Towards improved agility in response to disruptive market changes in South African business

Abstract

This paper is about how South African businesses can improve agility in response to disruptive market changes. Agility is defined as having a quick resourceful and adaptable character, marked by the ability to readily move with quick easy grace. The rapid pace of changes in the business world requires a great level of flexibility and readiness to manoeuvre and keep abreast with the changes. These changes may be in the form of organisational restructure, reworking a strategy, and responding to competitor moves. The changes require organisations to think on their feet in order to always manage the drivers of change. Agile approaches are used in business to produce a minimal viable product and deploy to the market in order to ensure that the service or the product deployed is more acceptable to consumers. The findings of the study conducted indicate a common need for businesses to understand agility better and to adapt to better methods of managing disruptive market changes. The study was underpinned by the Theory of change. This paper provides a framework on how businesses can improve their response to disruptive market and business change. The framework could help provide business with a competitive edge. This paper adds to the body of knowledge on Disruptive Change and Agility.