Agility | Meaning & Concept [Explained]

We explain what agility is and what factors intervene in it. Also, what is physical agility, mental agility, business agility and more.

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What is agility?

The agility It is the ability to carry out movements and changes in body posture with speed, precision and efficiency . Agility involves a significant degree of control over the body and encompasses other physical attributes such as balance, coordination, speed, strength, reflexes and endurance. People who show a lot of agility are called people agile.

The word “agility” comes from “agile” and this in turn comes from the Latin word agiliscomposed of the verb agere (“act”, “move” or “carry forward”) and the suffix -ilis (expressing capacity or possibility). Seen this way, someone who is agile is someone who has a great capacity for movement or action, that is, who can use their body quickly and skillfully. This adjective is usually used when referring to sport or physical efforts: “an agile gymnast”, “an agile wrestler” or “several agile runners”.

In the field of physical education, agility was initially conceived as the ability to quickly change the direction of walking, a definition that was later modified to refer to a set of continuous and rapid changes in the position and orientation of the body, executed with grace, speed and precision. Two types of individual factors come into play:

Perceptual and cognitive factors which have to do with the perception of one's own body and environment, but also with the planning of one's own actions and making immediate decisions.
Physical factors which have to do with the state of the body, such as strength, balance, coordination or the technique learned and practiced.

All individuals are born with a certain degree of agility, but in general it is the result of the physical conditions of the body, so can perfectly be developed, accentuated or exercised and according to the same logic, be lost with the passage of time. Agility is the complete opposite trait of clumsiness, slowness and heaviness.

Mental agility

When talking about mental agility, this term is used in a figurative sense: having a quick, balanced and light mind, just as gymnasts have their bodies. That is, mental agility is understood as the capacity for speed, efficiency and mental aptitude that all people have to some extent . Just like physical agility, mental agility can be the result of practice and training, or it can be the result of natural talent, but in both cases it is a set of reasoning skills.

Business agility

In the business world, business agility or organizational agility is understood as the ability of an organization to adapt quickly and effectively to market changes both in the internal aspects of the company and in the external ones. Therefore, an agile company will be one that faces changes efficiently and manages to convert them into an impulse to grow.

Typically, business agility It is evident in the ability to sustain service or production despite changes that take place, thus maintaining the advantage over the competition. The changes themselves may be of a very different nature, but an agile company will adapt to them quickly and will be able to face organizational challenges in a better way.

An example of business agility is that demonstrated by the Zoom Video Communications corporation, created in 2011, to face the gigantic growth in demand during the peak months of the Covid-19 pandemic (particularly the years of 2020 and 2021). , given that public health restrictions forced new teleworking models to be devised.

In February 2020 alone, the company gained 2.2 million users worldwide, and on a single day in March its teleconferencing application was downloaded 343,000 times. A critical situation for the business world gave them an advantage that, however, could not have been taken advantage of if the company did not have the necessary agility to satisfy demand.