We live in a world where everything updates instantly. Customer behavior changes by the hour. Campaigns tell you within days—sometimes hours—whether they’re resonating. Teams now sit on dashboards that refresh faster than anyone can read them. Yet inside most organizations, decision-making still moves at a glacial pace.

Real-time information is treated like a luxury. Real-time action is treated like a threat. It’s not because leaders don’t care, or because teams aren’t smart. It’s because most companies have never intentionally measured, trained, or operationalized one simple capability: Responsiveness.

Responsiveness isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a competitive requirement.

Why Strategic Agility Deserves KPI Status

Strategic agility is not synonymous with being reactive. It’s not about chasing every micro-trend or overcorrecting every time a campaign dips. It’s about disciplined, intentional responsiveness and being able to move quickly without losing strategic coherence. And yes, you can measure it.

What does this look like in practice?

• How long between noticing a performance shift and deciding what to do about it?
• How quickly can a team implement that decision?
• How fast does feedback get collected and interpreted?
• How often do you adjust course within the quarter?

These metrics shine a harsh but necessary light on what’s really slowing a company down. They tend to expose the same underlying issues: bottlenecked approvals, teams waiting for “perfect” information, Rocks treated like concrete instead of anchors, and leadership structures that unintentionally reward hesitation over clarity.

The Companies Winning Right Now Aren’t Smarter. They’re Faster

If you look at the organizations that have grown the fastest in volatile markets, they share one uncanny trait: they don’t wait.

They don’t hold decisions hostage until the next standing meeting.
They don’t cling to quarterly plans when the assumptions behind them have shifted.
They don’t treat experimentation as a luxury reserved for “when things calm down.”

They move quickly because their systems allow them to—short cycles, early signals, clear accountability, and decisiveness baked into the culture. They trust their teams to act with 80% of the information, knowing they can course-correct faster than they can overanalyze.

Meanwhile, slower organizations often defend their pace by calling it “alignment.” What it really is: a tax on growth.

Where the System Breaks Down (And Why It Keeps Happening)

Responsiveness erodes in predictable places:

• Decision authority is too centralized. When everything requires top-level approval, speed dies.
• Teams are afraid to be “wrong.” So they wait. And wait. And wait.
• Quarterly planning becomes dogma. Rocks become immovable, even when the data is screaming for an adjustment.
• Data ≠ meaning. Dashboards produce information, not interpretation. Without the latter, no one knows what to act on.
• No one owns responsiveness. Which means no one feels accountable for it.

These aren’t character flaws, they’re structural flaws. Strategic agility calls them out in a way that forces meaningful improvement.

A New Way to Think About EOS Quarterly Rocks

EOS is powerful, but only when Rocks are treated as focus areas rather than restraints. Most teams fail at Rocks not because the goals are wrong, but because they don’t create short enough checkpoints to catch issues early. Strategic agility doesn’t compete with Rocks; it protects them. When teams measure responsiveness, Rocks become:

• adaptive instead of rigid,
• directional instead of prescriptive, and
• supported by continuous feedback instead of blind faith.

The question becomes: How fast can we learn what’s true, and how quickly can we adjust while staying aligned on the bigger outcomes? That’s where Rocks and 90-day roadmaps actually thrive. Think back to the last time something wasn’t working—a campaign dipped, a competitor moved, a key assumption fell apart. Now ask: How long did it take us to respond?

Not notice. Not discuss. Actually respond.

If the real answer is “weeks,” not “days,” you’re moving slower than the environment you’re operating in. It’s that simple. 

Responsiveness Is an Undervalued Leadership Skill

The ability to decide and act quickly isn’t a personality trait. It’s a discipline, and leaders set the pace. Strategic agility emerges when leaders create conditions where:

• teams are trusted,
• direction is clear,
• decisions are made close to the work, and
• learning loops are short enough to matter.

In a real-time world, responsiveness is strategy. It’s time we start treating it with the same seriousness as every other KPI we track, obsess over, and celebrate. That’s the real work of modern marketing leadership and what we do every day at &Marketing. 

Strong marketing leaders create the conditions for faster learning, faster decision-making, and faster execution without sacrificing coherence or focus.

If you want to get a clearer picture of your team’s true strategic agility, start with one question: How long does it take us to act on what we already know? If the honest answer feels slower than it should, you’re not alone. If you’re exploring ways to build more agility into your marketing leadership, here are a few places to start:

• Download: Why Fractional to Full-Time Is Better Than Hiring a Full-Time CMO
• Assess: Take the fCMO Readiness Quiz to see where your organization stands