From Agility by Necessity to Agility by Design: Learning from the COVID-19 Crisis

June 5, 2020


Click here for the PowerPoint slides (in PDF format).

Organizations around the world will be spending the next years emerging from the economic and societal disruption of COVID-19. Forward thinking organizations will emerge stronger, more fit for the future, and perhaps with changed organizations, business and operating models, and social systems. During the crisis, companies have, at least temporarily become more agile. They have become “unfrozen”—their longstanding assumptions and work patterns having been uprooted by the realities of social distancing, shelter-in-place policies, and disruptions to their markets and supply chains. To prevent automatic backsliding into the Pre COVID status quo, they now need to be aggressively intentional about a reset for the definitely different world they will be encountering—a world characterized by uncertainty and ripe for ongoing disruption. Organizations will have little choice but to stop talking about agility, and to design for it.

In this webinar:

  • Kathy Zarr, Manager of Digital Development and Andy O’Conner, Director of Digital Development from BASF; and Jeanna Kozak, Principal from Humana, talked about the learning and redesign challenges and approaches in their companies.
  • Chris Worley, Beth Gunderson and Sue Mohrman, from CEO, presented an actionable framework to guide the learning, recovery and redesign process that constitutes agile capability: This framework informed by their research during the 2008 recovery period, and their extensive research on  designing for agility, digitalization and sustainability.
  • Together, and with input from attendees, we examined the elements of the transition to the agile organization of the future.