Editor’s Introduction

Rationale for the special issue

Accelerating societal changes over the past several decades have forced organizations to be responsive in more or less strategic ways. However, 2020 provided abundant empirical evidence of the difficulty organizations may face when the pace of change is sudden, and when fundamental organizational practices and procedures must be significantly altered, or fully upended, to meet the demands of a rapidly changing environment.

One way for organizations to become more suited to the demands of contemporary society is to adopt agile practices and structures. However, the concept of agility fundamentally challenges the business models and management approaches of many organizations. According to Zerfass et al. (2018), agility is:

the overall capability of an organization to respond to and take advantage of changes initiated by drivers in the internal and external environment. It includes the ability to identify relevant changes and to respond proactively, efficiently, and effectively, employing the right personnel based on competence, not hierarchical status. Agility includes the ability to implement flexible structures and processes suited to the immediate tasks at hand and to employ the appropriate resources in the shortest possible time. (p. 7)

The emergence of agility as a business management model is of great importance because companies must constantly reassess their increasingly volatile, uncertain, and complex environments, often adapting their actions and strategies as the environment requires. Naturally, such organizational responses to internal and external challenges affect strategic communication management. The need for organizations to become more agile profoundly challenges and changes the role of strategic communication within organizations.

This special issue of the International Journal of Strategic Communication, titled “Agility in Strategic Communication,” features work from 12 scholars who explore a novel approach to communication management from different perspectives and different cultures. The issue signals a paradigm shift from our staid rational management structures to more flexible, co-created decision-making models based in agile thought and process.

This collection of work demonstrates that agility is a viable strategy to cope successfully with changing environments and the processes linked to the digital transformation in corporate communication. To that end, corporate structures must be reassessed and adapted, and established patterns of thinking and acting must be reconsidered. By examining theoretical and empirical insights related to the emerging phenomenon of agility, this special issue solidly positions agile in the strategic communication body of knowledge and provides a foundation for future research in this area.

Contribution of the special issue

This special issue emerged from scholarship presented in May 2019 at the International Communication Association 67th Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., as part of a panel titled, “Transcending Boundaries: Agility as Challenge and Chance for Corporate Communications.” Several of the articles presented here stem from that panel session. Others were invited from scholars who are forwarding cutting-edge ideas on the topic of agile and its place in the strategic communication body of knowledge. The articles in this special issue are organized into three sections that explore agility in strategic communication.

The first section, Explicating Agile, attempts to provide a basis for understanding the concept of agile and highlights the work of U.S. co-authors Matthew Ragas, of DePaul University, and Traci Ragas, of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education. Their article, “Understanding Agile for Strategic Communicators: Foundations, Implementations, and Implications,” examines the emergence of agile from the “world of information technology (IT) to functions across the enterprise” (p. 81) and reviews agile approaches and methods being employed by today’s most adaptive organizations. The authors offer an historical account – augmented by sports analogies – of the rise of agile values and principles as organizations respond to an operating environment characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). Ragas and Ragas illuminate the associated paradigm shift that has emerged in organizational management and provide a review of key terms and definitions to “improve the cross-functional fluency of strategic communicators” in performing agile (p. 81). The authors conclude by discussing implications of agile for future scholarship, professional practice, and pedagogy, emphasizing the role of educators in training the next generation of communications leaders to succeed in the uncertain and risk-filled business environment of the future.

The second section, Strategic Communication in Agile Organizations, features two contributions with different emphases. The first article in the section is titled, “The Triple Role of Strategic Communication in Agile Organizations,” and is co-authored by Lisa Dühring, of Leipzig University and Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and Ansgar Zerfass, of Leipzig University in Germany and BI Norwegian Business School in Norway. The authors engage in a multi-method approach to bring the agility debate of other disciplines fully into the strategic communication domain. Through a comprehensive literature review, Dühring and Zerfass identify six key dimensions of agility and group them into three categories: structures and processes, culture and people, and tools and technology. Interestingly, they identify traditional public relations management perspectives (Cutlip & Center, 1952; Long & Hazelton, 1987) that contain elements of current agility models and frameworks. In addition, Dühring and Zerfass provide one of the earliest empirically driven investigations into the challenges and implications of agility for strategic communication professionals. Their findings demonstrate the relevance of agility in practice and posit ways communication departments may become more agile in the future.

The second contribution in this section, “Communication Planning: Agility is a Game Changer in Strategy Development,” features the innovative work of prominent communication scholar Betteke van Ruler of the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. In this conceptual piece, van Ruler draws on business and marketing strategy modeling, as well as her own previous work (van Ruler, 2015; van Ruler & Körver, 2018), to introduce a framework for agile communication strategy with eight building blocks. According to van Ruler, “agility encourages a focus on choices to be tested, not only at the output or tactics levels, but for every choice in the strategy” (p. 122). She makes an interesting distinction between the concepts of “strategy” and “plan,” and argues for a greater focus on “goal-based and goal-free formative evaluation, in order to test choices over and over again and show that strategy is not a product but a process of adaptation” (p. 133). More than six years in development, van Ruler’s Communication Strategy Framework combines the building blocks of vision, internal situation, external situation, ambition, accountability, stakeholders, resources, and game plan to create a model that sees strategy building as a narrative that ensures coherence in the choices made. Her model represents a clear paradigm shift from linear planning that will undoubtedly provoke more scholarship and appear in the boardrooms and classrooms of the future.

The third section of this special issue, Agile Strategic Communication Practices, features two contributions that demonstrate specialized areas where agile practices may contribute to organizational effectiveness. In “Agile Content Management: Strategic Communication in Corporate Newsrooms,” a team of scholar from Austria point out that trends like globalization, digitization, and mediatization have facilitated a move away from traditional differentiated communication functions toward topic- and content-centered approaches. Co-authors Jens Seiffert-Brockmann, Vienna University of Economics and Business, and University of Vienna scholars Sabine Einwiller, Neda Ninova-Solovykh, and Daniel Wolfgruber advocate for communication departments with autonomous content managers who serve as “conductors of inclusive, collective storytelling” (p. 126) that “weave narrative elements from diverse sources into collective stories” (p. 140). Their study provides insights on agile content management gleaned from interviews with communication professionals working in Germany and Austria. The authors conclude that issues of power, control, and trust present challenges to the effectiveness of agile content management in communication departments; however, a more inclusive storytelling approach to content management permits more effective communication strategy development that produces more effective outcomes for the organization.

The issue concludes with an article titled, “Agile Cooperation between Communications Agencies and Companies,” by co-authors Christian Wiencierz, Ulrike Röttger, and Christina Fuhrmann, of the University of Münster in Germany. In their study, the authors explore how agility may benefit collaboration between corporations and agencies, a relationship that is often burdened with “fundamental principal-agent problems” (p. 145). While these problems are complex, the authors demonstrate that an important contributor to the success of corporate-agency collaboration using agile methods is to determine concrete mutual goals early in the collaboration. Wiencierz, Röttger, and Fuhrmann conclude that, in an uncertain and volatile world, agile characteristics like a flat working structure, iterative processes with many evaluations, and innovative collaboration tools contribute to more effective client-agency collaborations.

The articles presented in this special issue provide a new way of thinking about strategic communication management. These studies offer unique insights, make compelling arguments, and point to promising areas for future scholarship. As strategic communication scholars and practitioners face an ever-changing and volatile world, it is our adaptability and propensity to look outward beyond our imagined disciplinary boundaries that will ensure the growth and evolution of strategic communication in the future.