Organisational Agility

Exploring the Impact of Identity on Knowledge Management

Neha Chatwani

• Verlag: Palgrave Pivot
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030172497
• Thema: Betriebswirtschaft
• Thema: Unternehmensstrategie

The agility paradigm suggests thatknowledge management is central toan organisations' capability to proactively anticipate environmental changes and respond to them effectively. This book specifically explores how organisational identityimpacts knowledge flows within an organisation, influencing and negotiating its responsiveness. By looking at agility through the identity lens the author takes a cross-disciplinary approach that aims at offering a new and important perspectivetowards our current understanding of change management and inparticular, of theagility model, making this book a valuable resource for students, researchers and practitioners.

© The Author(s) 2019

Neha ChatwaniOrganisational Agilityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17249-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Agility Revisited

Neha Chatwani¹

(1)

Workplace Atelier, Vienna, Wien, Austria

Neha Chatwani

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

The importance of knowledge sharing for organisational agility is indisputable. How and when knowledge is effectively shared to enable agile responsiveness is under-investigated. By defining knowledge as a dynamic human asset expressed through organisational practices and linking it to identity as a way of accounting for the agency of human action within an organisational framework, the complexity of knowledge sharing for agility’s sake is investigated. Consequently, the agility model is refined to underline the importance of organisational identity for knowledge flows.

Keywords

Sense-abilityResponse-abilityAgilityKnowledgeIdentity

End Abstract

Introduction

In order to navigate successfully in volatile and turbulent economic and socio-political environments, organisations are increasingly embracing the notion of building their agile capacity. The focus in change management literature is therefore shifting from a project management-based change approach towards creating, developing and nurturing a leadership attitude for agility and an organisational mind-set for continuous, evolutionary and transformational change. The idea of fluid, open-ended, adaptive and continuous change is not new. In fact, this could be considered inherent to human action as it reflects biological evolution which is on-going and incremental. The notion of continual change is experiencing a revival in management literature (e.g. Tsoukas and Chia 2002) under the term ‘agility’. The latter, it can be argued, was first mentioned in Sun Tzu’s classic text, The Art of War, written around 320 bc. In this comprehensive study of the art and science of effective action, Tzu wrote: “avail yourself of any helpful circumstances over and beyond the ordinary rules. According as circumstances are favourable, one should modify one’s plans” (quoted in McCreadie et al. 2009). Here he is preaching the adaptability and perhaps even the opportunistic attitude necessary in the management of agile organisations.

The recent modern discourse on agility is not something that has emerged unprompted: it is reflective of a disruptive environment and developments in technology that are not only borderless and networked but also pave the way for a data avalanche when paired with artificial intelligence. Whereas the theoretical notion of agility is largely well defined and its practice very appealing, organisations grapple to create and nurture an agile capability that genuinely acknowledges and pulls on the interdependencies of stakeholders and beneficiaries in a shared environment. This means an agile capability that allows for the timely leveraging of (unique) organisational knowledge or fosters meaningful resource synergies, thereby allowing for impactful actions.

From the 1990s to the present, the resource-based view of organisations, the evolution of the knowledge economy and the changing nature of work has reinforced a view that knowledge is the key competitive asset in organisations. This is particularly the case for knowledge that is organisation-specific and is therefore difficult to replicate. However, methods that investigate an organisation’s knowledge and knowledge management process (see Wang and Noe 2010; Harzing et al. 2016) still need to be developed. The lack of the latter has perhaps led to an overstatement of the positive linkage between knowledge management activities and business performance. Although some research does confirm this link (Almahamid et al. 2010), much more in-depth investigation of this complex topic is needed to understand how the link between managing knowledge and business performance is affected (Heisig et al. 2016).

The management literature on agility outlines multiple pathways for the implementation of agility. Much emphasis has been put on enabling organisational design, particularly flat and decentralised organisational structures such as holocracy; or more fluid plug and play building blocks such as cross-functional teams, self-directed/managing groups or flow-to-the-work staff pools. These often demand the re-skilling of employees, and they also require new forms of leadership—for example, collaborative, servant or distributed leadership (see Chatwani 2017). In the debate on agility, there is a general consensus that agile leadership which entails an empowering and engaging attitude towards talent plays a critical and central role. This is an important insight and can be extended to all organisational assets in agile organisations. In this vein, equal and keen attention needs to be paid to the human value in the organisational asset: knowledge.

The striving for agility has become somewhat hyped in industry and a buzzword in management literature in recent years (for example, Sull 2010). ‘Agility’ is the synonym for an organisation that is flexible, fast, lean, customer oriented, innovative and adaptable. Numerous models have been designed that emphasise various aspects of agility, such as that of Teece et al. (2016) who developed a model of strategic enterprise agility based on dynamic or meta-capabilities. To avoid an endless debate about the characteristics and various definitions of agility, I propose a simple and powerful working definition for this book that describes agile organisations as organisational systems that thrive in unpredictable or rapidly changing environments. The keyword in this definition is ‘thrive’—not survive, function or simply operate.

