3 Reasons Why Tomorrow's Leaders Will be Fluent in Enterprise Agility

Bren Triplett, Director CIT, ISM, MGT programs for School of Business and Technology at CCU Online

Assumptions are dangerous in today’s world because the rapid speed of change is real. What was true yesterday may not be true today. The term “enterprise agility” has been around for decades in various forms, uses, and names.

A new concept arrived in 2012 called the Agile Fluency Model. Eight years is an eternity in this space and the assumption is that tomorrow’s leaders will be fluent in Enterprise Agility.

Why? Because this generation of leaders have been raised on technology.

According to Henny Portman, Agile Fluency is:

Businesses desire the following for those fluent in agile:

• Agile fundamentals (the value of business) are produced by focused teams. This is a hallmark of agile methodologies.
• Agile sustainability (market cadence or rhythm) is delivered by teams. Agile seeks continuous improvement as an implementation of this concept.
• Optimized teams lead their teams and companies. Optimized teams are at similar skill levels and use agile values and principles to understand what business needs.

Is this true? Are today’s leaders truly fluent?

According to the BAI, Business Agility Report, the average business agility fluency is 4.9 which is walking on the scale. 71% of businesses have low fluency meaning they are crawling.

As industries go, consulting and information technology firms have the highest fluency and smaller companies are more fluent than larger companies.

Today’s leaders do not possess across-the-board fluency, but there is hope.

Being in the information technology industry for over 35 years, I have experienced many different attempts to bring fluency to the marketplace.

Here are the three reasons that I believe that tomorrow’s great leaders will acquire fluency

1. Demand

It is necessary because the rate of change in the world is accelerating. Think about the number of apps that are on smartphones today and how many are added daily. Humans need to learn to adapt to change and view change as something to seek out not something to be afraid of. Necessity will result in fluency.

2. Time

Eventually, enterprise agility at every level will become second nature. The average time for a concept to be assimilated is about one generation or 20 years. Enterprise agility is about 15 years old, so time is in favor of fluency.

3. Opportunity

Universities are starting to teach the concepts of enterprise agility haphazardly. CCU is at the forefront of this educational endeavor at the request of specific industry leaders to fill a gap between certifications in enterprise agility and in-house training. Therefore, students will acquire the necessary tools to be enterprise agility fluent in our degree programs. 

CCU is investing in this industry opportunity. We created a new emphasis on enterprise agility for our bachelor’s and master’s degrees. CCU has taken what was requested and expanded on the concepts to provide a deeper understanding of enterprise agility and business agility. This program provides an academic and practical hands-on approach to facilitate fluency.