A year ago, when we talked about agility, we were market-focused: Is our company agile enough to handle new privacy regulations? The death of cookies? The shift in retail habits?

Now, market needs have clearly changed. It's not just about privacy legislation and cookie-less advertising—there's been a global shift in priorities. Supply chains have flattened; people have lost jobs; some borders are closed—then reopened, and closed again, then again reopened.

How has all that affected your business—and your clients' businesses?

How agile are your product plans?

Has your team been able to react quickly and confidently to the market's needs while keeping your company's end goal in sight?

When the pandemic ends or becomes endemic, and we adjust to live with it, which practices are you likely to keep?

Right now, business agility is more important—and more multifaceted—than ever. And each of those facets is critical to your company's success.

Business Agility and Time

Now that you are probably saving hours on your commute, on top of days saved on travel—how effectively are you using your time? How agile is your team with their time?

After working remotely for the majority of 2020, I realized how disrupted my day used to be. Between daily internal meetings, getting stuck in traffic, flying to client offices, or just getting caught up in conversation in the office kitchen, I wasn't using my time as efficiently as I could have been.

Many of us are using that new-found time in ways that, on the surface, seem wise. We're filling the hours in ways that are proving to be very productive for the business—but possibly counterproductive in the long-term.

How so? We use those hours to complete tasks, checking items off the to-do list rather than allowing ourselves to simply sit and think, talk, and collaborate.

Sitting and thinking may seem like a waste, but how else do you arrive at brilliant creative ideas and strategies? How else do you find the space to innovate?

Some of the time we're allocating for mundane tasks might best be spent collaborating with peers, or just staying away from the day-to-day to formulate new ideas and allow them to percolate.

Business Agility and Collaborative Work

In previous years, you may have had multiple offices that met once a year for an all-hands event. This past year, face-to-face meetings were restructured or even eliminated. Collaboration was challenging across office locations in the past, but at least groups could grab a conference or huddle room and work together to brainstorm ideas or hammer out projects.

Now we've gone from having limited interaction geographically to no interaction even locally. A lot of the things we'd learned about how to work across locations helped us put those things into practice when we had to shelter in place. However, even in companies with offices and remote employees across the country, work communication has taken a big hit.

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Business Agility Is the New Norm. Do You Have What It Takes?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Aaron Jackson

Aaron Jackson is chief growth officer at Eyeota, an audience technology platform.

LinkedIn: Aaron Jackson