Why Your Organization Should be Focused on Agility Right Now
How the COVID pandemic has changed the game for non-profits, cultural institutions, and community-facing organizations
For the past two years, organizations ranging from small non-profits to massive corporations have been forced to adapt to an ever-changing landscape of life with COVID-19.
As I’ve written previously, it is less that the virus created this organizational turbulence, but rather that it has exposed and catalyzed problems along fault lines that were already there. Remote collaboration, fair wages, staff morale, urgency culture, programmatic relevance — these topics were plaguing our workplaces long before COVID entered the scene.
At the initial crest of the pandemic there was swift, if clunky, adaptation. Slowly, virtual events improved, and we even found a few things worth holding onto (like shortened commutes and better accessibility features for people with disabilities). We began asking, “Is this an opportunity to do things differently? Can we finally retire the practices that no longer serve us? Might this be exactly the moment to demand long-overdue changes and fulfillment of promises for more equitable and just workplaces?”
And then, just when the potential for change was starting to grow, something else shifted. In late spring of 2021, the speed of vaccinations picked up, and offices began arranging their plans for the long-foretold “return to normal.” We were asked to promptly forget the lessons and traumas of the past year and go back to the old way as if nothing had changed.
Now, organizations are once again scratching their heads as the path forward has forked in yet another unexpected direction. Re-openings have been pushed back, returns-to-work reconsidered, and policy positions re-interrogated.
In my role as a consultant, I’ve supported organizations across the cultural and educational sectors trying to make sense of these shifting conditions. The back-and-forth of virtual, to in-person, and potentially back to virtual again. It’s dizzying to say the least. I’ve come to believe that this moment is trying to teach us something that has always been true, and which demands particular attention now.
It all begins with a concept called agility.
The Case for Organizational Agility
It’s not a new idea to say that stability is only an illusion. Anyone who’s lived through a period of personal groundlessness knows that changing conditions are the rule, not the exception. People leave us, relationships evolve, our own planet will never be the way it once was.
Yet many organizations still act as though things ought to be relatively steady: that work should be done in consistent ways, that audiences and constituents are likely to want the same types of programs, year after year.
“Agility is both a skillset and a value. It requires us to hold certain kinds of mindsets, a tolerance for uncertainty and adaptation. It takes preparation and rehearsal. It takes a kind of humility, a letting-go of the idea that we know what’s coming.”
The truth is that we are always oscillating between temporary stability and unexpected change. We find things that work for a period of time, and then we reach a moment of necessary recalibration. Sometimes these are large adjustments like a new business model; other times, they‘re minor, like a shift in how our content gets delivered.
Along the way, we learn to embrace agility as a guiding principle. Agility is the ability to change positions with accuracy and speed. It’s not enough just to land on our feet: we also want to land in the place we intended, or at least, somewhere worth being for a while.
Agility is both a skillset and a value. It requires us to hold certain kinds of mindsets, a tolerance for uncertainty and adaptation. It takes preparation and rehearsal. It takes a kind of humility, a letting-go of the idea that we know what’s coming.
When we move with agility, we avoid the traps that keep us stuck in operational fixedness. One of those is solving the wrong problem: inventing all kinds of new practices and protocols only to realize that we were only looking at the surface features and not the underlying dilemma.
Another one is clinging to what’s familiar: trying at all costs to replicate what has worked in the past, in hopes that it will continue to serve us.
And finally, even when we do muster the courage to consider trying something new, we can still get caught up in defeatist thinking: a kind of “why bother?” stance that is both extremely tempting and extremely dangerous. This happens when we express sentiments like, “Well, it’s always been like this; what good would it do to change things now?” Or, “We’re too entrenched in the way things are; it will never work.”
What I’ll offer here are some antidotes — a trio of cognitive re-frames we can train ourselves to use when we encounter one of these traps. I’ll introduce each of them one-by-one and explain how they can help organizations retain a spirit of agility, not just in relation to the challenges currently posed by the pandemic, but as a stance that can be used to greet any moment of turbulence down the road.
IMPULSE → REFRAME
- Solving the wrong problem → The complaint is not the problem
- Clinging to what’s familiar → Move beyond the model
- Defeatist thinking → The second best time is now
1. The complaint is not the problem: solving for what’s really going on
There was a recurring sketch on the SNL-for-kids TV series All That that I grew up watching in the 90s called “the complaint department.” In the sketch, people would petition the clueless employee of a department store’s “complaint department” for help with some defective object. The bemused employee, deftly portrayed by actor Lori Beth Denberg, would then offer a barrage of outlandish and unhelpful suggestions.
Sometimes, she would mistake an ordinary piece of information for the grievance itself, asking ”…is that your complaint?” In another scenario, she offers a puppy in exchange for a broken clock, then orders the customer to leave: “No animals allowed in the store, sir.”
The complaint department clerk is not a very good listener. Perhaps if she had just given the man a working clock he would have left satisfied. But his punchline retort is illuminating: “I can’t tell time on a puppy!” he exclaims. The customer is upset, presumably, not because he left without a clock, but because his fundamental need — the ability to accurately know what time it is — has gone unmet.
