Forever Flywheels?

Flywheels are all the rage these days. I’m a fan as well.

“No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop. Rather, the process resembled relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel…turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough.” (Jim Collins, Good to Great)

A key attribute of a flywheel is the self-reinforcing loop.

Some examples of Flywheels in the agility/product space -

• Safety Nets - Investing in test automation and collective ownership that, over time, creates more flexibility in the team, reducing bottlenecks, and creating even more safety and capacity to invest even more in test automation and collective ownership

• Working ON the Org/Business - Investing in improvement in general. Spending time ON your business/organization is very hard when there’s no “momentum” - when you need to keep turning the wheel to keep it moving. But as you invest in improvement, you start to build momentum, and things become somewhat easier. The same amount of work on the business results in more and more impact, and more and more capacity to focus on the business.

• Descaling - Investing in team empowerment/autonomy - can be very challenging when you have a tightly coupled organization. Just getting the teams talking about their dependencies seems to take all the energy and time you have. But as you start to invest in descaling, you make integration and coordination somewhat easier. Which frees capacity and builds momentum and conviction to do more and more of that.

Consistency is crucial for all of these examples. It’s not about “installing a framework” and then moving on. It’s about the grit and the grind.

You can’t talk about Flywheels without talking about their nemesis - the Doom Loop. (aka Downward Spirals)

Tech Debt, Quality Issues, and Hero Culture are a few examples that immediately come to mind.

Look at your organization: Can you identify your flywheels? Your doom loops? Look at both your ways of working and your actual product/business.