No Magic Bullets (2020-09)

This article was first published on the BP Launchpad blog in Sept 2020


Innovation! Digital! Agile!

My LinkedIn inbox is full of people offering to make me and Launchpad better, faster and fitter*. There is no doubt that large organisations from all sectors are trying to learn to work differently, and most are turning to the so-called ‘digital natives’ for inspiration. The prevailing wisdom is that culture is key to cracking these ‘problems’ of established companies. They just need to cast off the shackles of their old mindsets, embrace agility, and take a couple of these pills with water each morning.

Having been lucky-enough to work with some very agile teams in my career, and unlucky-enough to have been pushed to sell ‘innovation’, I am convinced that while culture and attitude is definitely a part of the answer, the lessons learnt from the digital space just don’t translate directly in many cases.

My Not-So-Humble Opinion

Pretty-much every new organisation I’ve been part of, started very agile, but became less so over time. The simple reality is that human ability is finite, and so speed and flexibility have to be trade-offs for other things. Speed is usually a trade-off for control - the slower you go, the more control you have and vice versa. Flexibility is usually a trade-off for certainty - the more you plan, the less freedom you have, but the more certain you are of what is supposed to happen when...

Therefore, behold the rack upon which we are all stretched:

Unable to have all four, most organisations gravitate to over delivering on some combination, bringing some familiar dysfunctions:

  • Chaos: You say you have maximum flexibility and speed, I say you haven’t a clue what’s going on, and you don’t know what the outcome will be… It’s a free-for-all...

  • Analysis Paralysis: You say you have complete control, and you know exactly what will happen when… I say you are so locked down you can’t react to change and everything moves at the speed of an paper-pushing snail

  • Snowflakes: You have control, but you let everyone do everything differently every time in the name of flexibility and agility… And actually your speed drops because everyone is reinventing the wheel every time…

  • Sausage Machine: You move at blistering pace… but only because you just do the same (probably dumb) thing every time… Never trying anything new, just getting incrementally better and better at doing the same out-dated thing every time…

In the middle of this is must be some sort of SWEET SPOT… It’s the place everyone actually thinks they operate! But not everything is as simple as it seems there either...

The Sweet Spot

Imagine two people with two very different attitudes, let’s call them Alice and Bob. Alice likes to have a plan, she likes to check everything, sometimes twice. Alice knows she could take more risks, but she’s had colleagues who liked taking risks, and it ended badly for them. Bob loves to take risks, he’s not wild or anything, but he likes to mix things up, to challenge the people he works with, and make them think outside the box. He tries to have a rough plan, but sometimes he just wings it.

At first sight, Alice and Bob seem quite different. However, if I told you Alice is a firefighter and Bob is a teacher, you could argue their attitude to risk is quite similar, maybe Bob could take more risks, maybe Alice should take less. The point is that everyone’s sweet spot is different, because everyone’s circumstances are different. If you are building the next start-up, you are going to want to be somewhat up-and-to-the-right on my chart. Less is at stake, you aren’t sure what is going to work, you can afford to trade certainty and control for speed and flexibility. On the other hand, if you are planning the next mission to space, I’d hope you are going to be much more down-and-to-the-left… Let’s not make up the life support system as we go along folks and hope we ‘muddle through’.

So the sweet spot is dynamic, and it changes from person-to-person, from task-to-task, and from day-to-day. As individuals, our responsibility isn’t to find the sweet spot, but rather to commit to never stop chasing it. As leaders, our responsibility is to create an environment where people are inspired and empowered to seek it out. Moreover, in my experience, the people best placed to find the right sweet spot, are the people doing the work.

In the tech team at Launchpad, we’ve had plenty of chances to grapple with finding our sweet spot. For example, my first vision for how we engage with the portfolio companies was (perhaps inevitably) too structured and theoretical, it under-valued people, relationships and earning-the-right-to-be-involved. We put it on the back-burner and focussed instead on “getting stuck in”, proving our value, helping, and getting to know the people in the portfolio companies as people. That’s still the broad approach, but actually now we need to put a bit more structure back in – to make it easier to understand what we do, what the value is to the portfolio companies and to Launchpad, and what the limits are.

To share another example, our journey with agile as an organisation started by following Scrum quite closely. This worked well when we were small, but became unwieldy as we grew and the work became more fragmented. Our Scrum Master and I ended up stripping the process down to bare essentials – the work is all quite separate, dependencies are low, so all we really need to do is ensure people are aware of what everyone is working on at the high-level, and that nobody is getting overloaded. We do this now with a simple scrum-of-scrums each morning, and a review at the end of each sprint.

Stop Waiting for the Magic

I've seen people and organisations find themselves far from their sweet spot for a bunch of reasons:

  • They have got so used to operating that way, they don’t notice

  • They think they have found the best possible way to do things and don’t want to admit they can improve

  • They think they don’t have time to ‘waste’ on thinking about how things can be better (they have too many trees to cut to have time to sharpen their axe)

  • They are not ‘allowed’ to change and improve by the culture and leadership of the organisation

I’ll share a disappointing secret :- I’ve never found a magic formula for this stuff. I’ve found the key to getting closer to your sweet spot is boring, hard but really simple – you have to want to ask (as individuals and as organisations) what is it you can do better:

  • Ask yourself if you could go faster? Do you really need to do all these steps? Does it all need to be perfect?

  • Or should you actually go slower? Maybe you need less haste and more speed? Are you courting disaster because you aren’t stopping to check basic things?

  • Ask yourself if you could be more flexible? If you relaxed things, what’s the most likely thing that would happen (not the worst possible thing)? Does it matter so much how things are done as long as they are done? Do you really need to measure and report all these things?

  • Or should you actually have more control? Are customers suffering because people are cutting corners? Are you actually getting things finished or are they being left half-done?

Ask yourself these things early, ask them often. Try to answer honestly, but also specifically because remember you’ll want to be slow and careful for somethings and quick and dirty for others, whatever the task at hand warrants.

Above all else, forget the magic bullets. Only you have to answer these things for yourself, for your team, for your organisation. Listen to people’s opinions, be open-minded, be challenged, but always remember your sweet spot is yours alone. If you can answer the challenges above with honesty, integrity and tenacity, then nobody on earth can better answer them than you can.

What are your experiences finding (and not finding) your sweet spot? Please do share in the comments!


*No, literally, a personal fitness coach for geeks, to make me my best fittest geeky self