This is a subtle distinction, but one with enormous significance for any organization striving to meet the needs of its audience. The complaint was a broken clock; the problem was an inability to tell time.
Why should this matter?
“…the complaint is not actually the problem. The complaint is just the surface-level indicator of a deeper problem to be solved.”
Imagine for a moment that the store was out of clocks. Or better yet, that clocks were temporarily unavailable due to a supply-chain malfunction. Then what you might have is a situation similar to the one we find ourselves in now.
Many of us, and our organizations, find ourselves in situations where the value we are used to offering — our “clocks” — are inaccessible. We cannot gather in our rehearsal rooms and community centers like we used to. We cannot hold large events, catered with delicious food and drink. It may not yet be safe even to gather our staff in an office as we had hoped it would be by now.
So, what do you do? How do you know what to offer when you’re out of proverbial clocks?
You could send out a survey, ask the people directly what they want. But most people don’t actually know what they want. Have you ever designed a program around a piece of feedback, only to find that nobody showed up? If so, you have learned first-hand that the complaint is not actually the problem. The complaint is just the surface-level indicator of a deeper problem to be solved. To get there, we need to think like a designer.
Thinking like a designer: what elevators have to teach us about engagement
There’s a famous story from the design world about elevators. Visitors to a building were complaining that the elevators took too long to arrive. The workers investigated, yet there was little the engineers could do to make the machine move faster. So instead, they looked harder: what were people actually saying?
The root of the problem turned out to have little to do with elevator speed at all. The true problem was psychological: people were bored waiting for the elevators.
So, what did the engineers do? They installed mirrors to give people something to do and alter their perception of time. Sure enough, the visitors began to report less dissatisfaction. Some even thought that the elevators had been sped up!
We have to look below the surface to understand what’s really going on for people. Only then can we begin to come up with actionable solutions that address people’s needs in meaningful ways. One way to do this is a practice called laddering questions. If you’ve ever met a toddler, you know how this works, because one way to do it is just to keep asking WHY.
Here’s what it might look like with the elevator example:
“Complaint: The elevators are too slow.
Question: Why is that a problem?
Answer: It makes me wait.
Question: Why is that a problem?
Answer: I don’t like to wait.
Question: Why is that a problem?
Answer: It bores me.
Question: Why is that a problem?
Answer: I’ve got more interesting things to do.”
You can see from the dialogue above that each successive layer of explanation has its own plausible intervention. The purveyor of the elevator could have installed entertainment to mitigate the boredom, utilities to meet the desire for productivity, etc.
This idea came up for me in a recent coaching session with a program manager at an education institution. She was lamenting the “problem” of families being unable to afford to attend their summer camps. I asked her to say more about what she had tried to implement so far: what strategies and tactics the organization employs around financial accessibility. She began talking about their generous scholarships and described how many families will abandon their applications because they assume they won’t qualify for the scholarships. Aha: here was the real problem.
The problem wasn’t that camp was inaccessible. The problem was that people didn’t think camp was accessible. Suddenly, a budget question became a PR one. And the set of possible solutions became much less costly. Framing matters. If we understand the current hiring troubles of restaurants to be the result of employee laziness, we’ll never be able to make progress on the actual reason no one wants to work — poor wages and working conditions.
The fundamental problem of returning to normal is that we have “changed everything to be mostly the same.” We have chosen to view the pandemic as an aberration, when it is really a culmination, an extreme manifestation of all the change that has already been brewing. Agile leaders understand this. And once they grasp the true, deeper nature of what’s happening, they must find ways to do what I call “moving beyond the model.”
2. Move beyond the model: embracing value over familiarity
The second insight has to do with the way we practice and program our work, which is necessarily a consequence of how we conceptualize what it is we do. And to understand that, we need to talk about something called schemas. Schemas are cognitive frameworks that we use to organize related groupings of information.
For example, when a child is young, they may develop a schema for a cat. They know a cat walks on four legs, is hairy, and has a tail. When the child goes to the zoo for the first time and sees a tiger, they will be able to recognize the tiger as a kind of cat. But that same child may incorrectly assume that a dolphin is a fish (rather than a mammal) because, like a fish, it swims in the sea.
Schemas get in the way of our understanding when they lead us to group items together based on limited past experiences. In the context of organizational change, schemas become a problem when they reinforce familiar expectations of how things are supposed to go. For instance, we may incorrectly assume that our organization should or shouldn’t provide certain services based on the conceptual “bucket” we place it in.
An example: there’s been a debate recently in the art world about the concept of deaccession, or selling off items from a museum’s collection. For many museums in the early wave of the pandemic, this was done out of necessity. Now, they are faced with the question of whether to continue the revenue-generating practice. Practically, there are reasons to consider it. But for many people, it does not fit into their schema of what an art museum “does.”
Consider this quote from a change-reticent museum director: “We are educational institutions,” he said in an interview. “If you want to flip paintings, there are many other types of institutions where you can do that, and they are called commercial galleries.”
