Releasing Agility by Pulling the Right Levers

Editorial Note
This essay is part of the Cultivated canon — a body of work exploring how organisations move from idea to value through systems, behaviour, and managerial intent. It reflects a recurring theme in this library: that meaningful change rarely requires more effort, only better leverage.

Levers of Change

Change is always happening in an organisation.

It emerges through thousands of small interactions, decisions, and pieces of work. The question is not whether change exists, but whether it is directed — and whether it moves the organisation closer to its purpose.

To release agility — the ability to move smoothly and deliberately toward meaningful goals — managers must learn to identify and pull the right levers.

A lever is a simple idea with a powerful implication. It is an action that produces an outsized impact relative to the effort required to apply it. Donella Meadows described leverage points as places within a system where a small shift can lead to big change.

Most organisations are full of them.

What surprises me is not their existence, but how often managers fail to see them — or believe they are allowed to pull them.

Agility is not something organisations need to install. It is something they usually start with and gradually suppress. Over time, layers of well-intentioned rules, controls, approvals, and initiatives accumulate. Each makes sense in isolation. Together, they slow everything down.

Releasing agility is about removing what no longer serves.

One of the most powerful places to look is delay.

Delays hide everywhere — in handovers, approval processes, budget cycles, reporting, and decision-making. Work often spends far more time waiting than being worked on. Studying this requires discipline and humility: following a piece of work from start to finish and seeing where it stalls.

Shortening feedback loops changes everything. Faster feedback enables better decisions, reduces waste, and brings value to customers sooner. Not all time spent is waste, of course — some work genuinely takes time — but until delays are studied, they are usually misunderstood.

Another critical lever is communication.

Most organisational problems trace back to missing, delayed, or distorted information. People do not know the strategy. They do not know what others are doing. They do not know how their work contributes to value. Or leaders do not hear concerns until it is too late.

Fixing communication rarely requires new tools. It requires intent, clarity, and attention.

Goals and rules form another powerful leverage point.

Goals drive behaviour. When they are unclear, conflicting, or outside people’s control, they distort the system. People adapt in predictable ways — optimising locally, gaming measures, or disengaging altogether.

Well-designed goals align effort with purpose. Poorly designed ones create friction, stress, and unintended consequences.

Equally important is whether people can change their own systems of work.

When individuals and teams are trusted to improve how they work — with appropriate support and shared understanding — improvement accelerates. When every change requires permission, momentum dies.

This does not mean uncoordinated optimisation. It means clarity about purpose, measures, and interdependence, so improvement happens in service of the whole.

Another often-overlooked lever is frustration.

Frustrated people usually care. They want to do good work and are blocked from doing so. Their frustration is a signal, not a problem. Find these people. Listen carefully. Then help remove what stands in their way.

Similarly, every organisation has natural aligners — people who instinctively bring others together around work. They may not hold formal authority, but they create coherence. Supporting them is one of the fastest ways to improve flow.

None of these levers are exotic. Most require no new headcount, tools, or transformation programmes. What they require is attention, courage, and a willingness to see the system as it actually is.

All organisations begin with agility. Over time, it is compressed by layers of control.

Managers often contribute to this compression — but that also means they are uniquely positioned to reverse it.

The work is not to push harder.

It is to remove what no longer needs to be there.

Pull the right levers, and the system will move again.

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Editor’s note: This essay grows from an earlier exploration in another medium. The thinking remains central, even as the format has changed.