Agile Like a Sunflower

When you hear someone say “agile”, do you think of an athlete, or a leopard, or do you think of a sunflower? I’ll bet the image that comes to mind most of the time is one of the first two; hardly anybody associates a sunflower with agility. That’s strange though because the sunflower is a great example of the most common kind of agility.

In business there are two kinds of agility. The first kind is the one we think of most often; it’s the rapid movement companies use to create new products or procedures in response to emerging market opportunities. That’s the agility symbolized by an athlete winning a game or a leopard capturing its prey. The second kind of agility is a slow yet continuous response to changes in a company’s operating environment and, when done effectively, it produces a steady and predictable flow of benefits. It’s the agility of constant small adjustments done just right so as to optimize operations as conditions change. That’s the agility symbolized by the sunflower.

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A Steady and Continuous Response to Changing Circumstances

The sunflower is a very agile plant. Between the time it first emerges from its seed until it flowers, its head and leaves follow the movement of the sun across the sky. Sunflowers face east in the morning and they track the sun during the day so that by the end of the day they face west; then they start all over again the next day. This movement allows them to maximize their interception of sunlight and increases their levels of photosynthesis day after day as sunlight conditions change.

In this way sunflower agility is analogous to the agility that enables a company to increase productivity of its existing operations (photosynthesis is an existing operation in a sunflower). Most activity in any company is related to carrying out standard operating procedures so there are more opportunities to exercise this kind of agility than there are to exercise the other kind of agility related to creating new products or services.

The agility involved in constantly optimizing productivity of existing operations is guided by the action of simple underlying feedback loops. The trick is to identify the feedback loops at work and then find ways to harness them to drive operations toward higher levels of productivity. Let me continue with a few more analogies from the sunflower to illustrate what I mean.

Internal operations in a sunflower (or any other plant) are guided by the interaction of some basic feedback loops. These feedback loops are driven by powerful forces in the sunflower’s natural environment such as sunlight, gravity, physical objects, and water. The feedback loops plants use to guide their internal operations are known as tropisms – that’s the name given to the way a plant responds when it encounters one or more of these forces.

Four well known plant tropisms are: phototropism for responding to sunlight; gravitropism for responding to gravity; thigmotropism for responding to physical objects; and hydrotropism for responding to water. All plants have differing capabilities in their operations that drive these four tropisms.

Sunflowers have evolved very productive operations for phototropism; other plant species have evolved state-of-the-art (so to speak) operations and capabilities for other tropisms. Successful plants (like sunflowers) are very productive (or agile) in the tropisms that are most important in their environments. In other words, if I’m going to live in

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