Agility vs. flinchiness

I’ve witnessed countless Friday back-pat meetings where leaders give kudos to a product team for being ‘agile’ during a sprint or cycle. I say ‘agile’ because often the body language of the team reflects that they’re a bit disenchanted + not taking the feedback seriously (i.e. arms folded, looking at the ground, giggling in Google Meet maybe). These leaders are disconnected who don’t really work in the day-to-day and maybe don’t have a pedigree in product/engineering but they’re happy to jump in and get involved in the scope of a sprint or give feedback on a feature at the wrong time. Worse, sometimes they’re happy to totally yank the rug and pivot in a different direction but praise the hustle: “Thank you guys again for being so agile, we appreciate your flexibility”. The team hears: “Sorry - we’re indecisive & change our minds a lot.”

It happens, of course. Startups aren’t clear. Surprises are always around the corner and there’s plenty of reasons to throw the rules totally out the window (e.g. company survival, a totally misguided effort in planning and new information arising during a cycle, an investor chiming in with some industry secret reason). No problem! But the valuable team members that you spent months trying to hire lose faith in your ability to lead when you lack the proper foresight to make small tactical bets & stick to them - you’re not being agile; you just flinch a lot.

Agile (adjective)

Able to move quickly and easily; characterized by quickness, nimbleness, and speed.

Agility is super useful in a small org. In fact, if you’re not extremely quick at 3-30 people, churning out features/tests/marketing campaigns and seeing response in your KPIs I’d argue that the organization is extremely dysfunctional. Dysfunctional orgs have a variety of problems - but the common issue I run into is the kind of control-freak/micromanaging set of founders:

• They are forced to delegate for the first time in their life
• They don’t have data that reassures them
• They don’t see the type of feedback they would hope from features/experiments/campaigns
• They report that they’re ‘blind’ a lot
• They flinch, yank the rug, deep-dive into a project and call into question the decisions that are being made in their absence

I think it’s probably a characteristic of every first time founder. The game you play at 2/3~ cofounders is different at headcount of 20, different at 50 and different at 300+. You have to continually reinvent yourself and change strategy.

Spatial disorientation

A study conducted in the University of Illonois in 1954 put forward the idea that non-instrument-rated pilots who fly into low visibility conditions (e.g. fog/clouds/storms/etc.) survive for around 178 seconds. If you go deep into this iceberg you’ll find youtube videos with comments sections full of anecdotes of lucky pilots who had some type of near death experience because they trusted themselves/their feeling more than they trusted their equipment. These type of bone-chilling, full blown panic attacks are all over the internet:

Even fairly experienced pilots report entering into big grey clouds where they lose all visual contact and instinctively make micro adjustments and lose focus on the tools in front of them. Over time they verge far off course or stall the aircraft and start reacting. With no visual feedback they start to panic. Here they often compound the dangerous situation by ignoring the machinery (“it must be wrong/non-functioning”) and start performing manuevres to save themselves. It only gets worse though as they’re totally misreading the situation.

I’ve witnessed mass-firings from emotional founders, poorly timed feedback, misreading of signals/data and alienating of valuable employees because founders weren’t able to understand the value that they were bringing. All of these founders crashed, by the way.

Being Nimble

Being flexible and responsive definitely does relate to agility. But it’s probably more of an indicator of the faith and the enthusiasm the team has for its leadership/project. Scrambling together to blast out a comprehensive spec, design, research + getting it to the team to develop and get together to test it. This is agility. On cross-disciplinary teams this is people innately understanding how to leverage themselves to collectively deliver on a vision. Teams who lose trust in leadership stop running and start walking when they feel like they can put in a huge effort up front only to have scope/priority/tactics changes at the last second. It’s fatiguing and teams feel defeated..

Speed & Momentum

Speed is something that you work towards. I think of this like a steam train that you’re feeding fuel into. When a cross-functional team is calibrated and has worked together for a few sprints they start to anticipate problems, slot into roles and learn eachother’s timings (instinctively). There’s no metric or unit in a PM tool or whatever, don’t bother looking for it - it’s just a feeling. If you start to stack together wins and stack together similar work you reduce the cognitive load. You build up to a velocity where you’re churning linearly churning out results. This is being agile. This needs to be celebrated. Consistent performance.

When you need to change direction unpredictably (flinch), you kill the momentum.

Why

Another thing with these teams: they have a unifying mission. They stop needing to consult with PMs/leaders and start proactively proposing ways to combat the inevitable problems during a sprint by simplifying the rules for prioritisation with whatever simple credo summarises product mission (or KPI or whatever).

Is “improvising solutions for problems without need for stakeholder input” a sentence that describes an agile team? Probably, right?

Planning is everything

A lot of the horror stories about visual pilots in poor weather conditions are told by people who failed to plan appropriately. Flying when conditions were iffy, lack of detail in flight plan or lack of training/experience to execute are all common factors. You should be flying with linear moves in a controlled and predictable way. Straight where possible and adjusting when advised to. To achieve this you might have to invest in a way that seems disproportionate in planning. Planning seems anti-startup/anti-agile/anti-hustle. But that’s maybe because you’re misreading the team’s quick responsiveness as an indicator of agility.

Spazzing out and ‘hustling’ might feel productive - but zoom and out take a look. Are you really getting the outcomes that you need? Forget valiant efforts or late nights for a second: have you achieved what you wanted this quarter? If not: could be an issue.