How Flexibility is Used and Abused
Flexibility can be great—but it's no excuse for skipping the planning and structure of what you're creating. Here's how I learned to employ generative flexibility rather than extractive flexibility.
Welcome to the 7th Edition of This is Not Advice.
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Today's topic is the way "flexibility" is used and abused.
When is being flexible a feature? And when is it a bug? When does flexibility make an experience better for customers or team members? And when does flexibility lead to chaos?
I'll get to my thoughts on those questions in just a bit.
But first, jazz.
I used to play the trombone. I was pretty good—although not nearly as good as I hoped I was. Anyhow, like a lot of high school and college trombone players, I played in the concert band and symphony orchestra, as well as every jazz ensemble I had access to.
I loved playing in jazz ensembles—for both musical and social reasons. But there was one part of jazz ensemble that I was utterly terrible at:
Improvising.
When you think of a jazz solo, you’re imagining someone improvising, whether you realize it or not. It may seem spontaneous and unplanned—even a bit wild. And sure, improvisation can be those things. But improvisation is actually a skill that’s carefully honed over years, really over a whole career.
Learning to improvise is learning scales. And variations on scales. Scales, and scales, and scales. You have to learn scales because they help you construct a melody on the fly. Without the base knowledge of scales and how they line up with the chords the rhythm section is laying down, the notes you play are jibberish.
So while an improvised solo is, in fact, improvised, it’s also the product of years of practice and study.
There is a structure that makes it work. And you’re welcome to deviate from that structure—but to make that work, you have to know what you’re deviating from.
I never committed to learning what I needed to learn in order to improvise. The time and effort required far outweighed my level of interest in the form. By the time I realized that I already knew I wasn’t planning a career as a trombone player. I never really had in the first place.
While jazz improvisation was never my jam, I do enjoy improvising in other areas—like teaching and speaking. And I’m good at it.
I can be quick on my feet. I can make things up as I go.
For example, I don’t rehearse the workshops I teach. Instead, I’ve learned certain structural techniques that allow me to move from topic to topic pretty smoothly. I have patterns that I use over and over again—even as the material changes, the patterns stay the same.
I prepare and then improvise. Prepare and improvise.
I know that putting in the work on those patterns and structural techniques—as well as being fully fluent in the material itself—means I can trust my instincts in the moment. I'm less likely to be flustered or caught off guard than if I were working off of a meticulously rehearsed script. My finely-tuned structure creates space for flexibility.
Oddly enough, recognizing that this is what I do is a relatively recent realization.
And because I didn't know planning and structure were what made me a good improviser in front of an audience, I could miscalculate.
I'd rely too heavily on my ability to make things up as I go and under-develop the structure I needed to improvise over. Or my confidence in my performance caused me to under-bake the administrative and logistical elements of a project.
That sucked for me, of course. Being caught flat-footed isn't fun. But it was in those moments when I realized that I'd skimped on the structure or logistics that I also realized I was making things unnecessarily difficult for the people I was working with. My reliance on "flexibility" actually made them question their own ability.
Being "flexible" is treated as an objectively positive value.
I don't think that's wrong, but I think it's more complicated than that. So I think we should differentiate between two types of flexibility: generative flexibility and extractive flexibility.
Generative flexibility focuses on the other—be it a customer, team member, business partner, colleague, etc. Generative flexibility offers well-considered structure with space to adapt to the other's needs. The structure provides a sense of comfort or safety, while openness empowers the other to express their curiosity.
Generative flexibility doesn't cut any corners. It's actually more work, not less. It anticipates questions, factors in friction, and communicates thoroughly.
Extractive flexibility, on the other hand, is about flying by the seat of your pants. It's about doing less beforehand and trusting your instincts when it counts. This kind of flexibility is extractive because it's not an equitable transaction. It disproportionately draws on the resources of the other.
By that, I mean your customers or team members have to put in extra work to follow along, to make sense of what you're sharing. They can't fully participate because they're spending so much of that energy on figuring out what's going on.
Extractive flexibility might feel comfy for you, but it's chaos for everyone else.
