Change has always been part of business, yet many organizations still rely on outdated structures that prioritize control over adaptability. The result is slower innovation and weaker customer outcomes. Business agility reframes how organizations respond, adapt, and deliver value as change accelerates.
Putting adaptability into practice requires an in-depth problem analysis. Bryan Stallings, Chief Evangelist at Lucid Software, emphasizes moving beyond output to focus on outcomes. At its core, Stallings says business agility is an organization’s ability to sense and respond to change by continuously delivering value through experimentation and adaptation, rather than relying on fixed plans or static models.
To be agile in this way, organisations must first understand where work breaks down, whether that’s unclear ownership, misaligned priorities, or fragmented information. Many of these issues are, as Stallings points out, systemically invisible, hidden within the handoffs and silos of traditional workflows. This lack of visibility can be attributed to a mismatch between the complexity of modern knowledge work and the outdated ways organizations attempt to measure it. Managers are still stuck in “deterministic models that assume work is predictable,” according to Stallings. Lucid’s Agile Advantage survey reports that 29% of teams cite “resistance to change or traditional practices” as their biggest hurdle, underscoring how essential it has become for organizations to rethink not just how they work, but what they measure as progress.
Solution-oriented
Organizations can’t respond to change without clear visibility into flow of value, Stallings asserts. That visibility, he says, depends on sensing three critical areas: strategic risk, operational friction, and cultural strain. Lucid’s Agility Accelerator is designed to surface insights across all three, giving leaders a more complete picture of where agility breaks down and where it can be strengthened.
The first area is strategic foresight, the ability to anticipate obstacles before they derail execution. Managers can use Agility Accelerator to build teams visually, create blueprints for a course of action, and test scenarios before they occur. Rather than following one-size-fits-all advice, leaders can test assumptions against their own data before moving forward. For example, Lucid users can include estimations for each piece of work and then match that up with expected team capacity to see how much work a team can feasibly take on.
The second area focuses on operational friction, the often-unseen points where work slows or stalls. Using structured frames and activities within the Agility Accelerator, teams surface both quantitative and qualitative signals, from missing information to unclear handoffs. By aggregating input across teams, the system highlights recurring systemic impediments, helping organizations pinpoint where existing ways of working need refinement.
The third area is cultural and often the hardest to surface: burnout and psychological safety. The consequences of burnout are measurable, but the underlying causes are often obscured by rigid structures, according to Stallings. By capturing team sentiment through interactive surveys, leaders can better understand whether employees feel psychologically safe, supported, and able to sustain performance. Disengagement, after all, doesn’t always show up as absenteeism; it more often appears as diminished capacity hidden in plain sight.
AI acceleration
All these points of attention touch on the most prominent topic of the 2020s so far: AI transformation. While organizations are eager to capture the potential of AI, employees often approach it with uncertainty, whether driven by concerns about job displacement or confusion over how AI will actually improve day-to-day work. That uncertainty is tangible. According to Lucid’s AI Readiness Report, 42% of employees say they are somewhat concerned about misusing AI due to unclear guidelines. For Stallings, that gap underscores why AI must be integrated as a transparent partner within everyday workflows. When AI is embedded transparently into processes, organizations can see where it genuinely removes friction and where it introduces new inefficiencies or errors.
That same visibility is central to business agility transformation. Rather than treating so-called shadow AI solely as a security risk, Stallings sees it as a signal of unmet needs and work that existing systems fail to support. When AI use is observable and openly acknowledged, teams can evaluate its real impact, build trust, and adapt how work gets done.
Autonomous choices
Stallings concludes that while familiar solutions work for ordered, predictable problems, the pace of change today creates complexities that make those linear approaches inadequate. To respond quickly to shifting markets and meet modern customer needs, organizations need agility not just in structures and processes, but in culture itself. Many executives were trained in environments defined by hierarchy, bureaucracy, and long-term plans. Today, their role is to foster a shared understanding that enables teams at every level to spot challenges early, adapt, and self-organize to solve them. Stallings says tools like Lucid’s Agility Accelerator give leaders the visibility and insight to make this possible, measuring work in ways that reveal both obstacles and opportunities and enabling organizations to act with clarity, speed, and confidence.
Also read: Lucid Software expands AI tools for business processes