By Mastering Agile Management, Teams can Double Their Efficiency

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Agile management is an art of drastically reducing unnecessary workloads. It is a management method used by global Fortune 500 companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, and WeChat, suitable for all industries, and has been widely praised as deserving the "Nobel Prize in Management." It focuses on freeing employees from various trivial matters, inspiring individual motivation, unleashing enormous human potential, and helping us work faster, more productively, and accomplish more in less time. No matter how complex an industry is, agile management can be applied. Wherever there is human work, agile management can take effect. We will explain how to use agile management to lead teams and double work efficiency immediately from five aspects!

1. Every delayed decision increases the likelihood of failure

Projects where decisions are made quickly within one hour have a 58% success rate. If it takes more than five hours to make a decision, the success rate is almost zero. The longer the decision-making delay, the higher the cost. A key lesson from agile management is to let those closest to the work make decisions quickly. Agile management serves as the implementation approach for most agile projects. Compared with traditional projects, agile projects are less than half as likely to fail but have a much higher probability of success. These are tangible, well-documented figures.

A large global automotive company once used the general Japanese-style approval system ringi, where approving a small project required four to five months and 35 signatures. The purpose of ringi was to reach a consensus among management on what decisions should be made. After a proposal was put forward, it would circulate among everyone in the decision-making chain; once everyone agreed and senior leadership finally signed off, the decision was made. While some decisions are important, others are not. Different types of decisions should be made by different types of people, requiring those with the most knowledge of the situation to make decisions based on the given context.

Agile management has a streamlined process because it decentralizes decision-making to the team level. In agile management, there are only two decision-makers: the product owner and the team. Therefore, fewer decisions need to be made by stakeholders or supervisors. This is key. Only those who truly have the most knowledge and understand the situation best should make decisions, thereby enabling quick action. If a decision takes more than five hours, it is almost a certain sign that it must go through the approval chain. One hour is the goal, the time required to make a decision.

2. Innovate Work Methods

It may be hard to imagine, but hospital operating rooms are also using agile management. For hospitals, a key question is how long it takes to clean and reset an operating room. Here, "cleaning" refers to a thorough sanitization: lights, floors, walls, and the entire environment. Keeping the operating room clean is a matter of life and death. Cleaning and resetting an operating room used to take about an hour—a practice that had remained unchanged for decades. It wasn’t just about disinfecting the room; the team also needed to coordinate with the next medical team—surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses—to ensure the correct surgical instruments were set up in the right places.

By applying agile management, the hospital observed where improvements could be made in the process of cleaning and resetting operating rooms, and soon, the issues became apparent. For a long time, each cleaner had been assigned to a single, specialized task. They realized that if everyone collaborated on the same tasks, they could finish faster. Through repeated teamwork, the average time was reduced from one hour to 30 minutes, and sometimes even less, without compromising quality. While the hospital saved significant costs, the most important outcome was that through agile management, it could treat more patients.

This wasn’t achieved by changing technology or hiring more staff. It was done simply by observing small details and focusing on processes.

3. Remove Decision-Makers from the Equation

Generally speaking, when people rise to management positions, the higher their rank, the farther they become from the on-the-ground realities of frontline operations—and the more convinced they are of their ability to solve problems. But problems persist nonetheless. Agile management is implemented to identify issues that drag down teams, as it brings problems into the open, allowing teams to better focus on solving them. One key principle is to temporarily exclude top decision-makers and delegate authority to the right decision-makers.

Akira Yamada, the founder of a Japanese company that produces electrical installation equipment, once told his employees, "Do what you think is best; let those closest to the work make the decisions." However, in most companies, leaders insist on knowing everything, controlling everything, and making the final call, thereby leading to decisions being made by those with the least firsthand understanding of the situation. Employees end up spending enormous energy convincing leaders, while leaders are forced to handle tasks they are unfamiliar with. Fearful of insufficient information, leaders demand more reports, hindering team progress. Then, worried about making mistakes, they convene additional meetings to decentralize decision-making. The result is a snowball effect: rising time costs with no improvement in results.

Agile management eliminates the need for special meetings or for funneling issues through siloed functional departments before escalating them to senior leadership. This approach drastically speeds up decision-making and enhances the effectiveness, transparency, and flow of information.

4. How to Determine Team Workload?

Both individuals and teams have pride and tend to set increasingly higher goals for themselves—it’s human nature. Achieving more with less effort is not an exaggeration; it’s the goal of all teams. It’s also natural for teams to overextend themselves by taking on more than they can handle. This leads to two outcomes: either they cut corners to avoid disappointing themselves or stakeholders, or they fail to meet their own expectations.

The best way to predict future workload is to reference past workloads. Estimating workload is simply a method to measure how much effort a task requires. Typically, management insists on setting goals that push employees to maximize their capabilities, thereby aiming to drive team or company growth. The problem is that if you set a target of X, people will strive to achieve X at all costs. Employees may take shortcuts or even knowingly do things wrong to make it appear they’ve met X. Over time, this leads to various issues. Thus, in many companies, the problem isn’t that teams reluctantly take on too much work—it’s that management imposes excessive burdens on them.

A typical scenario is when a business department wants deliverables by a certain date, but the technical team can’t complete all requested tasks within that timeframe. If the team commits to doing everything, it won’t finish early. The top priority in agile management is learning to say no. Once a team understands its actual pace of completing work, it can push back based on capacity limitations. This pace also provides leadership with better insights into what can be achieved by when. Saying no in this context doesn’t create unnecessary obstacles to work; instead, it fosters realistic planning and accountability.

5. Don’t Wait, Act

Speed matters. Through rapid iteration—testing, observing reactions, and testing again—you can ultimately gain quick feedback and let solutions emerge. Each of us wants plans to be flawless, but this leads to infinitely prolonged decision-making processes. In reality, perfect plans don’t exist. We live in a world that’s constantly changing, making it impossible to predict outcomes in advance. The only thing we can do is try something and seek feedback. Taking action is always better than doing nothing; never hesitate, just act.

In simple terms: don’t wait, act! What you do isn’t as important as taking action and making efforts for learning and progress. Agile management provides rapid feedback to help you determine whether a decision is good or bad. It allows you to pivot, change course, and find a different path toward your goals. Every quick decision provides intelligence for the next one. After all, paths emerge from practice!

The goal of agile management is to reduce the cost of changing your mind. No matter the industry, the problems you face are universal, and you can find relevant patterns and cases in this book. Applying agile management can help you solve problems at a speed beyond your imagination. Globally renowned companies like 3M, Schlumberger, Saab, and Bosch have become more efficient through agile management. Its core principle is to focus on one thing at a time, eliminate wasted effort, and accomplish more in less time. Use agile management to eliminate managerial waste and boost team efficiency!