The two words—learning and agility—combine to be very relevant.
Agility is the capacity to adapt and change. Some organizations can do so as they experiment, benchmark, and continuously improve. Learning turns those change events into sustainable patterns. Agility without learning is chaotic, unfocused, and seemingly random events and activities. Learning without change is running faster in place. Combined, learning agility is the ability to create a future, anticipate opportunities, quickly respond, and learn always.
The underlying principles of learning agility apply to strategy, organization, leaders, and individuals as each stakeholder creates a future, anticipates opportunity, reacts quickly, and learns always.
Strategic learning agility is less about what an organization does to win now and more about how it builds capacity for continual strategic change. It means continually and rapidly updating choices about where to play and how to win. This means stepping into an unknown space rather than penetrating existing spaces
Strategic learning agility differentiates winning business strategies as they pivot from industry expert to industry leader; market share to market opportunity; who we are to how customers respond to us; penetrating existing markets to creating new and uncontested markets; beating competition to redefining competition; and generating blueprints for action to crafting dynamic processes for agile choices.
Leadership learning agility matters because leaders are often the bridge between the organization and individuals throughout the organization. How leaders think and act creates an organizational culture and models accepted individual behavior.
Individual learning agility is the ability and internal motivation of people to learn and grow. More agile individuals find personal well-being and deliver better business results. Individual learning agility is the competence of an employee to learn and grow as a leader—in formal positions of supervision or informal roles on a team. It becomes a basic element of talent management
A good question to ask ourselves is – Where are we in this? As a person, as an employee, as a leader, and as an organization. Its a VUCA world and as Eric Hoffner, an American philosopher says:
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
