Agile isn’t just for software. It’s a powerful way to lead

In times of disruption, Agile leadership can help CIOs make better, faster decisions — and guide their teams to execute with speed and discipline.

When the first case of COVID hit my home city, it was only two weeks after I’d become president of The Persimmon Group. For more than a decade, I’d coached leaders, teams and PMOs to execute their strategy with speed and discipline.

But now — in a top job for the first time — I was reeling.

Every plan we had in motion — strategic goals, project schedules, hiring decisions — was suddenly irrelevant. Clients froze budgets. Team members scrambled to set up remote work for the first time, many while balancing small children and shared spaces.

Within days, we were facing a dozen high-stakes questions about our business, all with incomplete information. Each answer carried massive operational and cultural implications.

We couldn’t just make the right call. We had to make it fast. And often, we were choosing between a bunch of bad options.

From crisis to cadence

At first, we tried to lead the way we always had: gather the facts, debate the trade-offs and pick the best path forward. But in a landscape that changed daily, that rhythm broke down fast.

The information we needed didn’t exist yet. The more we waited for certainty — or gamed out endless hypotheticals — the slower and more reactive we became.

And then something clicked. What if the same principles that helped software teams move quickly and learn in real time could help lead us through uncertainty?

So we started experimenting.

We shortened our time horizons. Made smaller bets. Created fast feedback loops. We became almost uncomfortably transparent, involving the team directly in critical decisions that affected them and their work.

In the months that followed, those experiments became the backbone of how we led through uncertainty — and how we continue to lead today.

An operating system for change

What emerged wasn’t a formal framework. It was a set of small, deliberate habits that brought the same rhythm and focus to leadership that Agile brings to delivery.

Here’s what that looked like in practice:

Develop a ‘fast frame’ to focus decisions

In the first few months of the pandemic, our leadership meetings were a tangle of what-ifs. What if we lost 20% of planned revenue this year? What if we lost 40%? Would we do layoffs? Furloughs? Salary cuts? And when would we do them — preemptively or reactively?

We were so busy living in multiple possible futures that it was difficult to move forward with purpose. To break out of overthinking mode, we built a lightweight framework we now call our fast frame. It centered on five questions:

1. What do we know for sure?
2. What can we find out quickly?
3. What is unknowable right now?
4. What’s the risk of deciding today?
5. What’s the risk of not deciding today?

The fast frame forced us to separate facts from conjecture. It also helped us to get our timing right. When did we need to move fast, even with imperfect information? When could we afford to slow down and get more data points?

The fast frame helped us slash decision latency by 20% to 30%.

It kept us moving when the urge was to stall and it gave us language to talk about uncertainty without letting it rule the room.

Build plans around small, fast experiments

After using our fast frame for a while, we realized something: Our decisions were too big.

In an environment changing by the day, Big Permanent Decisions were impractical — and a massive time sink. Every hour we spent debating a Big Permanent Decision was an hour we weren’t learning something important.

So we replaced them with For-Now Decisions — temporary postures designed to move us forward, fast, while we learned what was real.

Each For-Now Decision had four parts:

1. The decision itself — the action we’d take based on what we knew at that moment.
2. A trigger for when to revisit it — either time-based (two weeks from now) or event-based (if a client delays a project).
3. A few learning targets — what we hoped to discover before the next checkpoint.
4. An agility signal — how we communicated the decision to the team. We’d say, “This is our posture for now, but we may change course if X. We’ll need your help watching for Y as we learn more.”

By framing decisions this way, we removed the pressure to be right. The goal wasn’t to predict the future but to learn from it faster. By abandoning bad ideas early, we saved 300 to 400 hours a year.

Increase cadence and transparency of communication

In those early weeks, we learned that the only thing more dangerous than a bad decision was a silent one. When information moves slower than events, people fill the gaps with assumptions.

