Agility Hacks

In the past 20 years, the agile approach to improving products, services, and processes has swept the business world. It calls for organizations to adopt small, empowered, cross-functional teams, break initiatives or challenges into small modules, and develop solutions using rapid prototyping, tight customer-feedback loops, and quick adaptation. Rooted in software development, agile has spread to many other functions, and some companies have turned much of their organization, including the C-suite, into agile teams.

Although agile can benefit the parts of a business that must be nimble—those that manage shifting customer relationships, explore new markets, and develop new products quickly and responsively, for example—it is less effective for operations or functions that require consistency and efficiency rather than agility. Consider mature, high-volume production processes such as those used to produce aluminum, commodity chemicals, and paper. They can run efficiently for weeks or months without interruption, and tweaks can be extremely costly and even dangerous. Other repetitive activities, including bill processing, payroll, and budgeting, are also best run with bureaucratic systems. Indeed, bureaucracy—characterized by specialized functions, fixed rules, and a hierarchy of authority—has gotten a bad rap: When designed well, it excels at ensuring reliability, efficiency, consistency, and fairness.

But understandably, such systems don’t adapt quickly to changing circumstances in the market, and occasions arise when businesses need to bypass them to tackle select projects that demand speed, flexibility, and experimentation. Examples include jump-starting an R&D function to generate more-radical innovation; figuring out how to serve the needs of a strategic new client in an emerging market whose requirements differ dramatically from those of existing customers; and responding very quickly to a sudden contextual change, as happened during the early days of the Covid pandemic.

In such cases, how can large, established organizations bypass their own processes to act quickly and effectively while leaving the overall system alone? Our research identified several large companies—among them PepsiCo, Sony, Novartis, and GE—that used temporary teams to carry out time-sensitive strategic projects quickly. All employed agile principles and values, but some did not use formal agile methods. Instead, they used what we call agility hacks. Similar in spirit to life hacks, they are shortcuts or novel methods that increase productivity or responsiveness, and they deliver on computer programmers’ original use of the term “hack”: a quick, effective, if inelegant, solution to a specific problem.

In some instances, teams were unleashed to pursue a new market opportunity; in others, they were formed to respond forcefully and creatively to serious performance problems such as an alarming and sustained decline in revenues. Team members knew they were trying to capture something that the organization would otherwise miss. All teams used unorthodox methods to achieve results quickly; they acted as work-arounds to get things done outside the organization’s established architecture and normal operating processes. Although the projects differed in size and duration, we uncovered commonalities in their approaches—related to their purpose, the permission granted to them to operate outside the norm, and the disciplined, iterative process they employed—that other companies seeking to create agility hacks can apply.

Purpose

Each project we studied began with an animating purpose that was inspiring and actionable—for example, winning a bid for a mega-order, regaining a key account, or catalyzing novel innovation. The importance of the goals helped minimize pushback from the custodians of standard operating procedures in the organizations. And in all cases project team members—and those in other parts of the company whose expertise or resources were necessary to succeed—believed that the objective mattered.

When to Use Agility Hacks: Three Examples

When dealing with an immediate crisis that requires fast execution (e.g., saving a large corporate

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Consider what happened at GE in 2012. Indian Railways, the second-largest rail network in the world, had announced a $2.5 billion plan to revamp its entire fleet of diesel locomotives and asked for bids to be submitted within six months. Given the decades-long life span of a locomotive, it was a rare opportunity. But Nalin Jain, a young executive at GE India, realized that a variety of factors stood in the way of being able to submit a bid in time to compete: the company’s plodding traditional systems; the distant location of GE Transportation’s headquarters in Erie, Pennsylvania; Indian Railways’ vague requirements and the likelihood that the specifications would shift during the bidding process; and the deal’s high risks (bid too high and the deal would be lost; bid too low and the deal would result in a massive financial loss). A nimble approach to assembling a winning proposal was the only option. Jain pulled a team together and got to work. The team needed expertise in manufacturing, sourcing, finance, and contracts, and in how a government tender process worked in India. It also needed people who could think about the problem in new ways. By highlighting the enormous size of the opportunity and making the case that it might be possible to win the bid and make it profitable, Jain gained the support of executives and the cooperation of various groups at GE whose expertise was critical to putting together a strong bid.

Another example is PepsiCo UK. In mid-2016, the unit had experienced two consecutive years of declining revenues and was poised to suffer a third. Ian Ellington, the general manager, knew he needed to take action. But he realized that PepsiCo’s entrenched systems and rules would impede rapid, novel responses. Ellington also knew that reforming the entire organization from within would take too long and most likely engender significant resistance. His solution was a “SLAM” (self-organizing, lean, autonomous, and multidisciplinary) team tasked with turning the ship around. Over eight weeks, team members reached out to key stakeholders with brand expertise or relationships with frontline retailers to understand what had gone wrong and to collect and generate ideas for revitalizing the different brands and accounts. Some brand experts, for instance, had ideas for improving online sales but had never been invited to experiment with them. The SLAM team did not dictate solutions; rather, it collected ideas and empowered others to create a viable path out of the decline. It led to an increase in UK revenues of 2.3% in the first year and 2% in the second.

Permission

A motivating purpose provides a starting point. But agility hacks fail unless they deviate from conventional ways of doing things. In every case we studied, project teams were given permission—and resources—by senior leadership to try new things fast, without going through the usual channels and approvals. But significantly, none of the teams we observed were skunkworks—off-site autonomous enterprises shut off from the rest of the organization. Instead, all relied on support from and interactions with colleagues in traditional roles.

