Achieving Sustained Agility

Hi, my name is Humberto, Carnegie Mellon alum with over 15 years of experience as a Product Manager, including a significant and ongoing tenure at Microsoft, where I focus on developing platforms and products for both enterprise and consumers. During my career, as well as through the experiences shared by colleagues at various organizations, I've observed teams sometimes struggle to achieve sustained agility and fall into the "Hamster Wheel of Haste". In this post I will explain the nature of this pattern, its signs, and how teams and leaders can improve with proven techniques. 

Definition

The hamster wheel of haste is a permanent state of feeling too busy, wanting to make fast progress but being unable to do so over a sustained period. This leads teams to neglect efforts that would help them increase their speed and rely on short term crutches that further perpetuate the cycle. When teams remain in this state for too long, it inevitably leads to burnout.

⚠️Warning Signs

• Excessive Meetings: Your team spends an inordinate amount of time in meetings without clear objectives or outcomes. Many of those meetings are to "get up to speed" busy team members. 
• Lack of Documentation: There's little to no documentation within your team, important information is only within a few individuals' heads, and team members struggle to find the information they need, including onboarding new folks.
• Challenges with Remote Work: Remote folks feel 'out of the loop', leading to frustration and isolation. 
• Everything is important and urgent: Every ask is sold as "important" and "cannot wait". Leaders fail to say "no" to new asks. 
• Recurring Burnout Cycles: Your team notices these signals, makes short-lived attempts to improve, experiences a brief respite, and then falls back into the same cycle.
• Lack of delegation. A handful of folks are forced into burning the midnight oil to get things done. They feel they need to "do it themselves" to meet deadlines, fail to delegate, leading to even more work and inefficiencies. 
• Rushing into things. There's a widespread sentiment in Technology that we need to move fast. Most folks would agree with that sentiment. Paradoxically, this desire for speed often pushes teams into the Hamster Wheel of Haste, as they misinterpret "going faster" as rushing and hoping for the best. What teams truly need is sustained agility, enabling you to move quickly without relying on constant heroics.

If you observe 2 or more of these signs, your team is likely trapped in the Hamster Wheel of Haste.

Achieving sustained agility

High-performance teams can consistently deliver software and innovation. Here are the key traits I've observed in successful teams:

🤝Lead with culture

Culture sets the tone for how team members interact, collaborate, and make decisions. It influences the team's ability to adapt to changes and navigate challenges effectively. Leaders must take the following actions to lead with culture: 

• Create Psychological Safety. Create an environment where team members feel comfortable expressing their thoughts, ideas, and concerns without fear of retaliation or judgment. Everything else hinges on this. 
• Ruthlessly Prioritize. Recognize that not everything can be both important and urgent simultaneously. Leaders must prioritize and shield their teams from outside pressures to ensure they can focus on the most critical tasks.
• Balance work. Resist the temptation to overburden your best performers with excessive responsibilities. When top performers are stretched too thin, they often find themselves caught in the Hamster Wheel of Haste, attending endless meetings and lacking time for crucial tasks like writing things down for others' benefit. Leaders should create space for these individuals to serve as coaches and catalysts for the rest of the team, rather than being constantly overwhelmed.
• Timebox Efforts. Timeboxing involves setting specific deadlines for tasks or projects. While this may seem like adding pressure, it serves as a powerful motivator for teams. Deadlines should be viewed as learning milestones, where teams establish specific learning goals tied to experimentation. Reporting what has been learned and outlining next steps is essential. This approach applies not only to software development but also to engineering efforts, preventing never-ending cycles of refactoring or adopting new technologies.
• Promote escalations as an effective tool. Escalating issues should not be viewed as a taboo within the organization. Instead, it should be encouraged and, at times, even demanded. Healthy escalations involve setting clear time-bound decisions and providing a structured process for resolving disagreements. This prevents the team from getting stuck in endless debates over details and allows for quicker progress through experimentation and learning.

📃Foster agile communication

Efficient and agile communication is a cornerstone of any high-performing team. It ensures that information flows smoothly, decisions are made promptly, and team members remain well-informed. Leaders must ask their teams to:

• Work in the Open. Create channels where team members can share information, updates, and ideas, even when they are still in the early stages of development. This approach encourages transparency and inclusivity within the team. It's about breaking down information silos and ensuring that insights are shared with everyone, rather than being confined to a select few.
• Lead with Documents. A vital aspect of agile communication is emphasizing written content as a primary mode of communication. Written communication can take various forms, such as wikis, documents, posts, emails, chat messages, and more. The advantage of written content lies in its accessibility, traceability, and the ability to revisit and digest information at one's own pace.
• Minimize Meetings. Excessive meetings can be a major obstacle to a team's effectiveness and productivity. Prioritizing asynchronous communication as the primary method of interaction can result in improved results and a more efficient work environment, especially for teams spread across different geographical locations. It's important for leaders to recognize that the perceived advantages of 'high bandwidth' meetings often serve as a temporary solution to compensate for the lack of time to document and carefully consider important matters 

🧪Learn by doing

Do, don't just talk. Act, experiment, and gain insights from practical experiences. Avoid getting caught in endless debates based on personal opinions. Ensure that you and your team:

• Set clear objectives and metrics. What you want to accomplish and how you will measure it. 
• Embrace calculated risk-taking. You don't know what you don't know and the best way to find answers is by trying things out in a responsible manner. 
• Reward learning, not just success. Your team will fail, constantly. They will learn constantly. Embrace that and reward folks that promote that learning. 

🪁Minimize managerial overhead

Create an environment where teams can excel with minimal micromanagement. You don't ship specs, reviews, meetings, you ship code and everything that gets in the way of shipping code is overhead and must be minimized. Leaders must: 

• Standardize processes. Teams trapped in the wheel of haste often hesitate to enforce uniform methods for tasks like specifications and reviews because they fear it will slow down the team. Paradoxically, the absence of standardization is what results in such a slowdown, as each team follows its own unique approach and decisions need to be retriaged often.  Make sure, however, that increasing the efficiency of the team is the primary objective of any process, if it's not, then eliminate it. 
• Give as much autonomy as possible: Provide team members with the autonomy to make decisions and execute tasks within the scope of their roles. Trusting their judgment fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility.
• Foster 'go do' feedback and recognition. Make sure your team feels confident asking and providing direct, actionable feedback. People shouldn't have to 'unpack' feedback for it to make sense. The same goes for recognition, be clear, be open, be enthusiastic. 

⚙️Invest on shared engineering systems, codebase and tools

Teams must have shared engineering systems, codebases, and suitable tools to support them. Neglecting these shared resources can lead to technical debt, which ultimately slows down progress. PMs must prioritize these efforts, even if they may not appear glamorous, to ensure efficient collaboration. 

Using these techniques, teams can break out of the hamster wheel of haste and move together faster. But what do you think? Does this resonate with you? Have you fallen into this pattern? What are your recommendations on how to get out of it?