[Dima Rezaev]

Adapting to a rapidly changing environment to keep meeting business objectives. Not being afraid to try new things to keep your team motivated, especially if you notice the ‘old way of doing things’ seems ineffective.

[Lynne Titley]

So I think the definition from the GENCFO research paper works well – “agility… is our ability to respond to change”. Having pondered this a bit since
I signed up to be a manager of the Agility group on the platform, I think in Finance there’s a particularly interesting angle around the contrast/sliding scale between flexibility and structure/control, which makes agility something more complex for us to manage appropriately in practice, beyond that fundamental definition.

The research paper definition works for me because it defines agility, nice and simply, as your *ability* to respond, but doesn’t specify whether or how you actually *should* respond, even if you can. We have a particular responsibility in finance for being custodians of controls & processes that protect our organisations from harm. A “change” could be that a new Sales Director is appointed, who asks us to adjust our rev rec policy on a contract so that he meets his target and gets his bonus. The right response to that is likely to be *not* to do as he asks – and you might say that we ‘shouldn’t’ be “agile” enough to be able to do it. There should be controls in place that stop us. On the other hand, obviously, if a change happens that *does*need to be responded to for the organisational good, and we can’t do that, of course that’s a problem. So absolutely, yes, having agility and the potential to respond to change is as important to us as to any other function, but the nuances of deciding what to change, and how, and sometimes the ethical, social or governance contexts around these scenarios, can be super complex.

Mastering Agility in the Digital Finance Function – GENCFO Community Platform (generationcfo.com)

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[Lynne Titley]

Adding to @drezaev ‘s good & valid points, I would go further on the “not being afraid to try new things” piece, and say “not being afraid to fail”. I think, putting aside my comments above and thinking about agility in the context it’s mostly relevant to (i.e. when responding/adapting *is* the right thing to do), I think culturally people are still very afraid of failure, and it’s still generalised as being bad, even though sometimes it’s an inevitable part of being agile & the journey to success.