Preface

Whew, 2020 was quite a year to write a book on organizational agility! If 2020 didn’t make the case that we are all dealing with constant change, much of which we can’t anticipate, then we don’t know what does. We started writing in January of 2020, working side by side at a whiteboard as we developed the outline. That way of working soon changed, as it did for almost everyone, and we transitioned to virtual meetings for our collaboration. Not only did we have to adapt how we wrote together, but the world also became even more uncertain and complex as we navigated rapidly evolving health advice, interacted with friends and family in new ways, and observed tremendous social change. We know that government organizations at all levels—federal, state, and local—have faced just as much change and complexity. If you are a leader in a government organization—and by that, we mean both those in positions of formal authority as well as those who show leadership through their actions—we hope that this book provides guidance on how to manage work differently than you did in the past to meet the ever-changing challenges of the present. We’ve focused our advice on how you can organize your work in the midst of today’s swirl of change.

The book offers a roadmap for how to lead. We encourage you to use it as a guide rather than a checklist or a formula. You might start by reading it from front to back, but we want you to continue to use it as a hands-on resource that you can refer back to as you help your organization navigate change. We’ve worked hard to go beyond platitudes (“be flexible,” “just adapt”) by describing actions that you can take and providing tools to get you started. While we’ve tried to be specific with our advice, we also realize that every situation is different, so we urge you to apply our counsel in a way that makes sense for the work that you do.

Another way that we bring our ideas to life is through Blair’s story. We chose to frame this hypothetical story around an acquisition group because that’s a common function across federal, state, and local government. That said, we believe that our story and the challenges that Blair and her team face will resonate with you no matter what type of work you do. And, although the story focuses on Blair, who is in a supervisory role, we recognize that agility is a journey that everyone in the organization takes. While some actions require support from someone in a position of authority, becoming more agile requires everyone, including individual contributors, to play a role. You will be able to implement almost all the concepts that we cover, whether you are an executive-level leader, mid-level leader, first-line supervisor, or individual contributor. The specific work that is done varies with each role; for example, executive-level leaders have responsibility for strategic planning activities, while first-line supervisors are more tactically focused. And each role may have to deal with both unique and common environmental factors; for example, dealing with pressure from Congress may be a highly salient challenge to an executive-level leader, while integrating new technologies into work processes may pose difficulties that supervisors and individual contributors must address. Regardless of one’s role, each type of leader will need to apply the levers, starting with their immediate team, if they are to improve agility.

The book focuses specifically on government organizations, partly because we are familiar with the unique challenges those organizations face and partly because we realized that few books are aimed specifically at government leaders, especially those books on organizational agility. Many books and articles provide advice for addressing organizational agility in for-profit organizations, and while there are similarities between for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, certain concepts (e.g., competitive factors, revenues, and profits) simply don’t apply to those in the not-for-profit sector.

The advice that we provide is evidence-based. The appendix contains an overview of the organizational agility model that we developed specifically for government organizations, along with select research that we relied on when building this model. Although we don’t want to bore you with references supporting every idea in our book, we do want to assure you that our ideas are based on sound research and accepted practice. Many of the ideas we present here may not seem new to you. What is new, however, is how these time-tested ideas can support agility. While little change will likely result from trying only one or two of these ideas, we encourage you to start somewhere and act on as many of the ideas as you can. We anticipate you will start to see the benefits of agility as you and your team begin to experiment with and iterate how you approach and organize your work.

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