Agility from the Outside In

4 min readOct 1, 2020

Imagine that you didn’t already know anything about agility.

You’re watching somebody try to drive down the block from Point A to Point B, where someone is anxiously waiting for them.

And, it’s not a long block. There is traffic there, by the way. Other people are trying to get from one end to the other, at the same time, on the same street.

But here’s the catch. It’s a one-way street, and the person you’re watching is driving the wrong way. Oops.

What do you already know about this person’s drive?

Priorities

For starters, you don’t know if they are ever going to get to the other end of the street. But you do know that they’re going to have to do a few nifty things to even have a shot at getting there.

Albert Einstein implied that they will want to manage the coincidence of their own speed, mass, and direction, so as to not wind up in the wrong position at the wrong time and lose that opportunity to keep going.

So there you are, watching, and there they go, weaving, ducking, stuttering and so on, while the rest of the traffic keeps heading at them. You’re pretty sure they’re not focusing on what time it is or how much longer it is going to take — stuff they might be focused on if they were instead moving the right way on the street.

You imagine that at the very least, you don’t want to be the person waiting for them to get to the other end of the street.

While you’re watching, it seems like they’re not really moving forward much. On the other hand, they haven’t stopped! So far they’re “still going”...

What they’re doing seems to be, at least, working out. You’re searching for that word that describes what their ability is, to go the way they’re going, Do the way they’re Doing.

It’s a description that characterizes them, that attributes a quality to them. It is… agility. They are agile.

[Photo: Rich Barnes / from USA Today]

Moves and the Abstract Truth

Agility is the quality of the behavior of being agile. Here, as you watch, it is independent of having the destination as a goal. It isn’t true or false based on whether someone is waiting nor who it might be. It isn’t true based on how much time it is taking. It isn’t true based on who the other drivers are or what those drivers are focused on.

It is true, of the driver you’re watching, based on the fact of how that driver responds to the circumstances created by the effort to go down that street that direction.

You try to imagine: if other circumstances, different ones, were presenting Me with challenges similar to what this driver is maneuvering through, what would I need to be like to actively cope with the circumstances and be able to keep going? What kind of maneuverability must be built into my ability to respond sufficiently against dynamic irregular streams of influences of the conditions I’m in?

One of the most obvious yet unremarked aspects of agility is the precondition that there is an opposing force strong enough to damage, deflect or simply stop one’s own effort. Sure, sometimes the smart thing to do is change your mind about what needs to be accomplished and switch to that (strategy), or to maintain position or velocity by counter force (persistence) — but both of those are already features of just executing for progress whether agility is actually needed or not.

Being There

Unless and until specific conditions are explicitly known and referenced, the weaving, ducking and stuttering are all just exercising — they don’t need any other justification to be done, and you can throw in some music as well to spice it up.

This tells us, if we didn’t already know, that there is no special dogma of proper technique that defines agility or defines being agile — unless you declare the distinctive boundaries of your circumstances — at which point what you're really doing is dwelling on risk management in practices. And on the other side of that coin, the goal of agility may not be reached in a given occasion; but the goal of being agile is not about having arrived. Instead, it’s about how to get there.

So we can recap: the importance of being agile may be strategic, but the quality of being agile is tactical, and the instance of being agile is conditional.

Most significantly, the value of being agile is that it generates future continued opportunity in circumstances where otherwise opportunity may either fail to arise or cease to exist.

Can Your Dog Do That Trick

Business People: hand over your agility agenda to Capability Developers, not to Performance Managers.

Pop Quiz

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Jackie Chan
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The entire World Champion US Women’s National (Soccer) Team, during any four minute stretch of any match