Agile Mind: Navigating Through Disruptions

“And I’m realizing how I can apply this in my personal life too!”, announced Mark as the epiphany came to him. “I think you’ve got it,” I said.

Mark was an EVP at a Fortune 100 company with more than 4,000 people reporting up to him. He was also a mountain climber who, prior to settling down and getting married, had scaled 3 of the 5 tallest peaks in the world. He was not new to undertaking complicated challenges, and was generally fearless out in the real world. But when it came to handling the massive disruptions they were facing as a company he was absolutely frustrated that things weren’t going to plan the way they had for most of his career.

In the past he had focused on studying the problem more deeply, developing a precise plan, and managing the details more closely to make sure they stayed on track. He took great pride in his typical pattern of finding an optimal solution and then sitting back to relax as things unfolded as he had foreseen. But for some reason things were different this time. “It's like we’ve planned our route, gathered our equipment and supplies, we’re halfway to the peak and suddenly we’ve been hit with a blinding snowstorm. We can’t just hunkerdown and wait for it to blow over, we have to keep going… but we need to make sure we don’t walk off a cliff.” Mark was clearly looking for options and ideas on how to navigate this situation, and I was his guide.

Have you ever wished you could navigate through disruption like the world’s most successful business leaders? Some organizations are able to consistently thrive in a volatile environment, and it’s no accident. Is it because their leaders are more intelligent? Is it because they have a better plan? No. It’s that their leaders have adopted an Agile mindset and practice techniques that allow them to adapt faster. They confidently take action and course-correct while others hesitate to even get started. These leaders operate as catalysts for their organizations, creating an environment where change is expected and constant adaptation is the norm.

Have you ever wished you could navigate through disruption like the world’s most successful business leaders? Some organizations are able to consistently thrive in a volatile environment, and it’s no accident.

Over the last 15 years I have had the privilege to work with many leaders across the country in various industries to help them develop an Agile mindset. These approaches and techniques reduce the pressure on leaders to control every detail in situations in which complexity and uncertainty makes it impossible to do so. By letting go of the perception of control they are able to better deal with the realities of challenging situations and respond more effectively. This not only provides benefit to their effectiveness at work, but also improves their work-life balance.

And the great news is that you can use these same approaches to improve your own work and personal life.

To help you start down this path, let’s look at 10 key lessons from my work with Mark and see if you can adopt some of these Agile-minded approaches:

What type of problem is this?

Understand and appreciate the nature of the situation you’re addressing. What degree of uncertainty or change is possible in the situation? Is this a problem that is clear and straightforward (making coffee or washing the dishes), something that is more complicated with a lot of pieces and parts (jigsaw puzzle or rebuilding a car engine), or a complex situation that is dynamic and evolving (blind date, the stock market, or talking to your teenager about, well, anything)? Hint: most situations that involve people (kids, employees, peers, family, customers, etc.) are going to be complex. Complicated work benefits from knowledge, expertise, and deeper understanding… this is where being smarter helps a lot! However, with complex work it's not about being smarter, it's about being quicker and more responsive.

Where are we going?

If we’re going to navigate successfully, we need to have an idea of where we’re heading. We don’t necessarily have to establish a precise location, but having an outcome we’re seeking or a vision we’re hoping to achieve is important to make sure we have our bearings and a north star. Of course this can change over time as we discover new possibilities. We want to have a directional goal but be open to possibilities, so avoid nailing down “how to get there” too early so that we don’t get tunnel vision.

Is there a right answer?

When we find ourselves in complex situations, there is rarely a right answer. Things are not just 1 or 0, black or white but rather a rainbow of evolving possibilities. We can spend countless hours stewing over important decisions and will never come to a final correct solution. Just when we think we have it all figured out, things change… sometimes without us realizing it at the moment. We can make a good assumption that if we’re in a complex situation, things are indeed changing constantly. This includes disruptive, perhaps negative changes, but change also provides more options for us to evaluate. Our Agile mindset leads us to continuously seek out these opportunities and not get caught up in trying to find the one right answer or best practice.

Can we experiment?

We often feel pressure to make the correct and final decision. The pressure is released when we finally make the decision, and take comfort that the decision is behind us and we can move on to the next problem. But leading up to that point there is often growing anxiety and increasing importance that can result from delaying a decision. This increase in importance leads to further delaying the decision to make sure we’ve thought through everything, and the cycle continues. The Agile minded approach is to treat each decision as an experiment, and if the experiment fails or needs to be modified, we simply make a new decision. So, decisions become more like pivot points and are less impactful, thereby reducing anxiety and pressure to always be right. This allows iterative course correction as the situation evolves. As you become more and more adept with this approach, you can also consider the opportunity to try multiple simultaneous experiments. Basically placing multiple bets through multiple temporary decisions, see which ones look most promising, and continue more experiments from there.

Are we on the right path?

