Business agility refers to rapid, continuous, and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and maintaining competitive advantage.
[2] In a business context, agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways.
To counter this, business agility can be developed in the enterprise, making change a routine part of organizational life.
Traditionally these issues were dealt with by planning experts who would attempt to pre-determine every possible detail prior to implementation; however, in many situations, even the most carefully conceived projects will be impossibly difficult to manage.
[8][9] Agile methods integrate planning with execution, allowing an organization to find an optimal ordering of work tasks and to adjust to changing requirements.
The agile approach allows a team or organization of collective trust, competence, and motivation to implement successful projects quickly by focusing on only a small set of details in any change iteration.
As with CAS, the outcomes or products of agile organizations such as software teams are inherently unpredictable yet will eventually form an identifiable pattern.
Agile enterprises exist in corporate (e.g. W. L. Gore & Associates and Oticon), non-profit (e.g. Alcoholics Anonymous), community (e.g., Wikipedia, the Burning Man festival), and even terrorist (e.g. Al Qaeda) environments.
[citation needed] Interactions, self-organizing, co-evolution, and the edge of chaos are concepts borrowed from complexity science that can help define some of the processes that take place within an agile enterprise.
They are an important driving force for agile enterprises, because new ideas, products, services, and solutions emerge from the multiple exchanges happening over time.
The creativity and innovation that arises from this self-organizing process give the agile enterprise an edge in developing (and redeveloping) products, services, and solutions for a hypercompetitive marketplace.
Operating in hypercompetitive, continuously changing markets, agile enterprises pursue a series of temporary competitive advantages—capitalizing for a time on the strength of an idea, product, or service then readily discarding it when no longer tenable.
Mobilizing involves managing resources, ensuring the fluid movement of people between projects, and finding ways to enhance internal and external interactions.