Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operate in a persistent state of vulnerability created by environmental turbulence, competitive volatility, technological disruption, and fragile organizational resource structures. Unlike large corporations, SMEs lack financial slack, formalized routines, and diversified portfolios that could absorb strategic errors. Consequently, survival and growth in this sector depend less on static efficiency and more on the firm’s capacity for continuous strategic reconfiguration, organizational learning, and business model renewal. Over the last two decades, the academic fields of strategic agility, organizational learning, business model innovation, and consulting-driven organizational change have evolved largely in parallel. Yet these streams remain insufficiently integrated into a unified analytical framework that can explain how SMEs practically build, maintain, and leverage agility over time.

This article addresses that gap by developing a comprehensive, theoretically grounded, and empirically informed framework that positions business consulting as a central catalyst in the development of strategic agility and performance resilience among SMEs. Anchored in the complex consulting model proposed by Kovalchuk (2025), this study integrates classical organization-environment theory, strategic management under turbulence, workforce agility, organizational memory, and dynamic capability perspectives into a single explanatory architecture. Rather than treating consulting as a peripheral support function, the article conceptualizes it as a knowledge-based governance mechanism that aligns strategic foresight, operational flexibility, and organizational learning within SMEs.

The article advances three central arguments. First, environmental turbulence systematically weakens the effectiveness of traditional planning-based management models in SMEs, necessitating a shift toward strategic agility and adaptive governance. Second, strategic agility is not a spontaneous organizational trait but a structured capability that emerges from the interaction of leadership cognition, workforce flexibility, organizational memory, and business model architecture. Third, consulting interventions, when designed as long-term learning partnerships rather than short-term technical fixes, provide the institutional infrastructure through which SMEs can internalize agility, continuously realign strategy, and avoid the rigidity traps that characterize failing firms.

Methodologically, the article adopts an integrative theoretical design grounded in systematic synthesis of prior empirical and conceptual studies on SMEs, agility, and organizational performance. Rather than producing new numerical data, it constructs an interpretive analytical model that explains how strategic agility is created, stabilized, and converted into performance outcomes through consulting-supported organizational processes. This approach is particularly appropriate because the phenomenon under study—strategic adaptability under uncertainty—is fundamentally dynamic, socially embedded, and resistant to purely quantitative measurement.

The results demonstrate that SMEs that align consulting processes with internal learning systems, agile human resource practices, and strategic foresight mechanisms achieve higher levels of resilience, innovation, and performance sustainability, even under extreme turbulence such as economic crises and pandemic shocks. In contrast, firms that treat consulting as episodic problem-solving remain trapped in reactive cycles that erode competitiveness.

The article contributes to theory by unifying strategic agility, business model innovation, and consulting into a single explanatory framework. It contributes to practice by offering SME leaders a scientifically grounded rationale for embedding consulting into their long-term governance structures rather than using it as an emergency tool.