The research presented in this book was conducted at a prominent global humanitarian non-profit organisation, one that is widely recognised as an agile player by its peers, beneficiaries, partners and stakeholders for its timely delivery of excellent medical services in an emergency context. This organisation was established in the 1970s and continues to embrace a traditional hierarchical organisational structure. As the latter fact has not interfered with the choice of place of investigation, a daring pre-emptive conclusion might be made in the first chapter of this book i.e. flat organisational structures may be enablers for agility but a traditional organisational structure does not appear to be an obstacle. This topic will be re-addressed in a slightly more differentiated way later in the book. The focus of this research is in organisational dynamics that are central to agility, specifically the link between knowledge management or sharing and organisational identity.

Theories of Agility

The initial models in agility were designed by Goldman et al. (1995) and Dove (1999, 2001). These postulate an agility concept that put knowledge management at the heart of operations and argue that if organisations were better able to strategically elicit, deploy and retain their knowledge, then managing change would be a more natural and transformational undertaking. Although no commonly accepted definition of agility exists, the embedded role of knowledge management in the original framework is and, as shown in Fig. 1.1, is largely accepted. Repeatedly, case-study evidence from industry has suggested that defined adaptability strategies and infrastructure for distributing knowledge by purposefully applying knowledge management tools, that is, through creating knowledge and exchanging information between people, has a positive and meaningful effect on an organisation’s agility (e.g. Tooraloo and Saghafi 2018; Becker 2001).

Fig. 1.1

The agile paradigm. (Adapted from Dove 1999)

Because organisations recognise that knowledge and human talent are linked to organisational performance (see Holbeche 2018), many proceed to design complex knowledge management systems based on sophisticated technologies, hoping to fully leverage their knowledge assets for continuous change, adaptability and innovation to gain competitive edge (Hislop et al. 2018). Very few of these knowledge systems enable or support the development of the organisation’s agile capability. For many of these organisations, knowledge management soon becomes synonymous with the distribution of know-how, quantifiable facts, standardisations and checklists enforced through information technology and presented in dormant and sometimes outdated databases, manuals or incomplete forms. This probably occurs due to two main reasons: first, because the knowledge sharing is not designed with strategy in mind and, second, because not only are the actors who share it human but the knowledge itself is dynamic.

The popular theoretical construct of the agility paradigm envisions a dynamic notion of knowledge. In the original agility model as stipulated by Dove (and later elaborated on by other authors, for example Overby et al. 2006), knowledge management is linked to two elements: sense-ability and response-ability—that is, these are connected to one another through the management of knowledge. Sense-ability feeds into knowledge management and response-ability is the outcome of it. Broadly, it is thought that the scanning and sense-making of internal or external environmental information triggers the deployment and perhaps even the creation of knowledge, resulting in responsive agile action (see Fig. 1.1).

According to this formula, organisational agility is an organisation’s ability to (pro)actively detect signals in its environment, to ‘sense’ and evaluate these as relevant cues and categorise them into threats or opportunities and then formulate an adequate organisational response. Holsapple and Li (2008) named these two change-enabling capabilities: alertness or opportunity-seeking and response capability. In the first, strategic foresight and systemic insight are included. The second is about the capability to select and enable effective actions, that is, decision-making, learning, reconfiguration and the like. If the link between the two components (sense-ability and response-ability) is knowledge, then agile organisations should have the capability of continuously acquiring, building and sharing knowledge quickly, as well as the ability to leverage this knowledge on an ongoing basis in order to act decisively by aligning and redeploying resources, talent and skills needed for adequate action (Kochikar and Ravindra 2007). In this way, agile knowledge management is not just about being flexible; it is about a holistic adaptive capacity or an organisational “capacity for continuous reconstruction” (Hamel and Välikangas 2003). In other words, agile responsiveness is created by “economies of knowledge” fuelled and accelerated through “enterprise-wide learning” (Roth 1996).

In the absence of a research tradition in its own right, aspects of organisational agility have been discussed under many different headings. It is a notion simultaneously traded for flexibility, speed and leanness; notwithstanding, there is an assumption that only that which is lean can be flexible. However, agility is not about spontaneous work-around solutions and then reverting to back to business as usual. As Tallon and Pinsonneault (2011) put it, one must conceptualise agility as an organisational ability to “detect and respond to [environmental] opportunities and threats with ease, speed, and dexterity”. At its core, this is about proactive and intentional change—such that ad hoc and unsystematic sense-response reflex actions are not indicative of agility, irrespective of how well they portray agility-like traits. So, agility is more about “the continual readiness of an entity to rapidly or inherently, proactively or reactively, embrace change, through its collective components or its relationships with its environment” (Conboy and Fitzgerald 2004). Where resilience or robustness are common components of flexibility, they imply that in the face of change the organisational entity with all of its subsystems and resources may adapt successfully to change but that the entity itself will remain largely homeostatic. The latter...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Agility Revisited
• 2. The Agile Case Study
• 3. An Updated Model for Agility and Its Implications
• Back Matter