabler to deliver greater value.
