Imagine That It Takes Only Weeks to Pivot Strategy

Mar 8

Imagine:

People in your organization learn new things readily.
Managers rapidly devise and incorporate new strategies.
It takes only weeks to respond to changes in the market and head in a new direction, with precision and effectiveness!

That kind of true agility is what is needed to rise to the top in today’s rapidly changing business world. But it takes special kinds of leadership at all levels of the organization to be like that.

We now have highly agile and market-dominating companies as models.

Here’s what’s changed today: Yes, things are moving faster than ever, and the world is increasingly unpredictable. But another change is that we now have highly agile and market-dominating companies as models. So instead of theorizing, we can look at what actually gives those companies their agility.

And guess what? These companies are not agile and effective because of “Agile frameworks”. Nor do they share common processes. What makes them so effective and able to pivot quickly is that their leaders have certain behaviors, and those behaviors were established as norms within the company culture.

Agility is behavioral. Agility is an organization-wide emergent property that arises from the behavioral norms of people in leadership roles, at all levels from the top down.

Agility is an organization-wide emergent property that arises from the behavioral norms of people in leadership roles.

Let me repeat the key thing here: agility is behavioral. And the second thing is that it is people in leadership roles, at all levels, whose behavior is most critical, because people in leadership roles generate everyone else’s behavior, through the examples and expectations that the leaders set, and through the incentives that they create.

Agility is not about a workflow process. It is not a set of practices for people to follow. It is about how leaders behave when situations arise. Situations that require you to change the workflow. Or change strategies without waiting for the next planning cycle. Or adjust the vision for where you are headed. It requires thinking both short term and long term all the time, seamlessly blending tactical and strategic thinking and action, continuously.

And now we can look at what the behaviors are that enable highly agile companies to do that, because we have examples, such as SpaceX. Netflix. Amazon. Google. And Spotify. All five of these companies have demonstrated unprecedented agility at scale, and also retained or grew their market dominance. What they share is not a planning process or decision framework, but rather behavioral norms among their leaders.

SpaceX has pivoted massively several times. After changing the industry by showing that rockets can be 80% reusable, and hence satellite launches could be massively cheaper – practically driving the market leader out of business – SpaceX then decided to build an even better system from scratch, a system that is 100% reusable. That’s a big pivot so soon after achieving success, but midway into the development of the new system, in January 2019, they decided to change the entire design, shifting from a carbon-fiber system to a stainless steel system. Most companies would be set back years by such a change, but SpaceX barely lost a step. By December 2020 they were launching flight tests of the completely new second stage design and completely new engines with it. This year (2024) they expect to get that new system to orbit, massively refined and improved, having nearly reached orbit on their second try in November 2023. Oh and by the way, it is the largest rocket every built, and the engines are the most advanced ever created.

Netflix has a different but equally impressive story of transition. They shifted from mailing DVDs to online content delivery. That doesn’t sound like a big deal until you remember that they are distributing full length DVD quality movies – not tweets. To achieve that, they had to change customer behavior and simultaneously build a huge Internet-scale (millions of simultaneous users) video streaming technology stack from scratch. That’s a strategic pivot if there ever was one, and they hardly lost a single customer in the process.

Amazon has also pivoted in a huge way several times. And so has Google. And Spotify. These companies are not perfect, but they are informative case studies in true agility at massive scale by market leaders. Yet none of them standardized on specific “Agile” methods. In fact, the company that is arguably the most agile in a true sense, SpaceX, does not use any so-called Agile methods, and does not even use the word “Agile”. (That claim is from a private conversation with a senior SpaceX software manager.)

But here are six traits that these companies have in common. They all have the following:

✓ Cultural expectation that people will solve problems rather than complete tasks.

✓ Cultural expectation that people will not wait – that they act as soon as they can, rather than relying on a schedule.

✓ Cultural expectation that people will go out of their lane to get a problem solved.

✓ Cultural expectation that people will talk to whoever they need to – not wait for permission.

✓ Cultural expectation that people will prudently try things before being completely sure it will work.

✓ Cultural expectation that people will think holistically, rather than only on “their piece”.

The Agile community has focused on the lone development team, yet agility is generated by managers – not teams!

It is their managers, from the top level through the lowest levels, who generate these expectations. They generate these expectations through their statements, through their own behavior, and through the incentives that they create.

We therefore find it ironic that the Agile community has, since the beginning of the Agile movement, focused on the lone development team, yet all of the above behaviors pertain to managers – not team members. Agility is generated by managers – not teams!

How to Create True Agility

If managers create agility through their expectations, behaviors, and incentives, how can they learn how to do that? It’s actually quite simple.

It is a learning process. (This is our system for that.) They need to become better leaders. We are not talking about just the few at the top. Sending the top executives to a Harvard course will not do it. We are talking about everyone who is in a leadership role, at every level.

It is not one dimensional though, as in just become a “better” leader.

If you improve the leadership of everyone in a leadership role, you will change the organization. The behavior of everyone will change as a result – everyone, not just the leaders. Because people take cues from their leaders and behave accordingly. Leaders are high-leverage, behaviorally: if you change their behavior, it has a ripple effect through everyone else.

It is not one dimensional though, as in just become a “better” leader. Leadership is complex and there are many kinds of leader. Highly agile and effective organizations that build complex products or provide complex services need many kinds of leader, but those leaders need to have a specific set of traits.

Sending the top executives to a Harvard course will not do it.

Leaders need soft skills such as inspiration, listening, empowering others, supporting individual growth, and people skills. Those are all the things one finds in typical leadership development programs. But those are not enough. Some of those are not even decisive traits.

Leaders also need to take an interest in all aspects of things, and not be an intellectual silo – they need to have a learning mindset instead of a fixed mindset. They need to be watchful and inquisitive and able to spot issues as soon as they arise. They need to generate effective discussions. They need to be decisive, but with a mind toward experimenting. And much more. These are today’s truly agile leaders – the kinds that SpaceX, Netflix, and the others have.

We can help you to create them.