Discovering Requisite Agility: An Integrated Approach to Value Creation in a VUCA World | Part 6 | Seeking a Requisite Agility Paradigm – Strategic Planning | Managerial Effectiveness | Author

Amit Arora, founder of RequisiteAgility.org describes the paradigm of RA thinking this way:

Requisite Agility means having the capacity in real time to make right choices and take right actions rapidly and flexibly in response to what is required within the worlds of those being served. It is fundamental attribute of the way an individual, group, enterprise, or ecosystem interacts in its environment in the creation of value within clients’ contexts-of-use.

The broader systemic understanding of Requisite Agility includes not only the economic dimension but also the social and environmental dimensions necessary to create value within dynamic environments in ways that are sustainable. RA provides a governance system for continuous organizational evolution and dynamic horizontal innovation enabling value creation and value capture from engendering demand-side alignment and cohesion.

Our agenda is one of promoting healthy, adaptive and effective organizations designed for speed, agility, adaptability and evolution. In this way, Requisite Agility strives to address a broader definition of demand—not just ‘customer need’ but also demands from unforeseen shocks, disruptions and ambiguity. We want Organisations to successfully navigate beyond a VUCA world and into the ‘never normal’.

The focus on deriving value from indirect effects means also that we must necessarily be focusing on the sustainable development of the industries we serve by enabling them to provide an approach to creating indirect effects that include spurring economic growth, reducing poverty and inequality, improving health and education, tackling climate change, and preserving nature.
Amit Arora, Founder of RequisiteAgility.org

RA is a return to a proper and much-needed demand-driven (i.e., customer-value-centric) and trans-disciplinary orientation and approach to complex and multi-faceted forms of value creation and wealth generation. It is a commitment to resolve the dilemma of the organization aligning itself with its own agenda and convenience versus aligning itself with what the customer actually values and demands in pursuit of their highest and most pressing goals.

RA is at the forefront of systems and managerial science while remaining transdisciplinary and drawing insight from across all scientific and humanitarian disciplines. It is a modern integrative approach to applied learning and demand-driven thinking that has become necessary over the past decades as more organisations are being forced to learn how to compete within complex networked environments. RA informs and illuminates the challenges entrepreneurs and managers face in coping with the inherent pressures and complexity of designing, building, facilitating and sustaining demand-driven enterprise systems that can meet and adapt to the accelerating tempo of ‘multi-sided’ consumer demand.

RA approaches the world as an integration of systems that are both internal and external to every organization and seeks to find points of paradox and leverage that focuses discovery, knowledge, innovation, resources, and action to create positive and profitable outcomes.

Success in distributed environments requires the recognition of underlying values that guide individual human choices and actions, mutual interests, and co-operation. The goal of RA is to introduce and utilize a set of principles and an ecosystem of practices that are appropriate to the specific challenge and context at hand to cope with, manage, harness, and facilitate requisite agility where and when appropriate under complicated and complex circumstances of asymmetrical demand.

One way to cope with complexity is to harness confusion and simplify, but this isn’t always possible. Some systems are so immensely complex and distributed that they cannot be controlled (such as the price system, legal system, language, and the coordination of the free market as a spontaneous extended order of human cooperation). Such highly complex self-maintaining systems require understanding and coping mechanisms rather than top-down control. In assessing challenges, it is important to know what you can change or not, and what actions are appropriate to obtain the best results. As Hayek notes and cautions, “order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive” (F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 1988:8).

In summary, Requisite Agility is emerging as a new and modern scientific and human-centric approach to making-sense of difficult challenges in complex human environments. It is an advanced conceptual system approach and set of practices to address and solve highly complex problems of value-creation and resource allocation that can bring about radical positive change, where demand tempos exceed enterprise integration tempos. Its goal is to provide insight, structure, and method to promoting healthy, adaptive, and effective organizations by enhancing the effectiveness of large-scale collaboration across multiple boundaries or ‘systems’ to successfully and profitably pursue, create and enhance the value consumers demand in what is an ever-emerging and always uncertain future.

To learn more about Requisite Agility and how it can benefit you, visit requisiteagility.org.

My thanks to Dr. Philip Boxer and Amit Arora for their time sharing their insights and comments with me. I alone am responsible for the content herein which reflects my own personal perspective.

Barry Linetsky is CEO of Cognitive Consulting, Inc., and a Partner with The Strategic Planning Group in Toronto, Canada, where he and his colleagues have been helping executives and owners define and align their business purpose with customer values since 1994. Barry is the author of the acclaimed business biography The Business of Walt Disney and the Nine Principles of His Success (2017, Theme Park Press). His most recent books, Understanding and Creating Vision and Mission Statements (2020), Understanding and Creating Strategic Performance Indicators and Business Scenarios (2020), and Understanding and Creating Critical Success Factors (2021), each co-authored with Dobri Stojsic, are available from amazon. Barry’s thought-leadership articles have been published by Ivey Business Journal, Rotman Magazine, Mises Wire, and the Economist Intelligence Unit in conjunction with Harvard Business School. Barry is also a writer, researcher, analyst, photographer, and business strategy enabler. Read his blog and learn more at barrylinetsky.com. Follow him on Twitter @BizPhilospher.