GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

Agility holds a special interest for me. I named my consulting business Agility Innovation Specialists and constantly am looking to emphasize that agility is really important to managing innovation.

I came across an article written a few years back by the Korn Ferry Institute and I thought it was worth extracting the top line thoughts as important in my advocacy of innovation.

If you want to read more from their report here is the link.

My takeaways from this:

“Learning agility is a reliable indicator of potential for leadership roles. Why? Learning agile individuals excel at absorbing information from their experiences and then extrapolating from those to navigate unfamiliar situations. They are often described as flexible, resourceful, adaptable, and thoughtful—in short, an ideal fit for mission-critical roles”

For this report they analyzed looking at scores on the four factors of learning agility: Mental Agility, People Agility, Change Agility, and Results from Agility and came up with a finding that seven distinct profiles described approximately two-thirds of the high learning agility people.

“Learning agility: Knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do” – sounds so right for innovation.

“Learning agility is the ability and willingness to learn from experience and then apply that learning to perform successfully in new situations”

People who are learning agile:

• Seek out experiences to learn from.
• Enjoy complex problems and challenges associated with new experiences.
• Get more out of those experiences because they have an interest in making sense of them.
• Perform better because they incorporate new skills into their repertoire.

A person who is learning agile has more lessons, more tools, and more solutions to draw on when faced with new business challenges.

Achieving to instill these from my innovation capability work, coaching and mentoring would be ideal, it is a way to seek out and learn innovation. Agile learners are potentially ideal for what is needed to manage innovation.

In their introduction I would like to go back to this, as it really sums up the agile person:

“Learning agile individuals excel at absorbing information from their experiences and then extrapolating from those to navigate unfamiliar situations. They are often described as flexible, resourceful, adaptable, and thoughtful—in short, an ideal fit for mission-critical roles.

For me, innovation is a mission-critical role.

Many organizations regretfully don’t recognize this enough but part of my mission is to raise innovation awareness and its ability to transform, to extend, to grow individuals, teams, and organizations. Becoming innovative offers that greater potential to be sustainable in what you do as you constantly look to evolve and learn.

I wish more would see the importance of having agility within innovation but actually learn to practice it, not just talk about it or think it lies elsewhere in the organization. Agility is required in you!

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.