By Christopher G. Worley

I was a big fan of John Wooden, the great basketball guru at UCLA, who coached his teams to 10 national championships in 12 years, including seven straight, a feat unlikely to be repeated. (In the two years they didn’t win the national championship, they finished second and third.) Wooden preached the pyramid of success, a multifaceted view of living and competing well. But he also had a number of sayings, and one of my favorites was, “Be quick but don’t hurry.”

Wooden believed — and there’s a powerful lesson here for organization agility — that the advantage of being able to move quickly should not be wasted on ill-advised tactics. Hurrying — taking action because of an imminent threat — can cloud good judgment. If an opposing player has an uncontested layup, there are options. Depending on the situation, you can use your quickness to block the shot. But if you hurry without taking the situation into account, you may use your quickness inappropriately to try to block it and end up giving up a foul or a three point play instead.

So it is with agile organizations. Agile organizations possess the ability to respond (proactively or reactively) quickly. They have the systems and processes in place to allocate resources — people, time, and money — to the most pressing and emergent opportunities and threats. These systems include budgeting processes, reward systems, goal setting, learning mechanisms, and market intelligence. But possessing the ability to be quick doesn’t mean you should always apply it to any situation. Agile organizations have developed these systems and processes so they act quickly at appropriate times.

There were three important implications of “be quick, but don’t hurry” for agility: shared strategy, leveraged learning, and understanding time.

Shared Strategy
Our notion of the charismatic, all-powerful, decisive CEO in a centralized bureaucracy or as the central node in a network is a dead issue; its time has passed. In a complex, volatile, and uncertain world moving with increasing speed, it takes too long for critical information to get to a centralized decision maker. Moreover, information that trickles up a hierarchy is usually too filtered, sanitized, and massaged to be of any use. Most centralized top management teams are making strategic decisions with old, bad data. As a result, the organization has to hurry. Any quickness that is has is spent catching up because people don’t know where they are going.

I argue that one of the most important remedies is a clear, shared, and understood strategy. It’s easy to say, but strategy has become one of those extremely important and impactful words that mean nothing and nobody understands, like “business model” or “end-to-end solution.” Most organizations don’t have it. If leaders spent more time making the difficult choices among alternatives (instead of trying to do everything), ensuring alignment among functions, divisions, and countries (instead of allowing silos to reify), and being sure everyone understood the company’s business model and how their unit contributes, there would be a lot less hurrying to catch up, and a lot more focus.

Hurrying, just trying to go faster without a clear, shared, and well understood strategy leads to lots and lots of waste. Although new initiatives can come from anywhere, successful ones are more likely to come from people who have deep connections to the environment and who are accountable for action.

Leveraged Learning
The second implication of “be quick but don’t hurry” for agility is how an organization leverages its learning mechanisms. One of the initial, but surprising observations leading up our book, The Agility Factor, was how disciplined agile organizations are. They are very rigorous, evidence-based decision makers. Part of their efficient quickness is a function of how well they leverage what they know, and they know a lot because they take the time to reflect on their experiences, successes, and failures.

Many agile organizations can seem sluggish from the outside. They take good care not to over-invest in mobility barriers or barriers to imitation especially if they involve some irreversible commitments.

Too many organizations don’t know what they know or don’t bother to learn from their experiences. As a result, they pursue every bright shiny object that comes their way. One tried and true method is the after action review. It is a big part of the US armed forces teams and 3M. But you actually have to perform and use the review, and too many organizations are hurrying because they failed to reflect on prior experience and understand why they were successful (or not).

For example, capturing learning is a big part of 3M’s success. Codifying the reasons for successful innovation facilitates the transfer to implementation in which successful experiments are scaled up and made repeatable. Second, learning from failed tests often forms the basis for new innovations and creates options for the future. 3M spends considerable time documenting their failures. The failures were often not an issue of bad strategy, technology, or effort, but bad timing. By documenting the failures well, when the environment changed, it often changed in ways that favored the failed idea. In these cases, the organization was able to respond quickly – they looked really insightful and clever – because of the ability to dip into an existing knowledge base. 3M’s failures really became options on the shelf.

But 3M also deliberately records the insights from innovation attempts that don’t work out. These stories become part of a technology platform, and as a technology matures, these once worthy ideas can become, again, sources of opportunity. Instead of being abandoned as mistakes or dead ends, failed tests often represent a preadaptation to an emergent future. Today’s failures can become tomorrow’s successes.

Without good learning mechanisms that capture knowledge and experience, the organization wastes time and resources re-learning. They have to hurry.

Understand the Nature of Time.
The final implication of the advice to “be quick but don’t hurry” caught me a little by surprise. At first it sounds a bit academic: Agile organization seem to understand time. All change takes time, of course, but the agile organization chooses how to spend this precious resource. DaVita, the Fortune 500 kidney care company, distinguishes between concentrated time and elapsed time. DaVita’s CEO, Kent Thiry, told me that agility was about “concentrated time, not elapsed time.”

If a particular initiative is really important to the strategy and success of the firm and it will require a hundred hours of work, there is little sense in giving that initiative to a team that has two or three other high priority projects. The really important initiative will get done in two months instead of a hundred hours because the team has to switch back and forth between multiple priorities. Agile organizations are quick because they focus their attention and resources (time) in the right ways. By spreading important talent over too many things, the organization ends up hurrying. People get burned out and stressed out because they have too many priorities.

Christopher Worley is a keynote speaker at HRMA’s 2015 Annual Conference + Tradeshow. His session—Re-Thinking Organization Design: The Transformation to Agility— is on Tuesday, April 28^th.

Christopher G. Worley, Ph.D. is a senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations (USC’s Marshall School of Business) and professor of management in Pepperdine University’s Master of Science in Organization (MSOD) program. Dr. Worley’s most recent books include The Agility Factor, Management Reset, and Built to Change. He is also an author of Integrated Strategic Change and Organization Development and Change, the leading textbook on organization development. He and his family live in San Juan Capistrano, California.