Report
Business Agility Report (annual series)
- Publisher
- Business Agility Institute
- Date
- My role
- Co-author
Canonical report: https://businessagility.institute/
I have co-authored the Business Agility Institute’s annual Business Agility Report since inception. With over 2,500 organizations in the response pool, it is the global benchmark for how organisations measure and invest in business agility.
I lead the qualitative analysis: methodology, theme identification, and the narrative that ties it together. The analytical approach has evolved across editions, from external methodology specialists, to manual coding, to LLM-assisted theme identification with human review.
Local copies of each edition (PDF) are linked below for convenience. The canonical reports remain on the Business Agility Institute site.
Editions
Local copies are PDFs hosted on this site for convenience. Prefer the publisher link for the canonical version.
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2025 — 8th — Progress Under Pressure
258 individuals / 244 organizations. Pressure exposes system cracks, but mature business agility converts disruption into resilience and value. Findings emphasized deliberate trade-offs, creative workflow design, resilient culture/customer focus, and a strong correlation between agility maturity and performance.
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2024 — 7th — Towards Human-Centric Organizations
363 professionals / 300 organizations. Business agility maturity rebounded sharply to 5.7, the highest recorded in the index. Cultural capabilities grew strongly; the theme shifted toward customer-centric operations and supportive, transparent environments for employees.
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2023 — 6th — Leading Through Uncertainty
215 organizations contributed. Economic and social crises led many organizations to cut costs, reduce staff, and focus on “core business,” with collaboration and innovation declining. Higher performers still reported better customer satisfaction, business outcomes, speed to market, and revenues.
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2022 — 5th — Business in the New Normal
296 organizations contributed. The report situated business agility against the great resignation, economic uncertainty, war, and climate volatility. Higher-performing organizations were better at continuously improving ways of working, benefiting customers, employee satisfaction, and financial outcomes; company size became less predictive than in earlier reports.
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2021 — 4th — Rising to the Challenge
254 organizations contributed, over half with more than 1,000 employees. Higher-performing organizations were better able to respond to systemic COVID challenges while staying true to customers and purpose.
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2020 — 3rd — Responding to Disruption
COVID-era disruption reframed business agility as a practical resilience capability. Customer expectations kept shifting while employees demanded clarity, purpose, and meaning. The 2020 analysis reinforced the same three key predictors: relentless improvement, funding models, and value streams.
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2019 — 2nd — Raising the BAR
453 respondents from 274 companies. The major analytic contribution was identifying three predictive indicators of business agility: funding models, value streams, and relentless improvement.
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2018 — 1st — Raising the BAR
First global survey: 394 respondents from 166 companies. Adoption was accelerating, but most organizations rated business agility fluency relatively low. Common barriers were entrenched culture/processes, funding models, and HR/Finance/support-function transformation; reported benefits included better ways of working, employee/customer satisfaction, and market performance.
Cite
Business Agility Report (annual series). Business Agility Institute. 2018. https://netlog.net/publications/business-agility-report/