Business in the fast lane

Citation

(2007), "Business in the fast lane", Women in Management Review, Vol. 22 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/wimr.2007.05322bab.006

Business in the fast lane

American Management Association's 2006 agility and resilience survey reveals the effects of change on business

More than 80 per cent of executives say that the pace of change is speeding up in organizations all over the world. And seven out of ten say that their organizations experienced disruptive change during the last year. That is according to a new global survey commissioned by American Management Association (AMA) and conducted by the Human Resource Institute (HRI).

The AMA/HRI survey “Agility and Resilience in the Face of Continuous Change” included responses from 1,472 managers and HR experts from around the world. The survey was conducted in conjunction with AMA's affiliates and global partners, including Canadian Management Centre in Toronto, Management Centre Europe in Brussels, AMA Latin America in Mexico City and AMA Asia in Japan.

“While we talk about the need for organizations to be agile and resilient, it is easier said than done. The management of organizational change is a challenge, one that we must study continually if we are to identify the skill sets we need to cope with it at today's ever-accelerating pace,” says Edward T. Reilly, President and CEO of AMA.

“The actions of corporate leaders and managers can raise or lower the level of corporate agility and resilience. Functional silos, excessive decision-making steps, norms of conformity, restricted flow of information, cumbersome infrastructures and deafness to any ideas but our own – these are some of the ways that an organization's management team creates a sluggish company unable to work with change,” Reilly said. “While strategic agility and resilience are very much a function of an organization as a whole, they are also the sum of its processes, policies, systems, technologies, structures, and culture and of those who create them.”

Not only is the pace of change increasing, but also change itself is undergoing a transformation and becoming increasingly disruptive. The study found that seven out of ten of survey respondents said that their organizations had experienced disruptive change (defined as severe surprises or unanticipated shocks) over the previous 12 months.

When asked to compare disruptiveness in their organizations today with disruptiveness over the previous five years, about 37 per cent said that their organizations had experienced more shocks and surprises, compared with only 19 per cent who said there were fewer and less-frequent shocks and surprises.

According to Reilly, dealing with substantive change is not likely to get any easier. In fact, some companies like disruption, and they are often the ones setting the pace in their industries. After all, what is “disruptive” for one organization might seem perfectly manageable for another.

The extent to which a change is viewed as disruptive depends on how agile and resilient the organization is. It is no surprise that the AMA/HRI survey found that higher performers tend to be both more agile and more resilient than lower performers. Additionally, compared with their lower-performing counterparts, higher performers view themselves as having superior change abilities at the individual, team and organizational levels.

The AMA/HRI survey also examined what is driving organizational change. It found that the most important factors are related to the expectations of customers and vendors, new products and services, and technological and process changes. This suggests that in fast-paced markets, there is no resting on laurels. There is always a new customer demand, a new competitive product, another business-changing technology.