PwC: Long term business sustainability mapped out

By Rob Starr, Content Manager, Big4.com

A world first study to understand the value and elements of organisational agility has been released by PwC and University of Melbourne Faculty of Business and Economics.  Research for the collaborative study has involved 60 executives from 18 organisations that span some of the highest profile organisations in Australia and New Zealand including ASX top 50 to government departments and private businesses. The businesses represent a broad cross section of industries including mining, retail, health and technology.

The PwC and University of Melbourne newly developed “HVP Agility Model” recognises that agility has many dimensions but is based on three core capacities: Horizon, Velocity and Plasticity.

PwC and University of Melbourne will use the HVP Agility Model and continuing collaborative research to produce an Agility Index as a tool to confirm that agility generates greater shareholder returns. It will allow organisations to review their strengths and weaknesses, track improvement over time and correlate this with overall performance and shareholder returns.

University of Melbourne Professor Graham Sewell comments:

“Kurt Lewin was the first to develop a model of organisational transformation in 1947. Since then we’ve seen several different models developed all grounded on the core assumptions that stability is achievable and desirable, employees need to be convinced of change and that organisational development must be anchored by a new, replacement vision of stability,” he says. “But times have changed and our research has confirmed that existing models fail to provide an up-to-date roadmap for organisations to be agile in an environment where global and local market conditions are changing almost instantaneously. This is not purely ‘turbulence’ it is permanent change occurring to the ecosystems in which organisations are operating.”