"We Gotta Be More Agile" Means Nothing, & Everything

Explaining Agility and the reason companies may fail without it.

Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash

In an earlier blog I wrote about Economics 101: the idea that business, at its core, is owners trying to maximize the return on their investment while customers try to maximize the benefit over cost. Those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I believe the answer to making those an equal proposition lies in the way we instinctually act. In other words, cutting out the fluff. In today’s blog I aim to demystify Agile.

You Keep Using That Word…

We need to be more Agile. - Every CEO Everywhere

Agile has become the buzzword of CEOs everywhere. I often wonder if the unspoken question on every business leader’s mind is, “What the heck is Agility and how’s it hit that bottom line?” Even teams that claim to “be Agile” don’t seem to fully understand what that means or why it’s useful. I would like to help demystify agility and, hopefully, help some of you realize you’re farther along your Agile journey than you may think.

Agile Is 100% Organic

Yes, you read that correctly. Agile is 100% organic. It’s literally what we, as humans, instinctually choose on a regular basis. Well, given we don’t try to think too much. It’s not until we are asked or told to “Do” or “Be Agile” with some level of intentionally that things start to go sideways.

I’ll explain.

Let’s say for a moment you have a child, and that child has just accidentally cut themselves. What’s your first response? If you’re like most businesses these days, you sit down and start planning all the steps to take the child from triage to scar treatment, right?

Of course not!

You immediately apply pressure to the cut to stop the bleeding. A chemically healthy adult would not start making plans for a carpet cleaner to get the blood out of the floor or call the insurance company to start the claim process for the medical bills as their child sat there crying and bleeding. They would tackle the immediate risk which, at this moment, is that the child may literally bleed to death. Instinctually we will apply pressure, tie off the wound, and get the child to the emergency room for help.

Of course, work is rarely that frenzied or important, but I have seen situations when trying to plan everything allows a business to “bleed” money and fail. For instance, they make plans for marketing a product before they know the real problem their customer is experiencing. Take it from a pro that once bought his wife a Nintendo Wii memory card for Christmas because he thought he knew she wanted to be able to save her progress on Guitar Hero. Needless to say, shoes were the right answer. It was definitely shoes. I now know that when my wife says, “I would really love those shoes” it’s code for “I would really love you to buy those shoes for me for Christmas.” Who knew?

If We’re Naturally Agile, Why Do We Stink At it

This brings me to my ultimate point. As humans, we tend to organically act in lean and agile ways. It’s not until we toss in a little bit of structure and overthinking that we start goofing up everything. That is where adopting an intentional Agile mindset comes in handy, and I would love to share a couple easy tips that will help you do that.

Be Aware

Step one is easy. From this point forward you should know that we instinctually lean toward lean and agile action. It’s not about right or wrong decisions. It’s about taking action on something with an intent to solve a problem with as little resource as is necessary. Talk is cheap. Solutions are gold. Putting pressure on a wound is messy, but it helps us survive until round two and learn some things in the process.

Default to Action

Responding to Change over Following a Plan is one of they key ideas of what it means to be Agile. I’m pretty sure they even wrote about it in a manifesto. The idea is not that plans are garbage. It’s just that humans are terrible at predicting the future. Plans are great, but we must learn how to respond to change. The only way I have learned that is to take action over, and over, and over while learning from each iteration.

Identify the Riskiest Assumption

The third idea is one I learned from my mentor, Brendan Wovchko. He has consistently said, “Instead of solving everything with the one, final solution, identify the thing you may be assuming is true and build a solution for that.” For instance, let’s say you want to build a game where you destroy things with birds that are angry about their eggs being stolen. Let’s also say you want to call it, “Frustrated Birds.” You may be assuming people want an app called “Frustrated Birds.” You may think the solution for it is to build the thing and see if people buy it. But the simpler, cheaper thing to do would be to send an email to ten people asking them to pick the title of an app about upset birds that resonates the most with them. Add “Frustrated Birds” in the list. It’s not fool proof, but it’s better than launching something called “Frustrated Birds,” only to find out people hate the name. You’ve spent zero dollars other than the time it took to write and send the email, and now you have actual results plus ten possible early adopters.

Spider-Man Agility

Spider-Man is one of my top three favorite super heroes, if not the top. My favorite aspect of his superpowers was the fact that he seemed to frustrate villains as he bounded about dodging every attack they threw at him. As I was doing some research on agility, I found this blurb about the wall crawling hero.

In the nearly ten years that Stan Lee wrote Spidey, it’s unusual to see him do a really impressive acrobatic move, more that he uses a fairly basic comic-book dodge and it works — except that he dodges again and again and again, and it keeps working. That formula kept the focus on how Spidey was always outmatched in strength and unsure what to do next, but had one way to keep himself alive until he got an idea.

That is Agility in a nutshell: The ability to keep yourself alive until an idea emerges. Again, the goal of business is to try and maximize return on investment and the goal of customers is to get more bang for their buck. The way to do that so that both sides get their desired outcome is to learn how to translate agility to the way we work. How do we deliver small dodges that provide value while we find the idea that really solves the issue for the customer in a way that works for our business?

The funny thing is, we do it every day. When someone says, “I locked my keys in the car!” we don’t immediately sit down for hours and orchestrate the perfect plan for extracting the keys. Even when we do, there is always that one genius that simply tries all the doors, finds one of them unlocked, and revels as everyone marvels at their sheer brilliance. “How’d you think of that,” they always ask. “I dunno, I didn’t really think about it. I just gave it a try on the off chance it might work.” That, my friends, is Agile.

Until next time,

Keep on learning. Keep on growing.