Strategic agility beyond speed : Exploring the balance between speed and slowness

Background: In today's increasingly volatile market environment, organizations face an increasing need to respond to emerging threats and opportunities. By leveraging strategic agility, organizations are able to remain flexible and adapt to these changes. Strategic agility has in most cases been associated with high speed. However, during recent years, slowness has started to emerge as an equally important aspect to consider. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between strategic agility and pace with respect to both speed and slowness. Furthermore, building on existing literature on agility as speed and slowness, this explorative study aims to analyze organizations' usage of pace when responding to changes in the market and gain a deeper understanding of this phenomena. Methodology: This study is a qualitative abductive single case study conducted in a Swedish context on a multinational organization operating in the automotive industry, Alpha. The data used in this study was based on 11 interviews as well as additional secondary data which was further analyzed through a thematic approach. Conclusion: Our study identifies nine distinct components which facilitate an organization's ability to balance speed and slowness when being strategically agile. Additionally, we have discovered that it is crucial for an organization to adopt a combination of the different components to achieve balance, as some have an emphasis on speed while others on slowness.