Agility and Rapid Response

In a business context, agility is a business's capacity for flexibility, coordination, and rapid, effective, cost-efficient response to changes in the business environment. Agility, a term usually referring to the physical abilities of the body, is a concept that covers more than just speed of response. It incorporates notions of balance, flexibility, thinking on one's feet, coordinating multiple systems, adaptability, and situational awareness, especially the idea of the business responding as one organism. An agile business not only responds quickly but also does so in such a way that it remains productive and cost-efficient even amid changes to the circumstances affecting its operations.

This idea of agility is one that has been heavily influenced by the study of complexity and complex [Page 18]adaptive systems in the ...