Building an agile culture of excellence to address the unstable business environments of the XXI century

Abstract

The pursuit of quality and excellence drives the efforts of companies wishing to improve and gain competitive advantage. Operational excellence programs are thus used as one of the most common approaches to promote structured change, with organizations implementing them in search for consistent strategies that match their customers' requirements. However, while being undeniably successful approaches in achieving organizational improvement, truth is that engaging in operational excellence programs has also proven to not be enough to ensure the long-term success, and companies do not develop the ability to quickly adapt to the demands of quickly changing markets. Economic, social and political transformations are hitting the world, adding to a fast-technological evolution and creating deeply unstable business environments. The development of agile capabilities becomes essential for organizations to stay competitive and address the changing demands of its stakeholders. Accordingly, we believe that developing an enduring capacity to change must be considered as one of the desired outputs of the implementation of any quality and operational excellence programs. However, being agile demands transversal support from the entire organization, under the risk of finding resistance to its implementation. It is necessary to work and transform the culture of organization to allow a closer fit to the strategic choices made to face the marketplace. Our proposal is to bring together organizational culture, operational excellence and organizational agility, structuring the pursuit of adaptability in a strong social and technical framework. We present a conceptual model interrelating the three concepts and the methodology in use for identifying the elements and enablers that help acquire the necessary capabilities for an organization to become adaptable.