Agility and Change
Taking advantage of a continually shifting landscape
The most successful companies, when measured by profitability, thrive in the face of change by perceiving, responding, and adapting to it more quickly and efficiently.
Questions about Agility and Change?
Business leaders know that their company’s competitiveness and effectiveness depend on accelerated, continuous change. Yet traditional designs and linear change models no longer work in our complex and uncertain world. Instead, proactive learning, redesign, and rapid implementation must become core capabilities that are supported by every part of the organization’s design and operation..
CEO faculty are known worldwide for their advanced research, teaching, and consulting on organizational adaptability. Their specific, research-based case studies demonstrate how to build change into the core processes of an organization and accelerate large-scale transformations.
Organization agility is more than just adaptive leadership, nimble strategy, and lean operations — and more than just a one-time occurrence. Agility is the ability of an organization to make timely, effective, and sustained changes over and over again.
CEO’s exclusive research has uncovered the complex routines that not only define this capability but explain the long-term, above-average profitability it engenders. It has also identified the basic management processes that support an agile organization and are instrumental in facilitating changes in a firm’s capabilities.
Overall, for businesses facing a future that will be at least as volatile as it is today, organization agility as a core competency is becoming increasingly essential — and in some cases, existential.
UPCOMING EVENT
2025 Strategic Organization Design & Activation Workshops (Enrollment Includes both Workshops)
Comprehensive Two-Part Strategic Org Design Certificate Program (Enrollment Includes both Workshops) Part 1: Strategic Organization Design Workshop (3/4/25-3/7/25) Part 2 (Part 1 is a Prerequisite): Strategic Organization Design Activation Workshop (5/14/25-5/16/25)
Featured Article
Agility’s Dirty Little Secret
Christopher G. Worley, Edward E. Lawler, Thomas Williams
Christopher G. Worley (CEO), Thomas Williams (PwC Strategy), and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) The Agility Pyramid describes how the four agility routines and management processes work together to keep an organization’s capabilities effective and refreshed..
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Featured Webinar
Certificate in Organization Design
The Certificate Program in Organization Design offers participants a deep understanding of this important competency as well as models, tools, and processes that can be applied within their own organizations. One-on-one coaching and peer consulting offer a tailored approach for business leaders while adding breadth and depth in the skills they need to address design challenges at all levels of an organization.
Part I
Strategic Organization Design Workshop
Our Strategic Organization Design Workshop provides participants with core principles, frameworks, models, and tools. We use examples from our research and consulting to address the core building blocks of design and to demonstrate how to put them together to support strategy. In its 14th year (2012), this program has been attended by 1,000 participants from over 395 organizations.
Part II
Advanced Topics in Organization Design Workshop
Our Advanced Topics in Organization Design Workshop is a practicum-based course in which participants receive coaching while working through a real design challenge, and learn from each other as the projects are shared and critiqued during the workshop. The Strategic Organization Design Workshop is a prerequisite for this course. Participants who attend both workshops and successfully complete a design project receive a Certificate in Organization Design. In its 11th full cycle, more than 160 participants have received certificates.
Meet Our Researchers
Our award-winning research scientists, affiliates and practitioners help companies drive performance by providing leading-edge research, practical tools, and a wealth of experience.
Susan A. Mohrman
Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Susan Mohrman is widely known for her research in the area of organization design and effectiveness and on large-scale change. She has focused on the design of knowledge-based firms, knowledge creating systems, complex laterally linked organizations, the design of complex eco-system collaborations to foster sustainability, and on organization design of the digitally enabled work systems.
Christopher G. Worley
Senior Research Scientist, Center for Effective Organizations
Research Professor of Management, Pepperdine University
Dr. Chris Worley’s applied research and consulting practice is complemented by more than fifteen years of management experience in academic, for-profit, and government organizations. The primary focus of his efforts in these organizations has been on organization design, the building of agile capabilities, and organization development.
Beth Gunderson
Affiliate Research Scientist
Beth Gunderson is the Founder of Minikahda Partners, an organization and talent architecture firm specializing in organization design and enterprise transformation initiatives. Beth is also a permanent instructor at the University of Southern California – Center for Effective Organizations – in their Strategic Organization Design Workshop and Adapting to Disruption Workshop.