Try Agile when sailing through adversity

Discussions about the future of work in the Public Service often mention the need for public servants to be more agile.

One way of thinking about Agile is to ask yourself what is the best way to sail directly into the wind. Have you ever been in the middle of a roaring ocean on a small boat tossed by Poseidon’s wrath?

For many, 2020 felt like the Ocean Race: the toughest test of a team in sport and sailing’s greatest round-the-world challenge — the ultimate showdown of the human spirit against nature’s fury and improbable odds. Except how long the COVID-19 race is going to last is tough to predict.

Against the wind

When sailing, you don’t have a choice from which direction the wind blows. But sailboat racers prefer a headwind because most modern sailboat designs allow them to sail much faster into the wind than when the wind is pushing them directly from behind. They achieve this seemingly impossible task by employing a trick called tacking.

Tacking is a maneuver by which a sailing vessel faces the wind so that the direction from which the wind blows changes from one side to the other, plotting a zig-zagged path to the goal. The change of direction is frequent and vital to reaching the finish line. Doesn’t that sound like most of 2020?