The most agile (able to move quickly and easily) organization is a single person organization! As organizations have more people and groups of people the harder it is to get agility. Yet, people have to join together to reach common goals due to what science calls emergent properties.
Emergent Properties (a property which a collection or group has, but which the individual members do not have like innovation) are key to human success. From hunters and gatherers, through villages, cities, state, unites states and god knows what next, people grouped to increase existing and create new emergent properties. But, one of the drawbacks of grouping to expand and create emergent properties is agility. As an organization starts to grow, the need for communication and coordination increased exponentially (number of people power of the number of potential interaction between them), and the ability to be Agile decreased exponentially as well.
No wonder why agility is such a common word and a problem that just increased as the world around us become more complex. One of the main reasons that responsible for the increasing challenge in agility is the mindset of central control that is so ingrained in today management systems. Central control is a viable management practice for certain size of organizations and in a certain environment (more linear environment), but it is a challenge in other conditions (both smaller and larger organizations and in any non-linear environment). In those scenarios autonomy to groups is a more viable solution. In those situations, central control needed to be replaced with a clear purpose and real-time feedback loops depicting how groups are pursuing the common goal.