Agile Business Problem Solving for Enterprises
Enterprise executives entered 2022 with a range of significant challenges and problems, many of these driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive changes it brought. The pandemic accelerated the pace of digital transformation across industries and heightened business uncertainty and the need for flexibility and efficiency. Many old business models — particularly in the sale of physical goods, talent sourcing and development, and supply chain management — will not work as they once did. Executives must embrace “dynamic capabilities” that will enable them to navigate and gain a competitive advantage in this new world of radical change and uncertainty.
Agile business problem solving is a critical dynamic capability for enterprises. More specifically, in a new world where changes outpace traditional, regular planning and execution cycles, new agile capabilities for strategic operational management must be established to enable executives to identify, assess, and concretely respond to significant internal and external opportunities and threats as they happen.
In practice, however, enterprises not only need to identify and assess changes in the business environment, but they must also have the capacity to concretely respond and take action. For that, enterprises require what we have defined in this paper as an agile business problem-solving capability.
Agile business problem solving is a digitally-enabled capability that allows executives to rapidly turn their ongoing strategic ideation into concrete, high-impact actions. Actions take the form of specific, regulated projects performed by precisely selected, highly experienced, and skilled business problem-solving experts.
The development of an agile business problem-solving capability should be a top priority for C-Suite executives that want to rapidly respond to significant, strategic-level changes and developments before their competitors do or they are simply missed.
The paper, which Catalant partnered with renowned business analyst and researcher Andrew Karpie on, discusses:
- What an agile business problem solving capability is (and is not)
- Why enterprises must develop and exercise an agile business problem solving capability
- How its development must be enabled by a purpose-built digital platform