More and more we see the words Agile and Strategy mentioned in the same phrase or title. Tim Leberecht, author of the book “The Business Romantic: Give Everything, Quantify Nothing, and Create Something Greater Than Yourself” , wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review on how to make your strategy more agile and why decision making doesn’t have to be a slow process.
Leberecht described how strategy, a function of the organizations typically known as slow and involving multi-stakeholders might be blended with sprints, a core agile concept, towards faster decision making on a strategical level. The author mentioned “Google Ventures’ five-day method” as an example of how sprints help bypass bureaucracy or endless debate cycles.
Although he recognizes the value of the typical big-up-front-activities like research or scenario planning, he states that companies have less and less time for them, so their strategy needs to rely on two emerging concepts: vision and improvisation.
