emlyon business school and Volvo Group are developing a new global tool to measure agility

16 JUNE 2017

What if we were able to measure the maturity & willingness of a company to accept change? In other terms, its agility to change? To help it become faster? To increase its life expectancy in a VUCA world? To compare itself with its sector?

 

Participants from Full-time MBA  and Executive MBA (Fast Track) collaborated with Volvo Group during 9 months with the aim of providing an open source tool that can be used by any organization, in any sector, in any country to measure and follow the level agility of an organization.

Their background makes our participants uniquely qualified to help organizations for a global economy, providing a perfect perspective right from the start of the project.

workshop agility participant MBA

The ELP allows our participants to:

  • Put their knowledge and experience to work in key areas of interest to organizations at no cost;
  • Get a fresh look at its current activities and future development;
  • Bring an international and experimented view of the company’s projects and use this valuable insight to improve market acceptance in domestic and foreign markets.

Furthermore, Action Learning is a process whereby participants work and learn simultaneously by tackling real issues with real consequences. The learners develop competence through action and practical examples, rather than through classical educational methods. We applied this concept to our MBA, because our actual participants are the directors and managers of tomorrow and they need to be fully aware of their future responsibilities.

 

Based on an in-depth study, the group came with a new definition of agility and defined 8 practices gathering qualitative and quantitative KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure it inside companies. The new definition ofAgility  is a team culture shared by everyone that allows to create value by adapting and anticipating any change in the environment (in a broader sense).

In concrete terms, the company has to be able to:

  • make decisions under time constraints and with limited information
  • act in a learning by “doing and testing” approach within the organization as a whole and promptly reallocating firm’s available resources & capabilities accordingly
  • while maintaining enough stability to recover from the (possible) failures on an effectuation mode (“small bets”)

This new standard is not made to put a mark on a company but to help it improve its agility in a progressive way.

This project will be launched in an open source format, because if you want to measure agility your tools has to be agile. This new standard of agility is incorporated within the framework of Early Makers from emlyon business school and more globally in the actual debate of a freedom-form company.

 

Agilité des entreprises Workshop emlyon business school MBA

The 31st of May, Nathalie François, Fabrice Beslin, Rafael Guerrero, Sadiq Dewany and Guillaume Bézie invited global companies such as Alstom, Bayer and Vinci and also start-ups from the region of Lyon, to a workshop in emlyon business school. With their sponsors and professor (Christian Friedemann), they realized a beta-test on the tool and gathered new feedback to improve it.

These improvements will allow the emergence of a tool more adapted to the needs of all companies and sectors. In a near future, the advent of Big Data will make possibilities endless and will allow us to perfect our vision about agility.

The MBA team is looking for new partnership with the aim of developing this project. Companies from all sizes and sectors are invited to submit their application to the project ! 

 

I want to support the project 

Further information