The Indian Railways team at GE bypassed organizational layers and reported directly to the CEOs of GE India and of GE Transportation. The team kept them abreast of progress and hurdles. Given the stringent cost and customization requirements, it wasn’t clear whether GE could make a profit on the deal. Worse, Indian Railways had put out similar bids in the past only to pull them back later. For these reasons, there was resistance within GE to even pursuing the deal. With the strong support of the two CEOs, however, the team overcame those obstacles by moving fast to recruit key experts from within GE, sharing the cost across divisions, engaging extensively with Indian Railways, triangulating information from different sources to improve cost estimates, and taking quick action to test ideas. When the team encountered problems in getting necessary resources or decisions, the senior executives intervened.

Ellie Davies constructs temporary interventions in the forests of England to consider the complex interrelationships between landscape, individual experience, and meaning. Ellie Davies

Consider also an agility hack launched in 2013 by Sony’s new CEO, Kaz Hirai. An important part of his transformation effort, it reversed a long period of slow decline that had started in the early 1990s. Hirai recognized that a risk-averse bureaucracy had prevented exciting innovations from getting from the lab to the market because they didn’t fit neatly into one of Sony’s existing business verticals. His solution? An innovation hack that enabled the pursuit of concepts outside existing product categories and ultimately launched a series of successful innovations. He assembled a team that reported directly to him, allowed it to bypass Sony’s cumbersome budgeting and decision-making processes, and ensured that it could quickly access whatever resources and technologies it needed from wherever in Sony they resided. This setup provided the team with the air cover to imagine new possibilities and then get them done within and outside the Sony organization. Among the innovations the team launched was a popular 4K home projector that cast high-resolution large-screen images onto walls and also served as a piece of furniture, and a glass speaker system housed in a light bulb.

At pharmaceutical companies, R&D tends to be a top-down affair: Senior leaders allocate research dollars to specific areas, often leaving lab scientists boxed in by defined therapeutic areas, such as cardiovascular disease or cancer. In addition, specific scientific methods, disciplinary silos, and a reluctance to fail often discourage risky experiments.

When Jay Bradner left academic science to become head of R&D at pharma giant Novartis, in 2016, a series of breakthroughs had put the company in a strong place. But Bradner wondered how many great ideas were being missed by not tapping into the more out-of-the-box thinking of bench scientists—a question amplified by the departure of a number of them who had left for start-ups. So when scientist Ian Hunt suggested a new approach to catalyze more-radical innovation, Bradner invited him to step away from his current role and give it a try. The result was Project Genesis.

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Set up as a competitive, fast-paced innovation contest, Project Genesis encouraged cross-disciplinary teams to pitch proposals for dream projects to a panel of scientists, which included Bradner. Of the 90 proposals, five were ultimately selected. The winning teams then received lab space, funding, and time to develop their concepts further. One scientist told us, “I am surprised by how much Genesis speeds things up. We were able to get prime lab space and equipment in just a couple of weeks.” Each project was able to tap into diverse expertise as needed. But despite their risky, novel content, all the projects remained housed inside the parent organization. After 18 months, each would have to either find a home within one of Novartis’s existing R&D programs or end the project.

Following its positive reception, Project Genesis attracted more than 150 proposals in its second round, in 2018. The panel selected six to be funded. Although the full impact of the initiative remains to be seen—it takes many years to bring a new drug to market—Bradner praises Project Genesis for quickly generating efforts to explore breakthrough ideas with little cost and disruption to the overall organization. “Genesis isn’t very expensive,” he says. “It isn’t very disruptive.” But it greatly accelerated the launching of initiatives in new areas, boosted collaboration and engagement among scientists across disciplines, and increased the number of transformative technologies and therapeutics in the pipeline.

Process

The agility hacks we studied were anything but chaotic or sloppy. Each followed a systematic, disciplined process of rapid trial and error aimed at producing results within a tight time frame. All shared a bias for action. They didn’t let the pursuit of perfect solutions get in the way of speed. In every case the project processes were designed to accelerate the pace of learning—despite risks—by forcing progress and providing guardrails. (Gulati’s article “Structure That’s Not Stifling,” HBR, May–June 2018, offers guidance on how companies can empower employees and yet retain control.) They embodied what we call “execution as learning,” a structured approach to getting projects done while paying close attention to what works and then changing course frequently in small, responsive ways. (For more on this, see “The Competitive Imperative of Learning,” HBR, July–August 2008.)

Novartis and other firms we studied that ran innovation contests set up rules and timelines for the competition process and for the projects selected for funding. Project Genesis offered coaching and presentation-skills training to scientists who chose to compete and facilitated collaboration among them by hosting structured ideation sessions and creating an internal social media platform. That allowed people to find partners in key disciplines more easily. A fast-paced schedule of deadlines was posted to put the pressure on the ideation process.

PepsiCo UK’s initial SLAM team and the others that followed worked intensively on a tightly defined mission, with a deadline, and used a structured agile method. The process included forming a team charter around the problem or opportunity; identifying a team leader, coach, and stakeholders; specifying key work areas, which were sorted into one-week blocks; designing successive experiments; and adopting a set of practices that organized the collaborative work in a transparent, iterative way. The process allowed SLAM teams to bypass organizational roadblocks and coordinate as needed with colleagues in various functions, such as marketing or manufacturing, to ensure execution of time-sensitive tasks. Once results were achieved, team members returned to their former roles. The GE Transportation team pursuing the Indian Railways deal was also able to move fast as long as it didn’t violate size, cost, and other parameters outlined by the customer and GE leadership.

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Admittedly, agility hacks are short-term solutions that don’t address underlying causes of entrenched performance problems. But they can be extremely effective in tackling immediate challenges quickly and in doing so awaken people to new possibilities and pave the way for success.