Inhibitors to agility
The following factors related to people are key barriers for enterprises seeking to enhance and sustain agility.
Mechanistic view of people
Due to the "hangover" of the industrial era, or because management education is yet to come to terms with knowledge work, many enterprises, especially those led by "old school" leaders, continue to show traces of treating people like machines and cogs in a process. The machine in this context is defined in the traditional sense of a closed-ended system, which is incapable of learning on its own.
The most critical difference between a human and a machine is that a machine is cold and impersonal, while a human has emotions. It is emotions that make a human care and feel the need for appreciation and a sense of belonging, dignity, and respect. It is emotions that create a desire to learn.
If there is a problem in the working of a machine, then the exact faulty part can be easily identified and replaced, without impacting the rest of the...
