Seeing with New Eyes

Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs define leadership agility as a process of reflective action or ongoing learning from your own actions — the ability to focus, step back, gain a broader and deeper perspective, and re-engage from that new perspective.

Though addressed to organizational leadership, the four key areas of agility are applicable with anyone or group of any size, from individuals to partners to families to organizations to communities to nations:

Self-leadership agility — stepping back to become more aware of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and experimenting with new, more effective approaches.

Creative agility — stepping back from your habitual assumptions and developing optimal solutions to the issues you face.

Stakeholder agility — stepping back from your own views and objectives to consider the needs and perspectives of stakeholders.

Context-setting agility — stepping back to determine the best initiatives, given changes taking place in the larger environment within which you operate. 

As noted by these authors, we all need greater agility to adapt to our turbulent world economy's accelerating change, growing complexity, and interdependence.

We enrich our lives and the lives of those we impact when we step back from our habitual views to broaden and deepen our perspective.