Build #44 - a tightrope between predictability and agility

Hola and happy Wednesday once again,

I’m fascinated with the enduring tension between seeking predictability and embracing agility in growth businesses.

It’s a classic tightrope for founders to walk. What shows up as agility in the early days of a business doesn’t scale well.

Add 50 people to an agile 25 person business and you usually end up with a sh*tstorm of a chaotic 75 person business.

Conventional wisdom encourages founders to reach for process, policy and structure to help create predictability.

And so once again the double-edged sword gets swung, risking choking off the founding spark and energy that has got them to this point.

The answer is to think about where predictability adds value and where it doesn’t.

Where you’ve worked out how to do something effectively, that’s where you need effort to systemise it.

Taking a systematic approach means putting in processes to ensure consistency in operations, delivery and decision-making. It helps ensure that mistakes aren’t repeated, quality is maintained and you can add headcount without causing chaos.

Being deliberate about where you want predictability or agility is the key thing here.

Be explicit about where you value having a defined and predictable operating system. Go for “minimum viable process” and be willing to iterate process regularly. Create clear de-centralised ownership for parts of your operating system.

Drawing lines around the zones of predictability in the business means then you then can think about where you want a bit of agility.

There are always areas where you want less predictability, giving greater space for people to explore new concepts, ideas and ways of doing things.

Decision-making is important here too.

Without conscious effort, decision-making gets increasingly centralised as headcount grows.

When a company is small, decision-making is typically held by a small group around the founder (and sometimes solely with the founder/s themselves).

Add more people without being clear about what decisions you expect them to take leads to an enduring centralisation of decision-making.

You’re cementing the habits of those heady early days into the culture of the growing business. That’s not a good thing.

It often shows up in the business as decisions bottlenecking with the founders, a nagging feeling that the organisation is lacking its former pace and a building sense of frustration among newer team members.

And I want to sign off with a little reminder. Agility is not the same as chaos. It really isn't.

Agility adds value and creates opportunity. Chaos saps energy, loses you good people and hurts your business.

Agility needs founders to create the right conditions for it to emerge. Chaos is often the result of a failure to plan for agility.

Have a great week.

all the best,
-sw

ps thanks to everyone who's emailed with feedback recently. My fave was this: "It’s like you can see into the heart of my organisation. Sometimes what you send is so bloody timely it’s scary!".

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