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Agile has often had a bad reputation among top management. Its strange practices, its incomprehensible terminology and the eccentricity of some of its practitioners have been off-putting to senior leaders. IT was often treated as little more than a distraction from the serious business of running the company.

Then came the pandemic of 2020. IT was summoned from the basement to the executive suite on the twenty-fourth floor and was asked to help save the corporation. Suddenly individuals and organizations had to operate digitally and virtually as never before.

To managements surprise, many IT departments delivered. Workers went remote, and business models were reinvented on the fly. In some companies, Agile practices had laid the basis for pivoting in response to rapid shifts in signals.

Brick-and-mortar organizations and those that functioned as steep hierarchies often couldnt cope and had to close their doors with no real certainty as to when business as usual would return.

The only going option was agility, whether firms had foreseen this or not. It wasnt that they hadnt been told. In 2015, Bloomberg Businessweek had devoted a whole issue to explaining digital in words of one syllable. The lesson often fell on deaf ears.

A key reason for those firms successfully working virtually, as an article by computer science professor, Cal Newport noted, was that their firms deployed the unusually systematic approach to organizing their efforts known as Agile.

Agile principles include elaborate systems, punctuated by standup meetings and coding sprints, which help them track and assign tasks without overloading individuals or creating unnecessary interruptions or redundancies. Leveraging these systems, carefully organized teams of coders can operate smoothly without the informal productivity boosts that come from working in the same space. In effect, in these groups enable the staff to get agreed things done, rather than controlling, adjusting, interrupting, and meddling with the work. In effect, they obeyed the Three Laws of Agile.

The epitome of agility: Romania's Nadia Comaneci

Yet Newport concluded that Agile management was beyond the capability of many organizations. The extensive efforts required to accomplish this feat, of course, only help underscore the importance of offices for everyone else. In other words, for those not benefiting from Agile management, the physical office is a necessary second-best crutch to help firms get by. In effect, the challenge of working virtually is just one more area where the principles of bureaucracy cant cope.

Yet faced with imminent demise, many managements were able to make the change. Necessity is the mother of invention, and managements began to think the unthinkable and do the unimaginable. The pandemic made them grab at Agile practices as the only way forward. It remains to be seen what happens after the pandemic has passed: will they continue to embrace Agile practices and values or go back to normal and the beautiful seclusion of the twenty-fourth floor?

In some cases, the pandemic has accomplished some rethinking of corporate values. For instance, Best Buy chairman and CEO Hubert Joly has observed, All of us have to rewire ourselves for a new way of leading. Whats the purpose of work? What kind of obituary do we want to have? Whats our calling? For many years, we cut off our head from our heart and our soul.

Yet not all business leaders received the memo. In a comprehensive global survey of more than 4,000 managers and executives conducted by MIT Sloan, 72% of respondents strongly agreed that it was very important to them to work for an organization with a purpose they believe in, but only 49% strongly believed in their organizations purpose. Furthermore, only 36% of respondents strongly believed in their organizations ability to advance its purpose.

The report concludes that this purpose gap suggests that senior leaders may lack credibility when it comes to aligning their organizations around a shared vision. That lack of credibility could put their companies long-term competitiveness at risk.

Leaders need to understand and embrace the reality that effective digital transformation cant work without their own affective digital transformations.

And read also:

Explaining Agile

Why Digital Transformations Are Failing

The rest is here:

How The Pandemic Validated Agile; Only The Agile Survived - Forbes