The Importance of Being Able to Pivot
Not just in sports but also at work and in life
As a young boy growing up in the suburbs of Montreal, Canada, I used to play a lot of ice hockey.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the sport, hockey is a fast-paced game where at any time two opposing teams switch between
- Offensive play (i.e. when a team has possession of the puck and is actively working toward scoring a goal in the opposing team’s net) and
- Defensive play (i.e. when a team is actively working toward preventing the opposing team from scoring a goal in the defending team’s net).
This frequent switch from offence to defense and vice versa often requires hockey players to pivot, which in this case means physically being able to go in one direction, stop, then go in another direction in a very short amount of time — all on ice skates.
Why does pivoting matter?
Much like in hockey, we all have moments in life when we can and/or should pivot. Pivots apply to work and business contexts as well as life in general.
How many times have you looked back and said to yourself that you should have turned right instead of going left?
Understanding how and when to pivot helps us to change course when we need to and enhances our chances of accomplishing our goals successfully.
What’s involved in a pivot?
If a pivot can be broken into components, there would be 3 parts:
- Pre-pivot: While carrying out a previously decided course of action, that person is also aware of what’s currently going on around them. This person is constantly evaluating what they are sensing around them, standing at the ready to change course if their assessment indicates that’s it’s time to alter course.
- Point-of-pivot: In an instant, the person now quickly decides on what course of action to take and how to execute it, all based on the information they collected during the pre-pivot phase. The new course of action is initiated.
- Post-pivot: The person is executing the course of action selected during the point-of-pivot. While carrying out this action, they are also evaluating and re-evaluating the situation to see if they will need to pivot again. In essence, the post-pivot of the current pivot moment is the pre-pivot of the next pivot moment.
How this can be applied to other contexts in life
Personal Health
By December 2014, I had been living my life in such a way that led me to be in terrible physical shape for several years.
In January 2015, I decided to change my life for the better. I embarked on a personal health and fitness journey that I continue to this day.
That was a “Big Pivot” in my life journey. Since then, there have been smaller pivots along the way to calibrate my health journey.
For example, while my weight and calorie intake were good indicators of whether or not I was on the right track, I made sure to be aware of how I felt at any moment in time — and to be honest about it. If a certain workout regimen that had brought me success in the past no longer made me feel good, I would pivot and try something else.
The end goal was a healthy sustainable lifestyle, not the ability to stick to a specific diet or workout regimen. I constantly listened to my body, mind, and soul and pivoted when they told me to do so.
Family Life
I’ve been with my life partner for over 25 years (17 of those in marriage). How did we build a life together and live contently for that long?
Part of the secret to doing that successfully is learning when to pre-pivot well.
In this case, it means picking up on the cues that tell me when
- To engage my wife or when to leave her be.
- To know when I messed up and make it up to her.
- To acknowledge (sooner rather than later) when she is right and when I am wrong about something (which, by the way, happens more often than I’d care to admit).
Business
As a project manager, I was trained in the traditional waterfall approach. In this approach, project phases are initiated, executed, and closed before the next one starts. I learned, rather painfully, that often times that approach does not work or the project is only partially successful at the end. The approach isn’t flexible enough to act on pivot moments. It’s like a huge ship that’s trying to make a sharp turn before it hits a not-so-far-away iceberg that the crew spotted just a few seconds prior.
An agile approach to projects allows for pivot moments.
In fact, some agile methodologies (like scrum) build them into the rigor of project execution through daily stand-ups and sprint reviews/retrospectives. If there is uncertainty regarding what the end product should look like (but there is a general idea of the end goal), then every pivot point where we can adjust direction brings us closer to an end product that best meets the requirements of the customer. This is why more and more companies are trying to build an agile mindset into their organization’s culture.
What can we do moving forward?
The key to pivoting well has a lot to do with the pre-pivot. We have to be open to the fact that we’re not always right about
- The current action we are taking
- The current strategy we are embarking on
- The current course in life (i.e. it may have been right before but now it no longer is appropriate).
Being truly open to the notion of not being right all the time requires a degree of self-awareness and vulnerability. Every time new data comes along, we have to be vigilant about doing that assessment of whether or not we should pivot.
The good news is that we can get better at pivoting as we grow more experienced. Every time we get a result or a consequence in life, we look back and connect it to when we pivoted (or didn’t pivot). Each experience goes into a knowledge bank in our brains that we can tap into every time the need to pivot emerges.
Better yet, we can get so good at predicting when we will need to pivot that we can make decisions way ahead of time — like a really great chess player who can see 20+ moves in advance.
So, if you’re up to it, you can start honing your pivot skills today. If you’re feeling like something’s not right at the moment, then listen to your gut and do something about it now.
The more you practice pivoting, the better you’ll get at it.
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