COVID-19’s Uncomfortable Revelations About Agile and Sustainable Organizations in a VUCA World

Organizations confronting the realities of a COVID-19 world find themselves managing challenging and unprecedented demands: redeploying talent, establishing remote workforces, building needed capabilities, propping up distressed supply chains, contributing to humanitarian efforts, choosing among firing/furloughing/ retaining employees, and planning for reopening amid uncertainty. In this context, the crisis has revealed three implications for research and practice on agile and sustainable organizations in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments. First, how to characterize the COVID virus and our response to it is unclear; what is clear is that we were unprepared. Second, despite the rhetoric, too many organizations did not have the capabilities to respond. Saying you are agile does not make it so. Third, the COVID-19 pandemic reveals our community’s silence on structural inequality (e.g., financial, social, and racial). We enabled unethical positions from the safety of our positivistic and supposedly neutral values. As reference, we define organization agility as the capability to make timely, effective, and sustained change when it results in a performance advantage (Worley et al., 2014). Sustainable organizations expand the term “performance” to address the optimization of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes as well as financial results. Since the relative emphasis on these outcomes changes over time and the methods for achieving them change, there is no sustainability without agility (Lawler & Worley, 2011).