When Strategic & Agile Ltd was founded in 2015, the name raised questions. What did strategy have to do with HR? Was agile not a software term?
The questions were not unreasonable. At the time, the dominant HR model across most African businesses was administrative: a function responsible for contracts, payroll, discipline, and the paperwork generated by employment. Useful. Necessary. And almost entirely disconnected from the commercial decisions the business was actually making.
That disconnection had real, measurable consequences, even if they were not being measured.
Businesses were hiring for roles without a clear view of what capability the role was supposed to add at that stage of growth. Succession was managed informally, so when a senior leader left, organisations discovered how much institutional knowledge had walked out with them. People costs, the single largest operating expense in most businesses, were being managed transactionally rather than strategically. Workforce structures built for a business at one size were being carried, unchanged, into a business twice that size. The people function was downstream of every major decision rather than informing them.
An organisation’s people decisions are not administrative functions that run parallel to the business. They are the business, expressed through the choices made about people.
Strategic HR, the principle that the people function should be designed to serve the organisation’s direction rather than simply manage its existing workforce, was not a new concept in academic literature by 2015. It was, however, largely absent from operational practice across African businesses at the time. The conversations in boardrooms focused on growth, markets, capital, and competition. HR sat in a separate conversation, called in when there was a problem and otherwise left to run its processes. The distance between those two conversations was where a significant amount of value was being quietly lost.
A decade on, that distance has narrowed. More CHROs sit at the executive table. More organisations understand that workforce planning, talent strategy, and organisational design are commercial levers, not support functions. The shift has been real, and it has produced better outcomes for the businesses that have taken it seriously.
Agility is the second half of our name, and the harder half to build.
Agile, in the context of an HR function, does not mean fast or flexible in the casual sense those words are often used. It means something more specific: the capacity to redesign how the people function operates in response to changes in the business and its environment, rather than holding a fixed model and asking the business to fit it.
A strategic HR function knows where the business is going and aligns its work to that direction. An agile HR function can revise its own structure, priorities, and ways of working when direction changes, without the six-month delay that most HR transformations currently require.
African businesses are operating in conditions that demand both. The pace of market change across the continent, across regulation, competitive dynamics, and the availability and expectations of talent, does not reward organisations whose people functions operate on an annual planning cycle and a three-year review process. The businesses that will manage the next decade well are those whose HR function can sense when the model needs to change, and move quickly when it does.
Most businesses have made meaningful progress on the strategic dimension. The agile dimension remains largely unbuilt. The argument against building it is not strong; it requires a level of deliberate design that is harder and less familiar than the strategic work that preceded it. The organisations that invest in it now will carry an advantage that compounds. The ones that wait will eventually arrive at it, as they arrived at strategic HR, after the cost of the gap has already made the case for them.
The name Strategic & Agile is a position on what a people function has to be if it is going to serve a serious business in a serious market. That position is as current now as it was in 2015. The market has caught up to the first half.
If your business is examining where its HR function stands relative to both dimensions, Strategic & Agile’s free guided assessment is the right starting point.
