Institute Pushes Enterprise Agility As Key To Surviving Disruption

The Project Management Institute Agile Alliance has unveiled a new "Manifesto for Enterprise Agility," aimed at helping organisations navigate rapid disruption and bridge the gap between strategy and execution.

The guide, released in Lagos, comes amid growing pressure on businesses to continuously reinvent their operating models in response to evolving market realities.

According to PMI's global C-suite research, 93 per cent of senior executives say they must rethink and challenge their business approaches at least every five years, while nearly 65 per cent are doing so every two years or faster. Despite this, many organisations struggle to translate strategy into actionable outcomes.

The managing director, Sub-Saharan Africa at PMI, George Asamani, said the core challenge lies in execution rather than strategy formulation.

"Most organisations don't struggle with strategy; they struggle with turning strategy into coordinated action. Enterprise agility is about building organisations that can adapt quickly without losing alignment, so leaders can respond to disruption while keeping their people and priorities focused on delivering value," he said.

The new manifesto expands the concept of agility beyond teams and projects to encompass entire enterprises, including leadership behaviour, governance structures, operating models and organisational culture.

Launched to mark the 25th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto, the framework avoids rigid prescriptions, instead encouraging leaders to "govern with guardrails instead of gatekeepers," fund strategic intent rather than routine activity, and decentralise decision-making closer to value creation points.

Meanwhile, the manifesto is anchored on four core values of clear purpose guided by adaptive planning, shared enterprise outcomes over departmental optimisation, continuous reinvention over preservation of legacy systems, and a human-centric approach to change.

Industry leaders have endorsed the initiative, stressing the urgency of organisational agility in today's volatile environment. Co-author of Superagency, Greg Beato, said the evolution mirrors the transformation triggered by the internet era.

"Twenty-five years after the Manifesto for Agile Software Development presented a new way to think about software development, it's time to apply similar thinking to enterprises as a whole," he said.

Commenting,Chief Executive Officer of GE Appliances, Kevin Nolan, added that "today's business landscape demands rapid adaptation and greater agility," warning that organisations that fail to embrace the shift risk falling behind.

Similarly, former CEO and co-founder of Rebel Foods, Sagar Kochhar, emphasised that agility is fundamentally about leadership mindset rather than frameworks.

"Enterprise agility is less about frameworks and more about leadership courage, the courage to reset the vision, dismantle legacy assumptions, and trust teams to execute within systems designed for speed," he said.

Hence, the release underscores a growing consensus that enterprise agility is critical for survival, yet under-implemented across industries. While 85 per cent of executives recognise its importance, about 65 per cent admit they have adopted it only to a limited extent or not at all.