Crisis Response; Why walk when you can sprint?

There's an obvious answer to this slightly obtuse question; of course I want to sprint. I often read about the speed of a response being the most important factor in setting the conditions for an effective response to crises; I'll leave that argument for another day but needless to say, if my very quick response was something akin to old Two Jags, aka “punchy” John Prescott, when confronted by paparazzi I'd say that I've not really achieved the affect I wanted. Like I said, I’ll park this for another day. 

Aside from my petulant nit-picking above I think we all know that speed of response is as critical as the quality of response.  This is the Holy Grail of crisis response and in an environment where we don’t necessarily have all the information and with competing priorities this isn’t easy to achieve.  In most organisations we rehearse, we plan, we exercise and we try and think about the nitty gritty, the detail and the minutia in advance to free up some cognitive capacity to allocate to the big stuff; and to be honest, this generally works but does that mean that there isn’t another way?  Of course not, this would be a bloody short blog post if I wasn’t of this view.

I’m not saying don’t rehearse. I’m not saying don’t plan. I am just proposing that by sprinting we can achieve a highly focussed, bespoke and fully considered response and as the name suggests; we’ll be doing it pretty damn quick (PDQ).

A sprint, in its simplest form and as used by Agile teams across the world, is a unit of time, not normally longer than 5 days (queue the arguments over ideal sprint length) with very specific goals that must be achieved when the sprint finishes. It’s transparent, with all parties having visibility of what the team is doing and its progress and it’s cross-functional (for a great description of cross-functional teams/tribes/squads read this).  

Sound familiar? Sound like a Crisis Management Team?  Of course it does. We want stuff done, we know when we need it by and we want to know how close we are to having it done and we all represent our business function on the team.  It’s Agile without even knowing it.  

Do we want to wait 5 days for a sprint to finish; not likely!  So what’s stopping us using sprints but reducing their length to 1hr, 2hrs, 12hrs, 1 day etc; you get the idea.  The beauty of a sprint is that it also sets the boundaries for its given goals meaning within the sprint you have full freedom to achieve the end state however you want to do it and however you feel is best. I think this is a really powerful mechanism, particularly in very complex businesses where we cannot be fully understand the “hows”, “whats” and “whos” of every facet of the business.

Not only do we have the freedom to act, we also clearly understand the “why”; it’s the goal, it’s what we defined as the deliverable at the start of the sprint.  In the Army we called this the “unifying purpose” and every mission statement had one. It meant that when it all went wrong, as it invariably always does, and the plan falls apart we knew why we were doing this so had the freedom to change the plan to make sure we completed the mission.

At the end of the sprint we come together and we review, we re-orientate and we reprioritise as the situation would have developed during the sprint; queue the next sprint, and thus it continues until all the work is done and we can sit down with beer and pizza (just me perhaps!).

So, that’s the “why” of sprinting and some of the big hand building blocks.  Hopefully now you’re lacing up your track shoes and lining up alongside me. Maybe next time I’ll be talking about the “how”.