Agility is the new stability

The idea of an agile organization has been percolating for a few years and while I think the language has seeped into our lives (note here the legacy company that claims to “think like a startup”), but I’m not sure the actual practices had gained a place in the business world.

Until about March this year. As the Harvard Business Review says, “There’s nothing like a crisis to ignite innovation.” It then goes on to cite examples in history of rapid innovation coming as the pandemic hit. They cite, specifically, Dyson creating a new ventilator in 10 days.

Which is all well and good when an actual crisis exists…such as an obvious “Houston we have a problem” crisis.

Most problems are hidden

The problem is that a lot of the time we have a crisis happening, it’s not obvious. You have a problem but you don’t know it yet. In fact, the Apollo 13 crisis existed from the minute the defective parts were put onto the spacecraft…just like a crisis exists when a company relies on a focus on a single vertical, not when a pandemic disrupts the vertical. Or, when an employee has a narrow skill set…and not when the need for that skill set disappears without warning.

Enter Covid

Starting this year, companies found that their ability to be agile was central to their survival. That includes agility as it relates to changing workplaces, changing protocols, changing environments, new client problems, new personal finances, new childcare situations, new skill demands and new products approaches entirely. Processes and people reliant on knowing everything a month in advance were obsolete immediately. Your IT guy who needed a six-month warning to switch to e-commerce after following a wall-sized flow chart…obsolete. Your PR people invested in their “expertise” in a certain industry—or with a narrow definition of PR—also obsolete.

It’s my belief that the future of organizations—especially small ones—will be built on agility. No one can know the future. That’s always been true and it is more true now than ever. (For an interesting perspective, check out The Agility Advantage: A Survival Guide for Complex Enterprises and Endeavors, written for the US Department of Defense in 2011).

If change is predictable, than not being ready to adapt is risk, even if it unrecognized. And if you want sustainable and stable progress—yes, disruption-resistant—than you need to be agile.

Key Steps to Agility…

From a very high-level

1. Counter-intuitively, maybe the most important is to have a platform that is timeless and bigger than your business. Unless you have a principle to fall back on, agility will become what leaders fear—chaos and anarchy. But if trust, service, innovation and accountability are embedded in word and deed, agility is viable.

2. You have to hire people who are agile-friendly. We all have worked with people who are not—they may be the majority. People have to have a tolerance for change and ambiguity to fit in this type of organization, top to bottom. The “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” or “this always worked before” crowd are going to have a harder time.

3. Your people have to commit themselves to being generalists and you need to hire generalists. When I do informational interviews with students, I always tell them to broaden their skill set as much as possible. Being a swiss-knife is a super power in times of change. Transferable skills are key here. If you can pitch the RV industry, you can pitch any industry. It might take you time to build contacts, but the skills are 100% the same. Similarly, if you can write a press release that connects with people, you can write a social media post that connects with people. And so on.

4. Machiavelli once wrote that problems were like diseases. When they are small and easy to cure, they are hard to detect. When they are serious and hard to cure, they are easy to detect. (I give you Apollo 13). You need constant monitoring. It might be quantitative and it might be qualitative. It can involve independent study of the industries you work in. But you need to ask if there’s a defective part in your spaceship.

5. Lastly, from a communication standpoint, you need healthy relationships with all your stakeholder groups and you need it built before you need to make a change. Being trusted by everyone from your employees to the media provides vital space to operate when things are in flux.

The good news is that the world is opening up. The hegemony of the specialist seems to be ending, opening up opportunity for the smart and the agile.