The origins of Alpine climbing
Over the last weekend, I helped move 250 people across London to a shining, state of the art new office. The one we left was old, tired, and still full of things we didn’t need after we left. Being responsible for getting the new office ready for business to start again on Monday, I watched with dismay as crate after crate of belongings and equipment arrived at the new office. As I stood there, watching them arrive, I began thinking about mountaineering.
Mountaineering is the pursuit of altitude on our most challenging mountains. In the earliest days of assaults on the big peaks like Everest and Nanga Parbat, expedition or ‘siege’ style mountaineering was common. A series of fixed, well stocked camps was set up along the expedition path, with groups moving up and along the camps. This is the style of mountaineering used by Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary in their first ascent of Everest.
But siege tactics are not the only way of summiting a peak. Another style of climbing, sometimes known as Alpine climbing, favours having climbers carry all of their own food and equipment for their attempt. Climbing luminaries like Reinhold Messner, Royal Robbins, Yvon Chouinard and, recently, the late Ueli Steck have championed a different way to climb on both ice and rock; Fast and Light.
As I watched those crates arrive, popping them open to peer inside and inventory them, it struck me just how far most companies are from Fast and Light behaviour. The tactics that nearly all of us use are those of the siege masters. We store things, just in case. We pack last years’ laptops in case the new ones fail. We keep old files in case we’re audited. We keep things we’re not sure about, in case someone remembers what it was for. We drag our clutter with us, because it’s easier to keep it than it is to expunge it.
This is not lean. It’s not agile. And it’s certainly not Fast and Light. It’s time more companies embraced Fast and Light as their mantra for continued success.
The Fast and Light business
The Fast and Light style is not safer or more comfortable than a full siege. Indeed, the style has sometimes been termed ‘dangerous and reckless’. As Colin Haley puts it,
“Moving faster in the mountains means spending less time exposed to the risks of being in the mountains, but it also means having a smaller margin of safety should something go wrong.”
Just as in the mountains, Fast & Light applied to business requires considerable discipline to achieve and maintain. It requires relentless focus on what you need now, and a continuous process to remove the extraneous as soon as it’s no longer useful. Importantly, this focus on being adequately and minimally prepared to trade does not apply only to equipment and belongings. The same lens of minimalism needs to be applied to processes and people as to physical property.
The reason it’s hard to apply the Fast & Light ethos is because our natural behaviour gives us a false sense of security. Rather than divesting ourselves of our unneeded inventory, we store it to mitigate future challenges. Often, we delay our disposal of something to defer a decision. We’re not sure if it’s needed, we don’t know who is responsible, so it’s easier to leave it in storage.
Going Fast & Light
To embrace the Fast & Light way, we first need to be mindful of the challenges we face. In climbing, ‘Fast and light’ is sometimes only considered possible if the climbers are ‘fit and experienced’. In business terms, the most important safety line we have is cash, rather than belongings.
So, here’s ten ways to start upgrading your business to be fast and light:
- Only take on new staff at the last responsible moment. Taking on new, permanent members of your team adds weight and commitment to your business. Each new person should be considered a solution to a failure to scale, not a badge of honour in company size rankings.
- Continually evolve and reconsider processes. Make it everybody’s job to continually be stripping waste from their activities
- Run a clean desk, hot desk or work from home policy (or all of the above). Don’t let people dig in, surrounding themselves with tchotchkes and trinkets that encourage them to stay static in one place. Encourage people to flow and move between teams, and with projects
- Scan, archive and recycle. Get rid of paper from your organisation. Don’t let it build up, and find alternatives to printing and paper waste
- Invest in digital collaboration tools. Allow people to work anywhere at any time by using tools like Slack, collaborative whiteboards, Trello, JIRA and other tools, as your business sees fit.
- Upgrade early and often. Don’t be tempted to avoid upgrades to make life easier. Always run on the most recent versions of software and hardware. Frequent upgrades drain the pond of legacy problems.
- Keep moving. Organisations are like sharks, built to move. Stasis and conservatism cause atrophy and should be avoided whenever possible.
- Prioritise your objectives ruthlessly, and focus only on those things offering the best chance of long term commercial success.
- Make decisions by fast consensus, communicate them clearly, and execute. Don’t dally after you’ve made a decision, and don’t allow disagreements to linger after a decision is made. Can you swap a long list for a short list quickly? Can you trust a staff member to make a call on their own? Do it, rather than waiting for committees. Slow decisions to save money are probably costing you more than the eventual cost saving
- Use reviews, not approvals — don’t wait for things to pass through management chains for approval, instead seek appropriate review and give candid feedback
Stripping the waste from your business isn’t easy, but it is worthwhile. Fast and Light isn’t ‘agile’, and nor is it ‘lean’, and it isn’t the preserve of startups who are fast and light only due to an absence of legacy, rather than a dedication to organisational athleticism.
No matter how big your business, you can start applying the principles of Fast & Light, and I promise you’ll see the benefits.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 276,798+ people.
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