Dynamic Capabilities and Digital Agility: A Framework for Strategic Adaptation

In today's business environment, marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), organizations face immense pressure to continuously adapt and evolve in order to remain competitive and sustainable. The VUCA paradigm, popularized by the U.S. Army War College to describe the post-Cold War world, has since been widely adopted in management literature to represent the dynamic challenges businesses encounter in the 21st century. Organizations now operate in environments where technological disruptions, regulatory changes, shifting consumer preferences, geopolitical tensions, and unexpected crises like the COVID-19 pandemic can rapidly alter market dynamics (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014). In such an environment, agility—defined as the ability to sense, respond, and adapt quickly to change—has become a crucial organizational capability. However, agility alone is not sufficient; it must be anchored in strategic foresight and enabled through dynamic capabilities and digital infrastructure. This necessitates a deeper understanding of how firms can develop and deploy digital agility in tandem with dynamic capabilities to achieve sustained strategic adaptation.