Agility as Leadership
The first time I heard “agile leadership,“ I assumed it was Silicon Valley jargon dressed up as wisdom. Another buzzword that would cycle through conference circuits and disappear.
Then I realized I‘d been practicing it for decades. I just called it something different: staying responsive when the plan falls apart. Learning from what isn‘t working while you‘re still in it; adjusting course when the ground shifts—and in conflict zones, the ground shifts constantly.
Agile leadership isn‘t about sprints and backlogs. It‘s a fundamental orientation toward uncertainty. And it‘s the minimum viable leadership capability for the next decade.
What Agile Leadership Actually Demands
Agile leadership is the capacity to lead effectively when you can‘t predict what‘s next. It‘s the ability to move quickly, absorb new information, and pivot without losing people or momentum.
The mindset underneath: You don‘t need all the answers before you start moving. You need clarity about direction, honesty about what you don‘t know, and the discipline to learn as you go.
Traditional leadership said: plan completely, then execute. Get the strategy perfect, then announce it.
Agile leadership says: here‘s the direction. Let‘s start moving, learn what we discover, and adjust. Not because planning is pointless. The plan the plan will be wrong in ways you can‘t predict from behind a desk.
I learned this viscerally. In Ecuador, I was running a constitutional convention with President Rafael Correa. I started the session before the official presidential announcement—a protocol breach that had my boss furious. The president was gracious about it. But the lesson stuck: you can plan perfectly and still have the ground shift under you. In Sudan, in Iraq, in Somalia, it was the same. You‘d spend months building a negotiation framework. Then a faction would splinter, or a regional dynamic would shift, and the framework was obsolete overnight. The leaders who survived weren‘t the ones with the best original plan. They were the ones who could hold direction while completely rebuilding the path.
The Three Shifts: Mindset, Behavior, Environment
Mindset: Curiosity Over Certainty
An agile leader treats being wrong as data, not failure.
When something doesn‘t work, the question isn‘t “Who‘s responsible?“ It‘s “What are we learning? What does this tell us about what we should do next?“
This is the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems have known solutions—you just need the right expertise. Adaptive challenges require people to change how they think. Agile leadership lives in the adaptive space, where curiosity matters more than expertise.
In environments where admitting “I was wrong“ wasn‘t just leadership but survival—if you couldn‘t update your understanding when facts changed, people died—you got curious fast. The business stakes are different, but the principle is identical: the leader who can stay curious outpaces the leader who clings to being right.
Behavior: Iterate, Don‘t Perfect
Linda Hill‘s research on innovation leadership identifies three capacities: creative abrasion (surfacing diverse, conflicting ideas), creative agility (iterating and learning quickly), and creative resolution (integrating competing perspectives into shared outcomes). An agile leader creates small experiments instead of waiting for the perfect moment.
“We think customers want X. Let‘s test it with 100 customers before we bet the company on it.“
“We think this process will work. Let‘s try it for two weeks, then gather feedback.“
This is the FOG Filter‘s “Reversible“ principle in action: if a decision is reversible, move quickly. Test it. Learn from it. Then adjust. Reserve the slow, careful process for the decisions that are genuinely irreversible.
The other behavior: radical transparency about what‘s working and what isn‘t. An agile leader doesn‘t hide failures. They surface them, learn from them, and move forward. That requires psychological safety—people need to know it‘s rational to say “this didn‘t work“ without getting punished.
Environment: Distributed Authority
You can‘t be agile if every decision flows through one person. That‘s a bottleneck, not leadership.
An agile leader builds an environment where capable people at all levels can make decisions. The leader provides direction, constraints, and criteria for good decisions. Then people move.
This is scary for traditional leaders. It feels like losing control. You‘re not. You‘re trading the illusion of control for actual influence. The leader who tries to control every decision gets exactly one brain working on every problem. The leader who distributes authority gets dozens.
Agile and Adaptive: Nested, Not Separate
Adaptive leadership asks: Which problems require people to change how they think?
Agile leadership includes that question. But it also includes tactical responsiveness—the ability to adjust direction quickly based on new information while the adaptive work is still unfolding.
They‘re nested. Adaptive leadership is the deep work of shifting mindsets. Agile leadership is doing that work while simultaneously moving, learning, and adjusting course. In practice, you need both—and the skill is knowing which mode the moment requires.
How to Start Monday Morning
1. Ask one genuine question in your next meeting.
Not “any thoughts?“ while signaling you‘ve already decided. Try: “Here‘s my current thinking on X. What assumptions am I making that might be wrong?“
Then listen, genuinely. If the answer changes nothing, you weren‘t really asking.
2. Create one small experiment.
Pick an area of uncertainty. Instead of three months of planning, say: “Here‘s our hypothesis. Let‘s test it for two weeks and see what we learn.“ Keep it small. Make it safe to fail. Document the learning.
3. Distribute one decision.
Pick something your team has been waiting on you to decide. Give them the criteria and let them decide. This reveals whether people understand your strategic direction well enough to make good decisions without you—and it frees you from bottleneck decision-making.
The Trap: Agile Isn‘t Formless
Agile leadership requires more clarity, not less. The clarity is just about different things.
What‘s clear: the direction, the constraints, the criteria for good decisions, how you‘ll know if you‘re heading the right way.
What‘s not locked in: the exact path to get there.
Leaders who mistake agile for “anything goes“ create chaos. Leaders who understand that agile is disciplined responsiveness within clear constraints create organizations that can move at the speed the world actually demands.