It can be frustrating to see “your query will be answered in 4-8 business days” when you try contacting a company on the internet to address your grievance. More often than not, it is easier to skip rigorous protocol and have your queries addressed instead of going through 10 people to know why your nut sack from Amazon hasn’t arrived yet. It is like you want to take a half day leave from school and procedure demands you take permission from your homeroom teacher, the vice principal, the dean and the principal and it has no flexibility. Imagine if you broke an arm or leg and still had to do all this because “IT’S THE LAW”, it is extremely impractical to treat every situation as the same with rigidity and zero flexibility.
Given the diversity of everyday situations, it’s practically impossible to come up with every possible scenario for a business to have a solution to. It is easier for them to have autonomy up to a reasonable level to counteract situations rather than to go through bureaucratic hell for every trivial thing. Agile and adaptive strategies can help businesses to grow exponentially while still maintaining a robust internal framework.
Customer Focused Approach
By keeping the customer as the main focus and maintaining continuous rapport with them, it is easier to identify what they need and require and identify a trend forming and the business can capitalize on this trend before any of their competitor and reap the profits by claiming first mover advantage.
This approach can rope in new customers while simultaneously retaining existing customers thereby maintaining customer retention.
Rapid Market Adaptation
Instead of having a monolithic team for every task irrespective of size, which is slowed down by its sheer size barely gets any activity done. It is easier to have smaller teams with reasonable autonomy and budget and assign them to act upon the market requirements, this allows a business to immediately “catch on” to an emerging trend on Instagram or Tiktok and act on it.
This is the approach that has made fast fashion a thing. Small teams scour the internet for fashion trends, and upon identifying it they work with their designers to work on it, make a prototype, source materials and mass produce. The traditional processes would have taken those 6-12 months to get one product into the market, but with fast fashion business model, the time is cut by more than half, and new products are on the shelf for around a month, give or take
Flexibility and Adaptability
Rigidity is always bad in unprecedented situations. It is good to be a rigid monolithic organization, but we do not live in an ideal world and are always plagued with uncertainties with every waking moment. Having a flexible set of regulations with minimal red tape is important while permitting autonomy, it is a terrible mistake to bless one individual with too much authority, slows down the entire process and is entirely dependent on their decision.
This allows smaller teams to take things into their own hands and troubleshoot upon identification. It is not practical to run things to 12 different level managers who are available on different days to get permission to fix a bug in the source code which might be costing you a lot of money if you work in fintech.
Constant Improvement
It is observed that smaller companies make more innovative strides than larger companies. Though the innovative end product can be questionable in terms of quality, their innovative spirit is large. Smaller teams are proven to be more agile as there is lesser room, literally for internal reporting, this allows them to make larger innovative steps when compared to a team which has to gain approval from a lot of higher-ups to make even a single action. As the old adage goes, “Too many chefs spoil the broth”.
While having various levels of management has its own reasons, it is also shackled for a variety of reasons.
Diverse Perspectives
Diversity of thought is what allows troubleshooting, small teams of different specializations working together is challenging and can instil a strong sense of belonging to something greater than oneself. It can also propel the process of what they are working on as they are able to perceive all possible errors due to diverse brains on the operation, no pun intended.
A physicist and knitter by the name of Daina Taimina was able to manifest a hyperbolic plane when it was thought impossible to give it a shape. This shows great things can manifest from the most unlikely of places.
All in all, flexibility is an important thing to practice when the end goal is to have a robust profitable organization.
