Agile Thinkers Embrace Uncertainty

The perfect is the enemy of the good, as the saying goes. Trying to force your priorities for a 5-year strategic horizon into a detailed operating plan results in what Agile software types call false precision. Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong!

Agile thinkers embrace uncertainty. Embracing uncertainty doesn’t mean you just give up and let the wind take you wherever it will. Your Board of Directors probably wouldn’t appreciate that. What it does mean is that you set vision, priorities, and measurable outcomes. But you take a more elegant, efficient, and iterative approach to decisions about how you'll get there. Adopting a Start Less, Finish More mindset radically reduces the amount of up-front analysis required before a strategy can be undertaken, while providing much greater adaptability to change.

William of Ockham was a medieval English friar who formulated the principle we now call Occam’s Razor. There are various wordings, but my favorite is “Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate,” which essentially means “Don’t make things more complicated than they need to be.” In other words, the simplest possible solution is the most useful.

Here is a set of decision-making rules that help you keep things simple and moving forward when you’re developing and executing strategic plans:

1. Document the assumptions you've made about your environment, the mental models you have about a future that hasn't happened yet. They may be roughly right. They may turn out to be completely wrong. One thing's for sure, they will never be completely right.
2. Set out a clear and measurable 3-5 year vision, phrased as an aspirational objective and a few measurable key results. Communicate this broadly and transparently throughout the organization. The vision can be supported by three or four strategies, also framed as OKRs, that give everyone in the organization a broad idea how you intend to get there. Taking a page from the Agile playbook, this is what I call a minimum viable strategy. After that, everything is iterative.
3. Don’t force unknowable details to be elaborated up front. Trying to force the known and the unknown into the same box leads to false precision. It's far better to admit you don’t know, and when the time is right devise experiments that will build knowledge.
4. Gather just enough information to make the decisions that have to be made right now. Don’t fall into analysis paralysis. It’s better to be roughly right, get on with it, and learn from experience. Try the simplest solution first, observe what happens, and then decide on the next step.
5. Create options to make better decisions later when more is known. Make it part of your regular management calendar to go back and review your assumptions. The more dynamic your industry, the more frequently you should do that review.
6. Don’t commit to detailed project plans too far into the future. Start with high-level narratives focused on customer value, known as epics in the Agile world. Go through a frequent process of creating detailed work plans for the next iteration only.
7. Whenever possible, defer decisions until the last responsible moment. The last responsible moment is the just-in-time point after which you are causing wasted time for others, bottlenecks, confusion, or risk. Kicking the can down the road may be the wisest course of action.
8. Centralize control for decisions that are infrequent, that impact the entire organization, or that have significant economies of scale. This includes enduring parts of the strategy, like organizational purpose and values. It also includes systems and processes that address common functions and efficiencies across the organization, like an accounting system.
9. Decentralize all other decisions. If managers and employees throughout the organization understand the purpose, values, vision and strategy, trust them to do the right thing.

(This is an edited excerpt from my forthcoming book, Start Less, Finish More: Building Strategic Agility with OKRs, to be published later this year.)