Predictability is not a requirement for clarity

One of the more ubiquitous challenges any team and organization daily faces is the ubiquity of unpredictability. Even when we hope our best intended and engineered decisions and plans create the assurance of predictability, they evoke and unfold new iterations of unknowns and unknowables. Every when we heroically execute our best decisions and plans, we unleash new generations of questions. 

In spite of the hypnotic seduction of our favorite assumptions, the future remains intrinsically unknowable. 

As much as this reality persists regardless of our efforts, what remains equally real us that we can be as clear about the future we want to create as we are unable to predict the future from the present.

Clarity is realizing the good we want to create. When we translate a long view good into short term action, we realize progress even as unpredictability remains life's constant.

Without clarity, we are deviled by unpredictability. Without clarity, we seek predictability and as a result create a future that tries to resemble the past. Predictability is the enemy of progress. Clarity makes progress possible.

The gift of failure

Failure happens. We don't usually fail on purpose. We don't intend disappointments, falling short and setbacks.

Nimble teams dedicated to growth experience more failure than slow teams dedicated to maintaining certainty at all costs. It is their intolerance of failure that keeps slow teams slow.

Nimble teams experiment continously and quickly engage lessons from each iteration. They have developed clarity on how to turn failing into a gift of new insights and accelerated experiments into far more than what slow teams even imagine.

When they make failing a gift to be engaged rather than problem to be prevented, nimble teams find that reflected failing is a rich source of new questions that spark new possibilities in realizing the long view good and near term progress they seek together.

The point of work in nimble teams is progress toward what we together define as good. Every instance of progress is failure to meet the good that most inspires and energizes our growth. As slow teams do everything they can to resist growth (and therefore failure) on their way to even "realistic" goals, nimble teams outperform slow by at least 200%.

Why goals don't work

As much as leaders place superstitious faith in goals, teams are more perspired than inspired by them. Goals provoke self-doubt that brings about risk aversion. Goals require confidence and constant adaptation. Over 80% of goals fail. Every day goals aren't met, self-doubt and risk aversion becomes stronger.

The opposite is defining the good we seek together and translating this into the next step of progress possible. In many stories of this approach, teams exceed would have been goals. Progress provokes confidence and adaptability. We adjust our approach with each new step in progress. 

The magic of a progress approach is how it creates more velocity and alignment.