By R. Esi Asante(PhD)
Change is inevitable, whether we like it or not. This is because nothing is permanent. To everything, there is a season, a time for every purpose under the heaven (Ecclesiastic 3:1).
Although change and transformation are not new, the current pace has become unprecedented and accelerating, overwhelming those who are not prepared for it.
The ability to navigate and adapt to the changes in good time, is the game changer. Adaptation and change are not easy especially when you have lived in your comfort zone and have become accustomed to the old ways of doing things, you become uncertain especially about what will happen at the other side of life.
This article takes a look into resilient agility and its role in building individual and organisational resilience.
Uncertain and difficult times ahead
Our ecosystem is full of uncertainties that require quick and adequate reactions. Everyone faces an evil day when things do not happen as expected.
We currently live in an uncertain biosphere which is growing rapidly with complex changes fueled by technology, climate disruptions and harsh economic conditions.
The uncertain complexities call for new ways to deal with the challenges presented in order to survive the environment and to thrive around disturbing events such as conflicts, wars and pandemics, which have serious consequences on individuals and businesses alike, bringing to the fore, discussions on the need to strengthen resilience both individually and in the organization.
For organisations, the rapid changes in the external environment, due to increased competition, also means that they must actively support and improve business processes consistently.
Companies need a diagnosis to know where they are, and develop guidance to move in the right direction (Stachowiak and Pawłyszyn, 2021)
Resilient Agility:
In a lay man’s understanding, agility helps to survive change and transformation. The synonyms of the word include quickness, dexterity, liveliness, alertness and swiftness among others.
It involves quick response to situations and flexibility in decision making. Resilient agility, which is a combination of agility and resilience, helps individuals to thrive and stand out, when all others are failing. Therefore, achieving resilience and agility requires being dynamic and quick at all times.
Martinot (2023), define personal agility as an individual’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to changing circumstances and to be able to thrive in the face of change, while resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and to bounce back from setbacks and challenges.
How fast and flexible are you to respond to changes in your environment? That is the game changer, responding too quickly and too late can spell doom and disaster, hence agile resilience is important for the individual seeking to thrive in whatever they do.
A keynote speaker on crisis and disruptive leadership, Prof. Sattar Bawany, contend that to achieve organizational high performance in an era of constant disruption and crisis, both agility and resilience are important.
The disruptive events in the external environment could be characterized as a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and disruptive (VUCAD) environment.
Agile resilience therefore, can be viewed as the capacity for responding with speed and flexibly and decisively toward anticipating, initiating, and taking advantage of opportunities and avoiding any negative consequences of change (Bawany 2023).
These qualities form the foundation of an organization’s ability to navigate and thrive amid disruption and become themselves agile and resilient.
Learn from the Eagle and the Crow
The call for individual and organization resilience and agility, is eminent in the era we find ourselves. Pandemics like COVID 19 for instance, brings to the fore the need to have agile resilience. The life of the eagle presents valuable lessons on agile resilience.
The eagle is a bird that is able to rise above its challenges. One of its challenge is the storm and the crow. The crow is the only bird that dares to peck at the eagle.
The crow sits on the eagles back and bites his neck. and when this happens, the eagle does not respond or fight with the crow. It simply opens up its wings and begins to rise higher and higher in the sky.
The higher the eagle flies, the harder it is for the crow to breathe, and then, due to a lack of oxygen, the crow falls away and the eagle is free. The crow represents the many challenges that come our way without invitation and some are determined to put us down like the crow.
The resilience of the eagle is emulative and sometimes, we just need to keep flying without getting distracted by the crows of life to get to an altitude that they (the challenges) fall off by themselves.
The eagle is also known for being the only bird that sets flight towards the rising storms. While other birds will find a place to hide to avoid the storm, the eagle rides on the winds and glides along the storm until it gets to an altitude where the storm no longer has any effect on it. This is a show of agile resilience and it is important to learn from the eagle.
One other thing to learn from the eagle is its ability to reinvent itself after reaching a certain age. Rather than succumbing to this natural wear and tear, the eagles embark on a bold and inspiring journey of self-renewal, giving it the opportunity to live for another life time.
This powerful act of self-renewal holds invaluable lessons for humans facing their own periods of change or limitation. Just as eagles demonstrate the courage to discard what no longer serves them, we, too, can learn to shed outdated habits, beliefs, and limitations to emerge stronger and more adaptable (Abass, 2024).
Individual or personal resilience, refers to one’s ability to bounce back after a disruption or set back in life. According to Bawany (2023), resilience is about having the mental toughness to persevere in the face of adversity and resilient individuals are able to regulate their emotions, maintain a positive outlook, and learn from their mistakes.
For the organization, it is the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and recover from disasters, emergencies, and other disruptions, and protect and enhance workforce and customer engagement, supply network and financial performance, organizational productivity, and community well-being when disruption occurs (Bawany, 2024).
Building Agile Resilience.
Individual pillars of agility, including proactivity, flexibility and adaptability, resilience, learning agility, collaborative mindset, competence, self-motivation, and self-management (Reinhold, 2024), are necessary and can be cultivated through investment in training and development, setting SMART goals and implementing strategic initiatives, fostering a culture of innovation, nurturing a growth mindset while recognizing and rewarding agile and resilient behaviours (Martinot, 2023).
At the organizational level, the importance of agile leadership and organizational learning, existence of strategic agility principles and insurance of autonomy and empowerment, flexibility encouragement, technological competence enablement, and prioritization of employees’ engagement and well-being are a must (Reinhold, 2024)
There are four key drivers of resilience and each of these drivers are underpinned by behavioural dimensions (Saville Assessment, 2025). They are 1. Dealing with change – that is embracing change positively and maintaining uncertainty with composure; 2. Staying connected – it has to do with making and maintaining connections by actively participating and communicating; 3. Maintaining drive – This involves capitalizing on the opportunities that change presents by focusing on key work objectives; and finally, 4. Maintaining new ways of working – that is having the insights to forge new directions by ensuring the delivery of effecting plans.
Successful agile organisations demonstrate characteristics such as network of empowered teams, rapid decision-making and learning cycles, dynamic people models that ignites passion and next generation enabling technology, leading to behaviours such as shifting focus from talking to doing, empowerment, extreme role clarity and mindset shift towards accountability (Handscomb and Hall, 2021).
Researchers, Pulakos, Kantrowitz, and Schneider (2019) suggests that for organisations to thrive and be successful in uncertain and disruptive situations, they must create right size teamwork, instead of driving teamwork, drive stability, instead of focusing too much on driving change, and relentlessly adopting course correction, instead of periodic performance reviews.
The importance of the qualities associates with agility and resilience cannot be overstated. They are qualities that can be cultivated and promoted in the individual and the organisations. Investing in these qualities can save the day in times of uncertainty.
