Nimbleness is about adaptability, flexibility, and resilience.
Nimble professionals and companies are more adaptive, flexible, and resilient to push the boundaries of complexity that provides opportunities to grow and create value, as well as pull necessary resources together for building competitive advantage.
Adaptation: Adaptation as the ability for adapting to environmental change is an inherent characteristic of humans to survive. Self-adaptation is a phenomenon strictly linked to see learning and knowledge increase if shared and consumed. Cognitively, an adaptive mind can converge conscious thinking and unconscious or inner realm, think fast and think slow accordingly, and embrace alternative viewpoints empathetically. Practically, adaptive behavior is more coordinated, sharing knowledge, making conscious choices, working collaboratively with others to fit the changing environment effortlessly.
Adaptability can be developed via information fluency and learning agility. In fact, learning agility is the prerequisite to becoming self-adaptive. Without a growth mindset and updated knowledge, either the individual or the organization will get stuck and cannot adapt to the increasing pace of changes smoothly. Business leaders and professionals need to develop adaptability by negotiating win-win outcomes, increasing self-confidence and performance in others, making effective decisions without procrastination, and getting yourself and others into actions to fit the change circumstances timely.
Flexibility: Physically, flexibility refers to body movement capable of being bent, without breaking. Psychologically, being flexible is a cognitive ability to think alternatively, an intelligence to explore new possibilities and discover different ways to solve problems. To drive progressive changes in this complex world, we need different perspectives, different knowledge and different ways to solve a problem. A flexible mind loves choices, appreciates the diversity of thoughts as a fountain of creativity, enjoys making differences; feels comfortable to be unique and innovative.
Dynamic and changing cannot operate with inflexible minds and unchanging people. A flexible mind is not restricted to rigid processes, but able to loose up and explore different ways to do things. Flexible people demonstrate a variety of skills, be comfortable with ambiguity, identify common, yet flexible processes, and focus on outcomes. People with a flexible mind can work as a team more seamlessly and professionally. Sometimes there is no "one" answer: there are some, or many: That is why what is first of all needed is to think as a team via embracing the collective wisdom. Together, these flexible teams, with cognitive differences, extensive experience, are resolute, responsive, adaptive, able to speed up the decision-making process and discover alternative ways to solve problems effectively.
Resilience: Uncertainties are a common occurrence in any walk of our progress, and failure is part of success. Resilience is about bounce. It’s about regaining one's footing which could be bouncing back, forwards. Resilience is the ability to respond to change, recovering quickly from setbacks, as well as the capacity to respond to the unexpected in a way that increases gain or minimizes loss. Resilience is a property of an elastic component of a person, restructuring his/her life integrating the change in some way that works.
Being resilient indicates the person can undergo high dynamic stress and yet he/she is able to recover smoothly without much degradation. Resilience is the ability to respond to change proactively, and act courageously when facing difficulties. The ability of "putting things in perspective” can support the person to bounce back from disappointments and thus, will provide the bigger picture for the person to move on from adverse situations, recharge energy when the prevailing constraints of the dominant cultural ethos keep perpetuating silo thinking and outdated conventional wisdom. Resilient people can stay positive, focus, and be flexible to drive progressive changes constantly.
We live in the “VUCA” new normal with varying characteristics such as diversification, ambiguity, unpredictability, nonlinearity and increased flux. Nimbleness is about adaptability, flexibility, and resilience. The nimble individual or organization is complex enough to act intelligently; adaptable in the midst of adversity, threat and stress and flexible enough to solve problems alternatively and make changes promptly.
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