If we’re going to experiment, feedback loops are crucial. We need to have the ability to sense and respond to what's really happening. That means paying attention, asking questions, getting people's thoughts and opinions about our progress, ideally with objective information like hard data. In a business context we’re often talking about internal or external feedback from real world usage of what we’ve created, though surveys, customer services scores, or sales numbers can give us some insights too. In our personal lives, feedback loops can come from friends, family, neighbors and colleagues who care about us and our goals and can help us see things we can’t about our progress and what we’re trying to accomplish.

Everything is a choice.

We have habits and default behaviors - things we do unconsciously at times. We can get into a rut and not realize it. If we want to improve our effectiveness in complex situations, it's helpful to take a step back and recognize that we have a choice in everything we do. Once we recognize this, we can decide if we want to keep taking that same path, or make a change in our default response. Being intentional about the choices we make on known issues is critical in becoming more effective in a complex environment where there are so many unknowns. The hardest thing about making changes to our habits is the follow through. Many of us have probably tried to lose weight and get healthier, but saying it and doing it are two different things. If we really want to follow through, there are triggers we can employ to help us change our habits. The easy one these days is to put a post-it note on your desk as a reminder. Other ideas might be to set a calendar reminder or find an accountability buddy - someone you tell about your goal who will help you hold yourself accountable by checking in with you. Siri and Alexa might be good buddies here.

Effectiveness over efficiency.

Another mindset shift is to focus on value over quantity. Many people take great pride and derive a certain degree of self-worth from their ability to be busy and generate a lot of activity. But being busy means you don’t have time to think creatively and strategically as your brain is active with tactical and tangible work, and oftentimes it’s trying to find ways to make that work more efficient through repeatability. When dealing with complex problems, repeatability is rarely possible and we need the time to think clearly about the adaptations needed for next time. Rather than being busy, let’s be ruthless… about prioritizing what’s most important. You have a #1 priority today or this week, and its probably a lot more important to get that one thing to “done”, than to get 10 lower priorities partially done. Identify that top priority and give yourself the mental space and focus to think creatively about how to address it. We call this “limiting WIP” (work in progress). Then address the next priority.

Keep it Simple.

One of the toughest things for us is deciding what not to do. We often have grand ideas and large goals. The art and skill of breaking large complicated goals down into smaller pieces is important. But the next, and most important, step is often missed completely. Once you take that big goal and break it down, not all pieces are equally important and not all of them may need to be completed to achieve the intent of the goal. For example, we might decide that we want to have the best looking yard on the block, so we brainstorm about all the things the best yard would have and what it will look like. Rather than commit to everything up front we break it all down into pieces such as lawn care, landscaping, flower beds, the trees, and shrubs. We foresee thousands of dollars and 3 months of personal labor on the horizon. The first weekend we prioritize the landscaping and lay down a bunch of mulch. The next weekend we put in some really nice flowers, and so on. By the time we get to the shrubs, we look around and figure out that it looks pretty good and we're satisfied with the results. So let’s stop for now, save the shrubs (and some cash and sweat) for next year. We got the value from our activities, have an awesome yard, and now we free up the next few weekends to enjoy it (or something else on that to-do list).

Early and often.

Accomplishing things early and often, along with keeping them simple, really gives us a great benefit. We get a sense of accomplishment and build momentum to continue. We can show some small early wins and maybe even draw other people to our cause. When you work on something for a long time without a light at the end of the tunnel you start to question the time you’re spending, and if you’re still going in the right direction. This is very true in situations where you’re trying to influence others, such as organizational change situations. A good way to handle this is to create a schedule with consistent and repeatable short term deadlines. In the Agile world, we call these Sprints, and they work in real life too. Just ask my kids about their weekly chore schedule.

Maintain Focus. 

If you haven’t heard, your brain can’t actually multitask. When you try to handle multiple simultaneous tasks, your brain actually switches focus between the tasks resulting in what we call “task switching”. Task switching has a cost, that we call a “switching tax”, because you are shifting context and losing productivity on each task as you move back and forth. Research shows that for every additional task you try to do simultaneously, you lose about 20% of your productivity. When you switch between drastically different kinds of activities, such as trying to do your monthly budgeting and following a recipe to make dinner at the same time, the switching tax gets even bigger. With an Agile minded approach, we want to limit the number of simultaneous activities, and focus on getting things over the finish line and into the “done” column of our task list. This not only feels good, that sense of accomplishment, but actually allows us to get more done because we’re eliminating the lost productivity of the switching tax.

As for Mark, using the patterns above, and others, he was able to move away from a fixed mindset into a growth mindset where he was constantly experimenting and evaluating new possibilities. It was certainly uncomfortable at first, and probably still is, but he became more comfortable with being uncomfortable over time. It's hard work to continually engage in addressing complex problems with an Agile mindset as we are continually on the lookout for that next opportunity to change direction. Mark of course started to get more and more of his leadership and organization into this mindset over the months and year. He has seen great results internally in that he and his people are happier and more engaged at work and are working on more important and innovative products. Mark has also seen the financial results of this mindset shift as well, as his organization’s value has increased by 223% over the last 5 years through innovation and the ability to act on opportunities quicker than competitors.