How to keep your balance when pivoting
the challenges of pivoting gracefully
I first learned the delicate art of pivoting on my high school basketball team.
It was an important skill to learn — how to maintain balance and control of yourself and the ball while finding a quick, successful outlet pass, all while your competitors were jostling and jockeying for that ball. One misstep with that planted foot and boom! a traveling violation and the ball was just handed over to the other team.
So yeah, it was important to master the art of pivoting.
Only, you may not realize it from the outside looking in, but it’s exceedingly difficult to keep your balance in these situations. In mere milliseconds you’re expected to take in a lot of information from the environment around you, maintain control of what you currently possess and stand strong against aggressive plays for the ball in what is supposed to be a “non-contact sport”.
I bring up high school basketball because I’m realizing how apt an analogy it is for pivoting of a different sort. And because it was as tricky a maneuver in that context then as it is in a start-up context now.
The term pivot is an interesting one for start-ups. It’s intended to mean planting one foot solidly in the core kernal of your start-up that’s working then rotating the other foot in a new direction that will lead to the wild successes that have other wise eluded you.
Only, which direction? And how forcefully?
Pivoting sounds like a wonderful concept in theory. In fact, to hear people talk of it these days, it sounds downright romantic and expected of start-ups.
Idea not working? No problem. It’s not a bad idea. It just needs a pivot.
No doubt that that’s true in some cases. In others though, it is a bad idea because either it’s a bad product in any context or there really isn’t any market for this awesome product created in the optimistic mind of an entrepreneur.
But how do you know when it’s which?
Pivots are an extremely powerful way to get out of a bad situation and set yourself up for a successful outcome. But they’re also fraught with peril. Plant that foot and pivot prematurely and you may have missed the winning move right in front of you. Wait too long or choose the wrong direction and you find yourself staring at an impenetrable wall with no exit options.
So yeah, it’s hard to keep your balance while pivoting.
How do you navigate this tricky move then?
The best resource that I’ve come across is the book widely thought of as the start-up bible — The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries. Not only does it do a great job of coaching you through how you should set up tests so that you can objectively determine through metrics whether a pivot is called for, it lays out different types of pivots to consider. So if you haven’t yet read the book, stop reading this post and go get it. For a quick summary of the types of pivots, this Forbes article is a great resource.
Once you’re armed with the academic understanding of when and how to pivot comes the hard part.
Deciding if and how you actually will pivot.
That, as far as I can tell, involves some artful combination of analyzing the metrics and following your gut. But if there’s one piece of advice I might offer it’s this: don’t even think about a pivot until it’s time to pivot.
By this I mean, commit to your original idea and do everything in your power to make this thing go. Because if you have some vague notion of an escape hatch in the back of your mind, my experience is that you won’t be desperate enough to find every single way to make the original thing work.
Then, if it so happens that you find yourself needing to pivot, you’ll a) know that you’re not pivoting too soon and you’ve done everything possible to make it work and b) you can devote all of your energies to figuring out how and which way to pivot. And at that point, pivot quickly. Don’t waver or have some drawn out case of the “I-can’t-decides”.
Because just like in basketball, a successful pivot is contingent on quick, decisive action based on a mix of data, instinct and faith.
And that’s the only way I know how to keep my balance.