Most commercial real estate organizations are still early in their agility journey. In our April roundtable here's what it actually takes to move faster, decide better, and build the change muscle to keep up.
At our April Human Capital Roundtable, real estate & real assets CHROs discussed the idea of cultivating resilience, agility, and flexibility. A throughline in our discussion was the idea that instead of immediately reacting to the chaos, organizations are learning to interpret it as data, using it to inform decisions and adapt in real time. This idea of ‘going slow to go fast,’ helps organizations ultimately respond quicker and more effectively to the constant change. Here are our key takeaways.
1) Most organizations are still early in their agility journey, with uneven execution
- In our live poll, the majority of participants described their organizations as “moderately agile,” with pockets of strength but inconsistent execution across teams.
- While agility is a clear priority, it is often dependent on specific leaders or functions rather than embedded as an enterprise capability.
2) The shift is from managing change to operating in constant change
- Organizations are no longer navigating discrete change events, but operating in a state of continuous change.
- This requires a fundamental mindset shift, where success is defined by the ability to continuously reassess assumptions, reprioritize, and adapt, rather than return to stability.
- Some organizations are reinforcing this shift by encouraging “test and learn” environments, normalizing failure as part of learning, and creating faster feedback loops to iterate in real time.
3) Decision-making speed is a function of structure, governance, and clear ownership
- A major barrier identified was the tendency to over-democratize decisions, resulting in too many stakeholders, slower timelines, and diluted accountability.
- In practice, organizations are improving speed by narrowing decision-making groups, defining single-threaded owners for initiatives, reorganizing teams to push decisions closer to the front lines, and creating governance models that provide clear swim lanes rather than adding friction.
4) Leadership behavior and culture are the primary unlocks for agility
- Organizations making progress are fostering a stronger bias to action, embracing iterative ways of working, and shifting away from perfection-driven cultures.
- However, many are still constrained by leaders operating as “players” rather than “coaches,” limiting delegation and scalability.
- To address this, some firms are tying leadership expectations around delegation, development, and change leadership directly to performance management and incentives, reinforcing that enabling others is a core leadership responsibility.
5) AI and change capability are accelerating the need to build “change muscle”
- AI is acting as both a catalyst for agility and a source of complexity, requiring organizations to move faster while bringing employees along.
- Participants shared examples such as cross-functional AI councils, internal innovation challenges, and employee-driven idea pipelines to surface and scale new use cases, alongside automation of manual processes to free up capacity.
- At the same time, organizations are investing in training, communication, and transparency to ensure adoption, recognizing that sustained change requires addressing both the technical and human elements.