Legacy institutions are ripe with schemas, because they are used to doing things in a certain way over long periods of time. In this case, the leader assumes that museum galleries must be for looking, not buying. We also see here how leadership can set the tone for how an organization reacts to the dilemma of changing contexts and purposes.
But you don’t have to work at a fancy museum to be change-resistant. All of us, to some extent, have attachments to the way we do things, whether we’ve been at it for five or fifty years.
Think in opportunities, not programs
For many organizations, a significant obstacle is the tendency to think in terms of programming. This is particularly true in the non-profit and cultural sectors, where we were used to providing value to our constituents primarily in the form of places and events: we gave performances, held symposia, hosted workshops and seminars.
Many of these programs have managed to survive well without their place-based connection and have been successfully reimagined for the virtual realm. Many others have not. (And even for the ones that have, lots of people are just plain Zoom-ed out!)
“…we were never just our buildings.”
While we can and should acknowledge the real loss of place-based programming, I think this is also a moment for us to expand our thinking about what organizations have to offer our communities. In other words, we were never just our buildings. We’ve always held rich resources, like knowledges, histories, networks, people, practices, and processes.
When I talk to organizational leaders who are used to creating events and workshops they often feel stuck on what they can do for people without their physical gathering spaces. But there are tons of needs out there that have nothing whatsoever to do with events or programs. Maybe your community is looking for opportunities to learn and grow while staying at home; maybe they need help connecting with others beyond their immediate context who share their experiences and values.
“…what do people most need in their lives right now? What kinds of resources, connections, access, opportunities, supports would most help them to thrive?”
When we activate our programming schema, we ask questions like: what does this event look like in virtual space? How can I rethink the format of this fellowship/performance/seminar remotely? Those aren’t bad questions, but they’re limited in their ability to truly meet the needs of the moment. They deliver events that work, not solutions that sing.
Instead we could ask, what do people most need in their lives right now? What kinds of resources, connections, access, opportunities, supports would most help them to thrive? These are questions that unlock the potential for a radical reimagining of what our organizations could offer moving forward.
In the initial crest of the pandemic, for a lot of places, this looked like offering financial, practical, and emotional support; I saw cultural organizations invest in things like mutual aid, food distribution, and community-building. In that moment, those things mattered more than what the organizations were most used to providing. Now, as we begin to rebuild, how can we make sure we aren’t reverting back to business-as-usual, but instead using our resources in ways that authentically meet the needs of the people we claim to be serving?
All this can be tricky; grants don’t typically fund “opportunities,” they fund programs. But we need to do our research. As leaders, we can make sure that we’re not diving in and replicating old structures that have outlived their value just because that’s where we’re most comfortable.
3. Doing better when you know better: the second best time is now.
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” — Maya Angelou
I recently came across a saying, credited on the internet as a Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” It struck me as significant to the current crises in which we find ourselves — crises of systemic and institutional racism, organizational fixedness, a (seemingly) sudden and urgent need to pivot programming in radical new directions.
It landed for me because I think many people were asking for these crises to be addressed 20, 40, many more years ago. Perhaps many organizations feel that it is too late, that they missed the boat. That they don’t have the proper infrastructure, the resources, the “buy-in.” It’s not in their 5-year plan. And yet, we are here now: not 5 years ago, or 20.
The other way to look at this is to ask ourselves what, in 20 years, we will be glad we did today. We can actually do this in the sense of looking at history and studying how past watershed moments were met. How did people react to moments of change? Did they clamp down on the way things had always been done, or did they seize the opportunity to set a new course for the future?
This stood out to me from a recent conversation I had with a program director at a university who told me that “in many ways we have a blank state.” The incoming students — she realized — didn’t know what the program used to be, which gave her the freedom to imagine it as something different.
On not picking up where we left off
There is, for me at least, a strange irony to the renewed caution around COVID we experienced earlier this year, and the attendant responses to push back re-opening plans. Last July, while many were celebrating the much-anticipated “return to normalcy,” others of us were glancing at it skeptically. It was too sudden, too soon, we felt. And it was. Not only was it too soon in the trajectory of the pandemic (which we would come to learn imminently), it was too soon psychologically. And in fact, it may have been the wrong target all along.
We always knew there were some things we missed. Gathering online will never be the same as gathering in person, and even the most obstinate introvert will tell you that different things can happen when people are in shared physical space together.
But the full schemata of what work and organizations look like need not be revived alongside the return of such productive practices. It is possible, in other words, to return to some of what we used to do without bringing it all back wholesale.
This takes discernment, and it takes — first and foremost — a recognition of what those component parts were. Most organizations (and leaders) lack either the time or interest, or both, to make that happen. But I would argue that slowing down and looking at that list is an essential step on the way to a more flexible and agile way of working.
I think we will all benefit from what I would call “more human” reopening plans. Ones that take into account not just our practical needs, but our psychological, emotional, and social ones, as well.
This has been a long time coming, and if our goal is to be sustainable, to last into the future, this might just be our best foot forward.
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