Responding to Change over Following a Plan

Part 4 of a four-part series on the values of the Agile Manifesto, first published on LinkedIn.

When anything changes, an individual or an organisation can do one of two things: react or respond.

A reaction is largely unthinking: the outcome depends entirely on the change. A response is thoughtful: the change is just one of the things that shape the outcome.

It’s also one of the properties that separate humans from machines. A machine can respond to an event in only a fixed set of ways; people can respond in countless ways. For an organisation, that ability to respond becomes a critical skill.

Why plans become a trap

Most organisations deliver through projects, and every project has a fixed set of committed deliverables and a fixed scope. Both are necessary: they give the project direction and an end goal. But fixed commitments can also make an organisation rigid, and rigidity never goes hand in hand with uncertainty. That’s why the Agile Manifesto puts responding to change ahead of following a plan.

An example: next-generation batteries

Say an organisation starts R&D on a completely new technology, such as the next generation of batteries. New development means huge uncertainty. To give the work structure, it runs as a project, with a customer guiding the team towards the end goal. That customer doesn’t have to be external; an internal product owner can play the role and define the deliverables and scope.

With this much uncertainty, the project manager should expect the plan to change. If the team sticks to the plan at every deviation, the plan becomes the obstacle:

• the team spends its energy keeping the project on plan instead of on the deliverables,
• money and time go into enabling the team to stick to the plan, and
• the result may still be a failure.

The agile alternative: every time a deviation happens, the team discusses it and responds in the best way it can, and the plan is updated with every obstacle. The uncertainty doesn’t go away, but the team’s energy goes into what matters, the solution.

Even if the product fails, the continual focus on the problem and its solution builds real value: skills and learning the organisation keeps.

A recent case

When ChatGPT arrived in Bing (this was written in May 2023), Google faced real uncertainty about its search business. Sticking to the plan might have put its dominance at risk. Instead, Google responded and released its own AI-integrated search. The first weeks didn’t go well, but Google steadily improved the product. Whether it keeps its position is still uncertain, but the ability to respond quickly gave it momentum that following the original plan would not have.