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Hello everyone. Welcome to the Five Minutes podcast. Today I like to talk about flexibility and inflexibility, and I want to start by saying that I'm not talking here about remote work, hybrid work, working in an office, or working from home. I'm talking about a much broader concept. Most of us working in project management and delivering projects, always have in our mind this concept of we plan something, we execute something and we control everything we can. So the execution goes exactly as we planned. It's like a train on the trail. So you want really to make sure that the train does not derail at any moment. But what happens today, is these models work extremely well if you have a predictable environment means if the word does not change too much if the conditions do not change too much, you can make sure that the track you put in place is reliable to have the train on the top during execution. However, what happens today is that it's so chaotic. It's so chaotic. We have things happening all the time that this model does not drive us most of the time to deliver the outcomes. And this is what I'm calling inflexibility means. This is the track you must be on this track today. What we need to create a team approach is a team that has flexibility and most of the time autonomy.
So you have the flexibility to decide if you should move a little bit towards the left. A little bit towards the right. Of course, I'm not saying here to have the flexibility or autonomy to just move completely and deliver something that is absolutely different, knowing the direction of the journey is still the same. We are still having a journey in that direction. But if you can shift, for example, if you are doing a sprint and you want to shift items from one spring to another, you must have this flexibility to say, okay, let's do this because we believe as a team that these will improve and will deliver better results. So this is exactly what I'm talking about as flexibility. And I want to share with you three tips that I think you should keep in mind to foster flexibility, foster autonomy, and improve your antifragility, not only as an employee or a professional but as a team or organization. The first one is to spend time with knowledge and knowledge. I'm not saying courses, I'm not saying certification. It may be courses or certification, but spend time making your team members wiser in making decisions because when your team members, have the knowledge, they know the subject, they know the problem, they know the environment.
You can provide them more autonomy and flexibility so they can make decisions and they can use their best judgment. Most of the time we do not provide people with flexibility and autonomy because we do not trust their ability to decide. We think that we must decide. It's something like, you know, that I say many times, it's I think you execute. And this is a very big motivator. It's a very big challenge for people and for intellectual work. Maybe if you are talking about a different type of work, but when you work with knowledge, when you are doing innovation or when you are doing digital transformation, it's not like that, right? You cannot think this way. You need to spend time and spend energy improving the knowledge of yourself and your team. The second one is to stop working with processes, policies, and procedures. It's something like You need to fill this form. You need to fill this, you need to report, report, and you need to fill this field that, you know, work with principles, principles. And what is a principle is something that guides your behavior and principles you can find in PMBOK® 7th Edition. I said this a billion times, but also you can find this on PRINCE2® and you can find it in many, many organizations today. For example, Netflix.
I love one of the initial principles of working for Netflix. They say you make decisions. Always consider the best interest of Netflix. Look, how simple is that? Every single time you only think what is the best for Netflix is not what is the best for my area, what's the best for me, what is the best for Netflix? And every single decision I make every single day I need to consider this. This is the concept of working with principles for me. For example, I developed my own principles. I have a set of principles that guide every single decision I make about new business, what I should study, about how I should develop my career. Because it's impossible to capture this and give people the flexibility and the autonomy if you are, you know, putting 300 different forms or 300 different policies so people don't have the flexibility they will be only I would say they will only follow that specific process. And when the project and because the project is so related to innovation, you just destroy that it's impossible to be innovative if you are following a track that is so predefined. And last but not least, the third one is smart work. It means you need to understand if you want to have flexibility and autonomy, you need to understand that work is smart, that you need to work smart.
And work smart is not defined as working from 9 to 5, 9 to 6, and work smart is not working 20 hours per day or 15 hours per day. No work is smart is to work. Focus on delivering the outcomes. It doesn't matter if you work at your home, if you work at your office, if you work in a different country, you just deliver the outcome that matters. Full stop. And that's it. Because of the past. What was the concept of working? It's someone that your boss needs to see, that you are sitting on that desk, that you see, that you are there to get in touch in the coffee or cafeteria. This is all interesting, but if you do all of this and you don't deliver the outcomes, then it becomes pointless. So always think if you want to increase flexibility and autonomy, you need to spend time with knowledge. Understand that it's not processes or policies, but principles that will guide you. And you need to understand that is smart. Work must rain means you work from wherever you need to, work the way you need to work. But you deliver the results that your company and your colleagues are waking you to deliver.
Think about that and see you next week with another Five Minutes Podcast.
