"LEADING THROUGH COMPLEXITY"
September 24 | Pre-conference Workshops
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September 25 | All-Day Conference
Patrick Hoverstadt
Director and Management Consultant
FRACTAL
Organisational Agility – beyond the rhetoric, what it really is and how to measure it
Organisational agility has become a hot topic in recent years for strategists, enterprise designers and for business transformation. Much has been said, but there is very little tangible to back up the rhetoric beyond a handful of “silver bullet” interventions.
In this talk we will take you through the reasons for increasing organisational agility, and for measuring it – both the strategic benefits and the importance of understanding organisational agility for enterprise designers. We’ll discuss the fundamental elements of organisational agility and the interdependencies between those, and we’ll go on to talk about how we measure agility and use agility metrics as a diagnostic and to improve organisational agility.
We’ll discuss some of the results from two case studies of the measurement approach in use and some specific and general lessons that can be drawn. These include:
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How we improved organisational agility in one case by 30x
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The key role of decision action-cycle time
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Understanding the huge variations in levels of agility between units within the same organisation, which in turn means that different parts of an organisation need very different interventions to achieve requisite agility.
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An unexpectedly high inverse correlation between levels of environmental change and organisational fitness
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Major differences between levels of operational and strategic agility within the same organisation.
Bio
Patrick has worked as a consultant since 1995 with organisations in the private, public and third sectors and in 24 countries. His consulting work has mainly been on strategy, organisational design and change. He specialises in using systems approaches for working with very large complex organisations including whole sectors. He has worked on over 200 strategy and restructuring projects, developing strategies and practical change plans, diagnosing structural weaknesses and designing organisations. He has developed methodologies for several difficult business problems including:
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Business Strategy
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Ecosystem modelling
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Large-scale organisational change
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Strategic risk
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Measuring organisational agility
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Collaborative governance
Patrick ran an engineering business for 13 years before becoming a consultant and founding Fractal. He has written numerous research papers, is a regular keynote speaker at conferences, has contributed to eight books on systems, organisation and management, is the author of “Fractal Organisation” a book on the Viable System Model as a way to understand and design organisations which was published by Wiley in 2008 and is used on seven masters programmes around the world. He co-wrote “Patterns of Strategy” a book on a systemic approach to strategy published by Gower in 2017 and wrote “The Grammar of Systems” in 2022. He chairs SCiO, the international professional body for systems and complexity practitioners, has lectured at 10 universities and business schools and is a Visiting Research Fellow at Cranfield.
