Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By : Sunil Mundra
Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By: Sunil Mundra

Overview of this book

The biggest challenge enterprises face today is dealing with fast-paced change in all spheres of business. Enterprise Agility shows how an enterprise can address this challenge head on and thrive in the dynamic environment. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment. Agility is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment. The core belief underlying agility is that enterprises are open and living systems. These living systems, also known as complex adaptive systems (CAS), are ideally suited to deal with change very effectively. Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual. Enterprise Agility takes a similar approach with regard to agility: it suggests foundational practices to improve the overall health of the body—culture, mindset, and leadership—and the health of its various organs: people, process, governance, structure, technology, and customers. The book also suggests a practical framework to create a plan to enhance agility.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Enterprise Agility
About Packt
Forewords
Endorsements
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Characteristics of a CAS


We will now look at the key characteristics of a CAS and their implications for enterprises with respect to moving the companies away from the mechanistic model and bringing "life" back into them.

Continuous evolution

The most important characteristic of a CAS is that it evolves continuously. Let's take human beings as an example. We, as a CAS, have evolved over millions of years from apes to our current form. We have shed the tail, as it was of no use to us. We branched into multiple races. We are still evolving and will continue to do so. Another example is economies, which were long ago based on a barter system and then went on to paper and credit money and now seem to be moving toward cryptocurrencies. The evolution of a CAS keeps pace with the changes in the environment. This is the primary reason for the resilience in a CAS, which significantly improves its chances of survivability.

Autonomous and self-organizing agents

A CAS comprises of agents that interact with...