Published cartoon ·
Can we make this more agile?
Changing direction is effortless from the steering wheel.
Why this one bites
The manager spins a wheel while the team hauls a loaded cart along a zigzag route. Flexibility at the point of decision becomes repeated physical effort at the point of delivery. Each new direction arrives without acknowledging the work already spent following the previous one.
The joke concerns the appropriation of agility as permission for cost-free changes of mind. Adaptation can be valuable, but here the people steering are insulated from its price. The winding tracks record the effort that the language omits.
Accessible summary
- A manager turns a large steering wheel back and forth. Three sweating workers push and pull a cart along sharply changing paths.
- The caption interprets the request as repeated changes of direction without acknowledgement of the resulting cost.
Reading notes
Changing direction is valuable when learning changes what is worth doing. The problem is not the turn itself but the claim that a turn has no cost. Work may need to be discarded, dependencies renegotiated and people brought up to speed on a different objective. If those effects are excluded from the plan, the team is judged against a route it is no longer following.
The steering wheel and the cart divide decision from consequence. The manager can move the wheel with little effort. The team must redirect an object with weight and momentum. This makes every steering adjustment feel cheap to the person requesting it and expensive to the people responding. The drawing exposes why a succession of individually modest changes can leave a project exhausted without producing much visible progress.
A useful change conversation acknowledges what stops as well as what starts. Which previous commitment is being replaced? Which work can be reused? Who needs to hear that the earlier date or scope no longer applies? Those questions do not prevent adaptation; they give it an honest cost. In the cartoon, the tracks preserve the answers that the meeting language has erased. The people pulling the cart have already paid for every abandoned direction.