So we made communication faster — and flatter. Every morning, our 20-person team met virtually for a 20-minute standup. The format was simple but consistent:

• Executive push. We shared what the leadership team was working on, what decisions had been made and what input we needed next.
• Team pull. Anyone could ask questions, raise issues or surface what they were hearing from clients.
• Needs and lessons. We ended with what people needed to stay productive and what we were learning that others could benefit from.

The goal wasn’t to broadcast information from the top — or make all our decisions democratically. It was to create a shared operating picture. The standup became a heartbeat for the company, keeping everyone synchronized as conditions changed.

Transparency replaced certainty. Even when we didn’t have all the answers, people knew how decisions were being made and what we were watching next. That openness built confidence faster than pretending we had it all figured out.

That transparency paid off.

While many small consulting firms folded in the first 18 months of the pandemic, Agile leadership helped us double revenue in 24 months.

We stayed fully staffed — no layoffs, no pay cuts beyond the executive team. And the small bets we made during the pandemic helped rapidly expand our client base across new industries and international geographies.

Develop precise language to keep the team aligned

As we increased the speed of communication, we discovered something else: agility requires precision. When everything is moving fast, even small misunderstandings can send people sprinting in different directions.

We started tightening our language. Instead of broad discussions about what needed to get done, we’d ask, “What part of this can we get done by Friday?” That forced us to think in smaller delivery windows, sustain momentum and get specific about what “done” looked like.

We also learned to clarify between two operating modes: planning versus doing. Before leaving a meeting where a direction was discussed, we’d confirm our status:

• Phase 1 meant we were still exploring, shaping and validating and would need at least one more meeting before implementing anything.
• Phase 2 meant we were ready to execute.

That small distinction saved us hours of confusion, especially in cross-functional work.

Precise language gave us speed. It eliminated assumptions and kept everyone on the same page about where we were in the process. The more we reduced ambiguity, the faster — and calmer — the team moved.

Protect momentum by insisting on rest

Agility isn’t about moving faster forever — it’s about knowing when to slow down. During the first months of the pandemic, that lesson was easy to forget. Everything felt urgent and everyone felt responsible.

In software, a core idea behind Agile sprints is maintaining a sustainable pace of work. A predictable, consistent level of effort that teams can plan around is far more effective than the heroics often needed in waterfall projects to hit a deadline.

Agile was designed to be human-centered, protecting the well-being and happiness of the team so that performance can remain optimal. We tried to lead the same way.

After the first few frenetic months, I capped my own workday at nine hours. That boundary forced me to get honest about what could actually be done in the time I had — and prioritize ruthlessly. It also set a tone for the team. We adjusted scopes, redistributed work and held one another accountable for disconnecting at day’s end.

The expectation wasn’t endless effort — it was sustainable effort. That discipline kept burnout low and creativity high, even during our most demanding seasons. The consistency of our rest became as important as the intensity of our work. It gave us a rhythm we could trust — one that protected our momentum long after the crisis passed.

Readiness is the new stability

Now that the pandemic has passed, disruption has simply changed shape — AI, market volatility, new business models and the constant redefinition of “normal.” What hasn’t changed is the need for leaders who can act with speed and discipline at the same time.

For CIOs, that tension is sharper than ever. Technology leaders are being asked to deliver transformation at pace — without burning out their people or breaking what already works. The pressures that once felt exceptional have become everyday leadership conditions.

But you don’t have to be a Scrum shop or launch an enterprise Agile transformation to lead with agility. Agility is a mindset, not a method. To put the mindset into practice, focus on:

• Shorter planning horizons
• Faster, smaller decisions
• Radical transparency
• Language that brings alignment and calm
• Boundaries that protect the energy of the team

These are the foundations of sustainable speed.

We built those practices in crisis, but they’ve become our default operating system in calmer times. They remind me that agility isn’t a reaction to change — it’s a readiness for it. And in a world where change never stops, that readiness may be a leader’s most reliable source of stability.

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