Agility is something of huge importance and it is particularly necessary for good innovation. In fact, you cannot manage innovation without it, not even with the best idea management software in place. But what is agility and why is it so important?
Getting to Understand Agility
If someone is able to learn to be agile, they are more likely to be an influential leader. This is because they can have experience and absorb the true lessons to be learned from that. They then use those lessons learned and apply them to unknown situations. People with agility are thoughtful, adaptable, resourceful, and flexible. They are the ones who can resolve missions, in other words.
There are four keys to learning agility:
- Results from agility.
- Change agility.
- People agility.
- Mental agility.
Learning agility is essentially about figuring out what you should do, when you face a situation in which you don’t know what to do. It is about wanting to learn lessons, applying this to resolve new situations.
Someone who is learning agile looks for new experiences. They like to solve challenges and problems that come with new experiences. They love those experiences, because they are focused on explaining them. Put together, they perform better, because the always add new skills to themselves. They are, in other words, the perfect people to drive innovation as well.
Agility and Idea Management Software
Someone who has learning agility is the perfect person to manage an innovation project. They are fantastic mentors and coaches, because they have a hunger to share the lessons they learn with others. Naturally, it is important that people have other strengths as well to really become the perfect innovator, but agility is perhaps the most important of all. That is because they can absorb information incredibly quickly, and take from that information the key pieces they need to resolve situations.
Translate this into innovation, and it means they can hear thousands of ideas, combine them into a manageable bunch, and take from them the key things needed to actually make things better. They are flexible, adaptable, resourceful, and thoughtful. They are the ones who see a mission as a challenge to be embraced, rather than to be feared.
Innovation truly is mission critical. It is not something that businesses can just do as a sideline to their other work, it is something that must be embraced across every level of the organization. They need agile learners, therefore, to help grow the organization as a whole, but also to bring that down to team level and even individual members of staff.
If you have installed idea management software in your organization, pay attention to those people who seem to bring forward the really good ideas based on the smaller ideas that have been submitted. Those are your agile learners, and they are the ones who should help you innovate your business towards success. While it is a team effort, they are the ones who can lead that team.
