Are high levels of business performance sustainable over the long term? If so, which factors are most important? These are the questions Chris Worley, Strategy Director at the School’s Centre for Leadership & Effective Organisations and a team of Researchers / Consultants worked on in their article “Creating Management Processes Built for change” which was published in the September issue of the prestigious MIT Sloan Management Review.

In this article, Worley and his colleagues developed theirs ideas of agility in a context where the word agility has entered the business lexicon even as the core concept is still misunderstood. “Initially, we studied performance data from the largest public global companies in 22 industries between 1980 and 2012 to see if sustained performance was possible”, explains Chris Worley. “Our next objective was to understand the factors that explained sustained levels of high performance”.

Their research suggested that organisational agility required 4 routines:

• The strategising routine challenges management to establish the purpose, direction and market position of the organisation. They must also support organisation members that challenge the status quo
• The perceiving routine connects organisations to their external environment and allows organisation members to sense and interpret relevant shifts better that their peers do
• The testing routine encourages organisations to experiment with different ideas allowing them to learn on a continuous basis
• The implementing routine facilitates day-to-day changes in products, operations, structures and systems, but more importantly orchestrates the development of new capabilities, business models and strategies.