The Ability to Pivot as Necessary, is a Characteristic of an Effective Lean-Agile Team

Clarence Galapon

8 years ago

titanic The huge ship Titanic can pivot — like any other ship for that matter — but in that ill-fated night, it was necessary for it to pivot … fast! Too slow…It sank … it was not Lean and Agile enough to pivot fast enough in order to avoid collision with a huge iceberg. Tragic.

Apple Inc. long time ago was 90 days away from being insolvent; Steve Jobs returned to Apple… made pivotal moves, fast enough to avoid insolvency, and as a result, Apple Inc. was profitable again… and still is profitable today, and, in fact, on August 2, 2018, it became the world’s first trillion dollar publicly traded company! Fortunate.

Fortunes are won/lost on the ability/lack of ability to pivot as necessary.

The ability to pivot as necessary is a characteristic of any effective entity (or a person)… big or small … even as small as an agile team… or as big as a team of agile teams.

Here is why: today’s business landscape is very dynamic. For example: a valuable business objective set forth three months ago might not be valuable today because the market has changed. Market is not static … as such, teams must be lean and agile — has the ability to launch an idea/product, observe/learn how it performs in the marketplace, then persevere (add-on more features to the product) or pivot (tweak it or turn around and try another idea/product) as necessary — to meet the dynamic nature of the market as they – the agile teams / team of agile teams — continuously deliver value to the marketplace.

Sometimes…successive small pivotal moves win the day! A series of cycles of ‘idea-build-observe/learn-persevere/pivot’ (the Lean-Startup model) might be needed to ‘test the water’ so to speak… add that to polish/re-calibrate/adjust your rather static Business Model Canvas (BMC)…which in turn make your BMC dynamic enough to move and keep pace with — better still, steps ahead of — a very dynamic market. Now, for some fun, Click this link to watch the ‘Friends’ episode — ‘the couch scene – Pivot’!