Start stopping faster

Business executives could learn a lot from cheetahs, Earth’s most agile land animals. Though their ancestors ran only about 20 miles per hour, today’s cats can accelerate from zero to 60 within three seconds— faster than a Corvette Twin Turbo. But speed alone is not what makes cheetahs such awesome hunters. Computer models show that the best predictor of a successful hunt is not a cheetah’s top speed; rather, it’s how fast the animal stops and turns.

There is an important parallel to the executive hunt for innovations. Whether organizations are developing new products, processes or overhauling old ways of doing business, it’s not enough that they pursue new ideas faster. Unless companies develop new muscles for skillfully decelerating and adapting to unexpected twists and turns, their efforts are likely to come up short. It’s one of the most common laments of executives struggling to increase their organization’s adaptability: “We are terrible at stopping work, even when it’s obvious that the work is a complete waste of time and money.”

The cost of this problem is higher than managers imagine. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimate the cost of bureaucratic waste has hit $10 trillion and is growing. Between 70 percent and 90 percent of innovations fail, and healthy operations grow weaker every day that they must subsidize foundering projects kept alive by political inertia rather than potential payoff.

Since stopping things is very hard, executives make starting them even harder, dampening innovation. They raise investment hurdle rates, demand more detailed analyses and add layers of scrutiny. Sadly, these actions don’t improve decisions so much as they damage competitive positioning.

There is another way. By focusing on three actions below, organizations can improve their own agility and start stopping things faster:

Make more decisions reversible

While researching our book Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos, we learned from Jason Goldberger, a former executive at Amazon.com, that in order to accelerate innovation the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, purposefully encourages executives to make decisions reversible, which ensures that a company won’t have to live with bad consequences for very long. Such an approach thwarts risk aversion and accelerates experimentation.

“If you tell people to innovate without making mistakes, you will kill innovation,” Goldberger explains. “But if you tell people to innovate and not worry about mistakes that are quickly reversible, you free them to test and learn in more agile ways.”

Unfortunately, not many companies run this way. Far too many investment proposals plan for premature and irreversible scaling. They call for large upfront investments, and predict delayed, hockey-stick-shaped revenues and profits. When revenue and profit fail to materialize, it seems too late to stop.

One way to break this habit is to run the business the way a savvy venture capitalist invests. Recognize business plans for what they really are: business experiments. Break large, risky gambles into a series of smaller, smarter tests. Clarify the hypotheses, the best ways to test them and the metrics that will signal whether to persist, pivot or pause. Avoid premature scaling— hiring too many people, building too much capacity, doing too much marketing—before key assumptions have been validated. Match costs to revenues. Start by confining experiments to affordable, adaptable and reversible microcosms of the ultimate solution by limiting geographies, customer segments or product lines.

Make work more visible

It ’s hard to improve or stop unproductive work if you can’t see what work is being done and how well it’s going. Too many companies are flying blind, and the intangible work of technology and marketing departments is often invisible to leadership teams.

Increasing visibility is good for everyone. It helps senior executives uncover valuable initiatives, recognize the people pushing them and accelerate progress. It allows employees to see projects related to their own jobs, learn from them and identify where workers’ expertise could solve perplexing problems or save time and money. It makes it easier for everyone to identify duplicative work and triggers discussions about whether overlapping teams should collaborate or compete.

Imagine a system that enables authorized employees to see all work streams, who is on each team, what else they are working on, and how the work is progressing. Imagine tagging the work of each team with descriptors such as strategic priority, targeted customers, expected economic value and progress against plans. Such systems actually exist—project and portfolio management software, objectives and key results trackers, talent management systems and workforce analytics—and they are getting better.

Overpower fear

Astute leaders realize that fearful workers will cling to the current work no matter how unproductive. To overcome that fear, they can do several things. We’ve already discussed one of them: They reduce the cost of stopping projects (e.g., by conducting experiments).

Another way to help workers let go of the fear of making mistakes is to reward people who learn valuable lessons by taking prudent risks, even if the immediate outcome was disappointing. In some cases, this may mean sticking to a bold objective but adapting the approach as conditions or capabilities change. When Bezos wanted to enable third-party vendors to sell new or used products on Amazon, the company initially failed: The 1999 launches of Amazon Auctions and zshops both fizzled. But Amazon Marketplace, launched soon after, was a success. It now accounts for more than half of all units sold by the company.

Giving people more opportunities if their current project fails also reduces the likelihood that they’ll stick with a bad idea longer than they should. Successful companies build a strong and visible backlog of compelling opportunities. They make it clear that until existing projects that aren’t panning out have stopped, new initiatives can’t be launched. And they redeploy people from the former to the latter. In time, the fear of missing out on something better starts to overpower the fear of loss.

In a world of increasingly unpredictable change running at higher speeds is not enough. Businesses must evolve to match their acceleration muscle with faster stopping and turning skills. As they do, their hunt for growth will grow more fruitful, their competitive capabilities will strengthen, and their position in the food chain will climb.

Darrell K. Rigby is a partner in the Boston office of Bain & Company and heads the firm’s global innovation practice. Sarah Elk is a partner in Bain & Company’s Chicago office and heads its global operating model practice. Steve Berez is a partner in Bain & Company’s Boston office and a founder of its enterprise technology practice. Rigby, Elk and Berez are coauthors of Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos.