Your Plan Will Fail—But Don’t Worry

Most likely, that is. Some plans succeed as they are, but most do not.

And that’s okay.

Most plans fail, but that does not mean that your basic idea or direction is wrong, although it might be.

A colleague of mine had successfully taken two companies public, and then a startup hired him as a CEO to grow their company. They had spent almost all of their investors’ money by that point. My colleague undertook a survey to find out what customers actually wanted, and discovered that they did not want the product that the company had been building.

Oops.

So they pivoted to what people actually did want, in the nick of time, before the last dime had been spent.

This is why agility is important. Agility is not about efficiency. It is not about using “Agile” tools. It is not about getting output faster. Agility is about being able to change direction, quickly and effectively.

You might think that you don’t need agility. Let’s see if you do:

You might think that you don’t need agility. Let’s see if you do

Are you in a consumer market? If so, then you definitely need agility, because consumers are fickle, and they follow fads. You never know what the next fad will be. Plus, everyone and their cousin is after consumers, so there are lots of people spending every waking hour trying to think of something better than your product.

Are you in a business that provides customized services to other businesses? If so, then you need agility because you never know what people will ask for. Right now we are finding out that machine learning is the next big thing. Everyone is asking, “How can we use that?” Can you build that into our systems? If you can’t, they will look somewhere else. That means that you need to be on top of things, and be able to pivot in what you offer, quickly and effectively. That’s agility.

Or are you in a business that sells commodities? For example, do you provide low-cost generic parts to other businesses? If so, what happens if your suppliers are unable to deliver? When that happens, you need to quickly find other suppliers, and connect to their logistical systems. That requires agility. If you take too long to do it, you will miss orders, and your customers will not be happy.

Agility is everywhere. Today’s world is changing faster and faster. We cannot escape the need for agility.

Missing the mark here and there is a natural part of tracking the market

Here’s something important to know: There is something out there called “Agile”. Forget that. It won’t give you agility. The community that drives that school of thought is swirling in confusion and cognitive dissonance, and is controlled by what one of the more astute founders of that community has referred to as the “Agile Industrial Complex”. So forget them – you would be led astray by the rampant torrent of bad advice.

Agility is mostly behavioral: it comes from how people handle situations. People who are expected to solve problems, and who are given some autonomy about how they do it, tend to set things up so that they are flexible. Agility is about what people do when that supplier falls short. It is about what they do when the tech suddenly changes. It is about how they respond when they see that a competitor has released a better product.

Agile companies position themselves for agility. But that is behavioral: the people who are making decisions are thinking about situations and how things might change. And – crucially – they have enough decisionmaking autonomy to position things so that they can keep things flexible.

In addition, people in an agile company are not afraid to make mistakes. They are expected to try things, and that sometimes things will not work out, but then they just pick up the pieces and adjust. That’s business as usual: missing the mark here and there is a natural part of tracking the target. Good leaders know that, and that’s behavioral. That produces agility, because people in those companies experiment: they don’t hesitate. As a result, they react quickly, and they capture opportunities when things change.

All organizations need agility.