The Changing Concept of Agile management: A New Interpretation of Flexibility in the 21st Century

Purpose – This paper reinterprets agile management as a multi-level organisational capability rather than as a project-level technique. It argues that the development of agility in the 21st century can be understood through three interrelated layers: project-level agile methods, lean–agile integration and scaling, and organisation-wide agility. The study also examines the contextual conditions under which agility can be embedded in organisational systems, with particular attention to leadership, culture, trust, spatial embeddedness and emerging AI-supported decision environments. Design/methodology/approach – The article adopts a conceptual review design based on an integrative literature review. The analysis draws on peer-reviewed journal articles, seminal books and a limited number of primary framework documents relevant to the historical development of agile management. The literature was selected through database searches and iterative screening using explicit inclusion criteria. The synthesis is organised through a three-layer conceptual model that links project practices, organisational design and contextual contingencies. Findings – The review shows that agility evolved from a software development approach into a broader organisational logic shaped by leadership transformation, distributed decision-making, psychological safety, continuous learning and adaptive structures. However, the study also finds that the expansion of agility is neither linear nor universally transferable. Lean and agile thinking overlap in important ways, but they differ in their underlying organisational logic. The success of agile transformation depends on boundary conditions such as organisational maturity, industry characteristics, cultural trust, regional innovation context and governance capacity. AI-supported agility may strengthen responsiveness, but it also introduces ethical, legal and accountability challenges. The synthesis further indicates that organisational agility cannot be inferred from the presence of agile methods alone. Across the reviewed literature, successful transitions toward organisation-wide agility were consistently associated with governance redesign, leadership transformation, learning-oriented culture and supportive contextual conditions. Originality/value – The paper contributes by offering a clearer conceptual model of agile evolution, by identifying the mechanisms and limits of movement from team-level agility to organisation-wide agility, and by integrating leadership, culture, regional context and AI governance into the analysis. It also formulates a set of propositions for future research on organisational agility as a context-dependent capability.