Evan Leybourn
December 11, 2025
The 2025 Business Agility Report: Progress Under Pressure
The idea that organizations experience periods of stability between disruptive events has long since passed. In 2025, pressure is constant. We must accept that economic uncertainty, geopolitical shifts, rapid technological change, and ongoing restructures form the environment we work within. In this context, business agility is no longer optional.
Business agility is not a transformation program or a delivery methodology. It is the set of organizational capabilities that determine whether a company can deliberately and clearly decide and adapt to deliver value. Especially when trade-offs are unavoidable. It shows up in how leaders allocate authority, how work flows across boundaries, and how organizations respond when conditions change faster than plans.
The 2025 Business Agility Report makes one thing clear: pressure exposes the cracks in the system.
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2025 Business Agility Report [EN] When organizations lack clarity, misalignment compounds. Governance slows decisions. Silos harden. Leaders retreat into command and control. Under pressure, these weaknesses don’t hide; they accelerate.
But when business agility is strong, organizations have the resilience to absorb that pressure. They prioritize more deliberately. They redesign workflow rather than add complexity. They can maintain customer focus and cultural resilience even as resources tighten.
This year’s data reflects both realities. Across industries and regions, organizations are making difficult trade-offs.
Many are protecting delivery and customer value while deferring leadership and governance reform. While some of these choices are rational in the short term, the consequences are visible. Where empowerment erodes and decision rights narrow, progress slows.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the adoption of artificial intelligence. AI does not create an advantage on its own. It amplifies the organization in which it is embedded. In companies with strong business agility, AI accelerates learning, innovation, and value creation. In those without it, AI exposes structural friction, leadership gaps, and brittle decision systems at speed.
The lesson is not that business agility prevents disruption. It doesn’t. The lesson is that business agility determines whether disruption becomes a liability or a lever.
As you read this report, you’ll see consistent evidence of what enables progress under pressure and what undermines it. You’ll see why leadership behavior, organizational design, and decision authority matter more than process adoption.
And you’ll see why, in today’s operating environment, business agility remains one of the clearest predictors of resilience, performance, and sustained value creation.
The future will not reward the fastest organizations; only the most adaptable ones will.
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