Agility Abacus

How this tool works

Who it’s for:

Designed for transformation leaders, portfolio owners, and Heads of Change looking to assess organisational agility beyond ceremonies and frameworks.

What it does:

This diagnostic helps you reflect on 12 key organisational tensions — from centralised vs decentralised decision-making to detailed forethought vs adaptive course correction. Each dimension invites you to consider where your organisation actually operates today and where you need to be to thrive in your context.

How it works:

You’ll rate your organisation on each dimension using guided prompts. The Abacus then creates a visual balance profile — your unique Agility Shape — along with prompts for discussion and potential action areas.

Why it’s different:

The Agility Abacus doesn’t score you against someone else’s model. It helps you see trade-offs clearly and make informed decisions on where to shift, rebalance, or double down.

Why we built this tool

Most agility models assume “more agile” is always better. But real organisations work in complex, constrained environments. Sometimes what you need is more clarity, not more sprints.

The Agility Abacus was developed in response to a decade of transformation work across both agile-first and traditional enterprises. We saw the same problem everywhere: agility was being treated as a method to install, not a mindset to adapt. This tool reframes agility as a set of dynamic balances rather than a one-way maturity ladder.

Inspired by our Transformation Delivery Framework and Organisational Design thinking, the Abacus surfaces the tensions you’re already navigating — consciously or not — and helps you turn them into design choices rather than accidents.

You can use the results:

• As an executive team to reflect and align
• As a facilitation aid for strategy or transformation planning
• Or as a foundation for deeper organisation-wide diagnostics

Because agility isn’t one-size-fits-all. And the Abacus helps you make that explicit.