I once had a therapist tell me that flexibility
without structure isn’t flexibility at all;
it’s just chaos.
—Amanda Montell, Cultish
Generative flexibility requires forethought, strategy, and structure to work.
It requires practice, boundaries, and rules (that do sometimes get broken).
"Flexibility" shouldn't be an excuse for lack of planning—as is the case with extractive flexibility. It's not a label you can slap on a half-baked idea because you need the money, can't be bothered to build the structure, or imagine that logistics is someone else's job. A flexible schedule still needs the schedule part. A flexible plan still needs the plan part.
Whether we’re talking about a workshop, a coaching session, a newsletter, or even a team meeting, the experience is every bit a part of the value as the content is. It doesn't matter how brilliant you are if the experience is chaos.
Flexibility is a key tenet of the lean startup framework for business and product development.
At a high-level, a “lean startup” employs a regular (even frequent) cycle of building, measuring, and learning. After each cycle, the startup will “flex” around what’s been learned. Central to early iterations of this cycle is the “minimum viable product” (MVP). The point of creating a minimum viable product is to understand better what customers want from the product you're building (or, if they want it at all). In 2009, Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup, defined a minimum viable product this way:
that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort
Ries then makes clear that MVPs aren't actually minimal. "In fact," he explains, the "MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead" (emphasis mine). The MVP is a lot of work because, in the case of software products, it "requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics."
In the case of knowledge products and services, an MVP will require energy invested in making bets on structure, logistics, or instructional design. Because you can't learn anything about the product itself if the people it's supposedly for can't make sense of it.
In a recent newsletter, entrepreneur wrote about rethinking the Minimum Viable Product:
The prevailing dogma over the past decade is that startups should ship fast and iterate as quickly as possible. Ten years ago, Reid Hoffman said: “if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” That was great advice in 2013, but a lot has changed in the last ten years.
As I reflect on Ries's initial definition, I think Hoffman had it wrong even in 2013.
What it takes for a product to be minimally viable has always been relative because viability is dependent on the customer, the industry, and the developer. "Flexibility" is often touted as a feature of a minimum viable product—especially within coaching, online learning, and services. But if that flexibility makes the product less viable for the people it's designed to serve, well, we're back to chaos rather than value.
"Everyone wants to have a unique idea," Azout observes, "but the alternative is just to be ten times better. The market is full of crap. An underrated way to succeed at anything is simply to be better." Better, in this case, and maybe in every case, doesn't mean more or even feature-laden. Better most often means thoroughly conceived. Instead of slapdash, it's structurally sound. Instead of haphazard, it's sturdy. Instead of fast and loose, it's deliberate and considered.
Azout notes that anyone can build something "quick and dirty," but "few people can build incredibly polished products. And those that do need time, effort, and intention."
Now, I'm not trying to give anyone permission to just sit on an idea until it's "ready" or "good enough."
Those words can be their own excuses—they're the lorem ipsum text of procrastination, false safety, and self-sabotage.
What I want to advocate for is craft.
The craftsperson doesn't only make a beautiful table or weave an intricate tapestry. They also care for their tools, their materials, and any machinery they use. A piece of fine craft starts long before a piece is even designed, far before saw contacts wood or thread is attached to the loom.
The same is true for the jazz musician. The improvised solo you hear at a concert was realized in the moment—but it started to form within the hours and hours of practice that made it possible in the first place.
There is true generative flexibility in craft.
The woodworker might notice something unexpected in the wood and decide to alter the plan. The jazz musician might hear something different in the chord progression and try something a bit avant-garde. But that flexibility requires the kind of time, effort, and intention that Azout mentioned. And that time, effort, and intention don't look like writing code, teaching a class, or showing off your brilliance.
Instead, time, effort, and intention look like oiling a saw or practicing a scale. It looks like taking time to ask, "Who are we forgetting?" or "How can we make this experience seamless for people?" It's considering contingencies, doing the paperwork, and setting up systems.
Once all of that is considered, then we can be flexible. We can improvise. We've made something truly viable and truly valuable.