David Alberts on the Agility Imperative

Agility and the Collective

21^st Century Imperatives

Dr. David S. Alberts

June 2011

We are incapable of meeting the most pressing challenges of the 21^st Century for several reasons.  We shall continue to struggle unless we recognize the twin imperatives of Agility and the Collective.  We must become more Agile as individual entities, and develop effective ways of focusing collective action to achieve shared objectives.  

Methods and approaches that served us well in the Industrial Age, even well into the Information Age, are increasingly maladapted for the realities of today.   We continue to behave as if we can adequately predict and thus prepare for the future by optimizing our capabilities for known and likely scenarios.  We continue to believe and act as if hierarchies are the most appropriate form of organization.   The complexities of the problems we face defy decomposition and prediction.  The coalitions of the willing we need to successfully tackle these problems cannot be shoe-horned into a traditional organization with someone in charge.  

Until we recognize the bankruptcy of these beliefs, we will not make the efforts necessary to understand Agility and improve our ability to effect, cope with, and exploit unanticipated, and unfamiliar, changes in circumstances.   Until we recognize that there is complexity in the Enterprise or Self - the collection of civil-military, governmental and non-government, Public and Private entities - that make traditional command and control and management approaches inappropriate for the tasks at hand, we shall not work together collaboratively to develop more appropriate approaches.

While both of these are transformational challenges, they are not as difficult as they may at first appear – as least not conceptually.  There are viable solutions that can be better understood and applied now.   However, we will remain prisoners of our limited imaginations, until we accept the limitations of our reliance on prediction and hierarchies.