Agility and Simplicity in the Face of Uncertainty
In the past couple of weeks, prompted by the uncertainty driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, several conversations with clients have turned to the topic of agility. Specifically, those leaders were thinking about how to orient their organization for success in a world in which no one knows what the next two years looks like.
For me, that comes down to agility. In the face of uncertainty, the challenge for organizations is not how to pick a single strategic direction, it’s how to prepare for multiple potential outcomes.
And the foundation of that preparation is (a) creating an ongoing assessment of what’s happening in the world and (b) orienting the organization to move in response to it. If either part is missing, the organization won’t be agile.
Many of the frameworks below come from a military framework, but at root, they are about the nature planning, communication, teamwork, and uncertainty.
Speed
My view of agility is first informed by the Marine Corps’ warfighting doctrinal publication (MCDP 1-3) and its emphasis on speed.
“Great leaders have repeatedly stated the value of speed in combat. Napoleon said, ‘I may lose a battle, but I shall never lose a minute.’ Nathan Bedford Forrest told the secret of his many victories: ‘Get there first with the most men.’ General Patton said in 1943, ‘When the great day of battle comes remember your training and remember above all else that speed and violence of attack are the sure road to success.’” (MCDP 1-3, p. 61)
In the combat context, speed provides both a tactical advantage and a psychological one.
“Physical speed, moving more miles per hour, is a powerful weapon in itself. On our approach to the enemy, speed in movement reduces his reaction time. When we are going through him or around him, it changes the situation faster than he can react. Once we are past him, it makes his reaction irrelevant. In all three cases, speed impacts on the enemy, especially his mind, causing fear, indecision, and helplessness.” (MCDP 1-3, p. 62)
“Rapid Transitions” and the OODA Loop
While speed is important, it’s usefulness is constrained by the ability to respond to events.
“In order to act consistently faster than the enemy, it is necessary to do more than move quickly. It is also necessary to make rapid transitions from one action to another.” (MCDP 1-3, p. 67)
A helpful framework for thinking about real-time ability is the "OODA Loop." OODA stands for the four steps of observation, orientation, decision, action. The concept was developed by U.S. Air Force Col. John Boyd, based on an observation that when smaller forces won battles and wars over larger forces it was typically driven by the ability to create “a sudden, unexpected change or a series of changes” that the opposing force could not adjust to as quickly.
“As our enemy observes and orients on our initial action, we must be observing, orienting, deciding, and acting upon our second action. As we enact our third, fourth, and fifth move, the time gap between our actions and our enemy’s reactions increasingly widens.” (p. 71)
The theory suggests that the winner in a contest is the side that has the faster OODA loop, the one who can get through each cycle fastest.
How the OODA Loop applies to uncertainty and your organization
Observation
This is the ability to see and interpret the right information and the right time. In the face of an uncertain world, leaders should consider evaluating their processes to understand what’s going on around them. Some questions that might inform that thinking:
How often do we collectively step back, reflect, and assess what’s going on?
How effective are our systems for collecting and synthesizing customer feedback?
How would we know how our stakeholders’—customers, suppliers, funders, competitors—needs are changing?
What are the major milestones coming up that will give us the most important information about our strategy?
When an organization has a robust system for understanding the world around it, it can make better decisions about what to do. This is especially important when everything is changing, when the underlying risk is higher.
Orientation
Orientation is the sum of the leadership actions, organizational processes, and culture that makes an organization able to take decisions and action.
An example: if I want to go to a specific restaurant for dinner this evening, I can’t just decide to go at 5pm. Why? Because I exist in an organization—my family—that is not prepared to act on a second’s notice. Instead, I need to orient the organization for decision and action.
I need to make sure my kids are down for their afternoon nap on time, so they will wake up in time. If they wake up at 4:59, there’s no way we can go to dinner at 5pm.
I know my wife is going to ask, “do they take reservations?” So I need to do some research to inform our joint decision-making process.
When the kids wake up from nap, I need to start preparing them for the idea that things are going to be different this evening. Beyond the time it takes them to stop one activity and prepare for another, they need time to get their minds around that change. I may even need to make an argument for why going out to dinner will be fun for them.
Around 4:30pm, I need to get the kids’ jackets and shoes ready by the door and convince them to play downstairs. I do that so when we make the final decision to go to dinner, it’s a decision to actually leave and not just a decision to “start preparing to leave.”
Similar dynamics play out in formal organizations. A leader cannot simply decide to take an action and implement it. She needs to prepare the organization to do so. For example:
Creating the expectation that changes are coming
Syndicating ideas with stakeholders
Gathering the information required to make decisions
Freeing up and moving assets (e.g., people, equipment, money) to a place where, when the decision is made, they can be activated quickly
These are all the leadership behaviors that set up the organization to take action once a decision has been made.
That work is also what makes options feasible. It’s not realistic to run a marathon if you haven’t been doing at least some running already. It’s not realistic to invest in a new strategy if your cash is tied up. It’s not realistic to go to dinner if you haven’t put gas in the car. That is, you cannot be agile if you’re not continually orienting your organization.
Decision and Action
These are straightforward concepts when Observation and Orientation are in place. The decision is just unleashing the energy the leader has already built up.
So in a world that’s changing, this is the critical work of leaders who need to prepare for multiple scenarios and outcomes. It’s not making just one decision; it’s creating the conditions to make decisions, put those decisions into action rapidly, and then adjust based on new information.
Finally, a key to organizational agility is simplicity.
The Marine Corps doctrine also suggests that one of the key ingredients to agility is simplicity.
“Once we have it, there are a number of things we can do to increase speed. First, we can keep everything simple. Simplicity promotes speed; complexity slows things down. Simplicity should be central to our plans, our staffs (large staffs may be one of war’s greatest consumers of time), our command and control, and our own actions.” (MCDP 1-3, p. 72)
Extreme Ownership also talks about the intersection of simplicity and agility.
“When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. And when things go wrong, and they inevitably do go wrong, complexity compounds issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster.” (p. 140)
And:
“If the plan is simple enough, everyone understands it, which means each person can rapidly adjust and modify what he or she is doing. If the plan is too complex, the team can’t make rapid adjustments to it, because there is no baseline understanding of it.” (pp. 145-6)
What’s interesting to me about those descriptions is that simplicity goes across leadership behaviors—planning as a technical matter, communicating clearly, and building culture.
Some questions leaders might ask themselves about simplicity:
Can I articulate my strategy in 1 sentence?
Does everyone understand the strategy?
Where is our organization needlessly complex? Are there opportunities to de-couple activities?
What elements of our organization would slow us down if we tried to pursue a different strategy?
If this seems relevant to your organization, I’d be happy to talk about it with you.