Accelerate Transformation Through Agile Growth

We often view time as linear, segmented into past, present, and future. This straightforward understanding can hinder our potential for exponential growth, but I've encountered numerous situations that forced me to reconsider my relationship with time.

One pivotal example from 2005 highlights the importance of agile growth and how transforming our perception of time can accelerate personal and professional development.

The Web Server Hack: A Lesson in Time Management

In 2005, as Delena and I planned our future together, my business was still in its early stages. We built and hosted websites for credit unions in Texas. While creating websites was enjoyable, hosting them proved challenging. One day, I received a call from a credit union CEO informing me that their website had been hacked. The site displayed a menacing black-and-white skull instead of its usual friendly homepage. Checking other sites on the same host revealed similar breaches. 

Panic set in, and I feared the worst. Would I have to delay my wedding? Shut down my business? Something worse?  

However, I chose to handle the situation with courage and collaboration with the web hosting company. We quickly resolved the issue, and I learned a valuable lesson about time.

This incident was one of many where I experienced pain, fear, and doubt. Over the past 20 years, I've made and lost millions, been deeply in debt, betrayed, lied to, and failed.

With each of these moments in time, there was a memory attached to an experience. Something that had caused extreme pain for me at a single moment in time, but that experience and moment in time was now in the past.

Somehow, thinking of time in this way helped set me free.

Of course, I didn’t have this perspective when the web server hack first happened, and looking back now, I can safely say that had I not developed this clarity, I would have never been able to move past that scary event and write this book. 

The human mind is like a movie theater: I’d probably still be replaying those feelings and emotions over and over. That’s because when the movie theater of our mind is left unchecked, it tends to default to films rooted in the pains of our past. So we must remember that we’re the owners of this theater, and it’s up to us to change what we’re viewing.

Reexamining Your Relationship with Time

You can change what you’re viewing right now by simply reexamining your relationship with time. You can even write an entirely new script for yourself that you will direct, produce, and star in. The choice you’re making now can accelerate your personal and professional transformation through agile growth.

Agile growth is for more than just tech teams in this Age of AI. Your ability to be agile and to adapt to exponential change is a prerequisite for anyone attempting to achieve exponential growth. This ability is rooted in how well you can reexamine and ultimately transform your relationship with time. 

Transform Time to Accelerate Transformation

How often has something that happened in the past created pain for you in the present? Perhaps it’s the memory of someone doing or saying something that hurt you personally. Or maybe you’re remembering a time when you failed miserably at a professional goal and let down your team or your boss in a big way. When you think about time as linear—past, present, and future—it becomes far too easy for the mind to binge-watch films of failures and anxieties rooted in your past. 

Whether you watch films about past failures or future anxieties, the feelings and emotions invoked in the present moment keep you trapped in your Cave of Complacency. That’s because, fundamentally, your mind cannot distinguish between fiction and reality.

The Three Theories of Time

Many thinkers, like William Strauss and Neil Howe in "The Fourth Turning," offer different perspectives on time:

1. Time is chaotic and lacks order.
2. Time is linear, like a story with a clear beginning and end.
3. Time is cyclical, marked by repetition.

This third way of seeing time represents, once again, a crucial third path in the Age of AI. 

We can see the cyclical patterns of time, especially in nature. The sun and moon rise and fall every 24 hours before repeating the cycle the next day. The same is true with the four seasons of the year: plants and animals follow particular patterns in spring, summer, fall, and winter, and then they do it all over again.

Even better, think of time as a spiral staircase cut out of the rock on the side of Mt. Mutatio. As Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, writes, “You will circle through some of the same issues over and over, each time at a different level. Frustrations and rewards exist at all levels on the path. Our aim here is to find the trail, establish our footing, and begin the climb.”

You, too, can accelerate your personal and professional transformation by seeing time as a cyclical spiral staircase you can confidently climb quarter after quarter, year after year.

Exponential Thinking Requires an Agile Mind

“Change before you have to.” Those words come from Jack Welch, who was Chairman and CEO of General Electric for three decades. I want you to heed Jack’s call and develop a recurring habit of change. 

I’ll show you what I mean, but the idea is that your transformation will follow “four seasons.” Like a butterfly, you’ll always be in this ongoing transformative cycle at one stage or another. You’ll flap your wings and soar up to your Apex of Awareness, where you’ll see what others cannot as they choose to stay stuck in their Caves of Complacency. 

But if you ignore Welch’s wisdom and decide to wait to change until you have to, it might be too late, just like it was for Blockbuster, Borders, and many other once-mighty brands that lacked an exponential mindset.

In the Age of AI, an agile and adaptable mind is essential. Agile thinking, rooted in 10X thinking, should become your default mode. Agile methodologies, widely used in tech, prepare individuals and teams for exponential change. 

However, introducing agile methods often encounters resistance from those who don’t fully understand the methodology. Or feel threatened by the impending changes. 

I urge you to listen to the warning of agile coach Erik de Bosm, who believes you still need agile, especially to understand the value of people over processes: 

“Agile is not simply a methodology but a consistent philosophy covering both the technical and the social aspects of organization. It is maybe the most important fact we learn from Agile, that people are more important than processes. It’s not about processes. It is about people.”

The 90-Day Growth Method and Four Seasons of Exponential Growth

One of the greatest lessons we can all learn from our COVID-19 pandemic experience is that the old annual strategic planning model needs to be thrown out the window! That’s not to say that long-term planning is unimportant. 

It’s just that the traditional process, which happens only once a year, carries more risk than needed in a world of exponential changes in technology, consumer behavior, and competition. 

I've observed a pattern: individuals and organizations feel their growth depends on the year's achievements from October to December. This annual focus leads to a false sense of security early in the year, followed by a sprint from Labor Day to the end of the year that results in less-than-optimal outcomes.

Looking at growth through a 12-month lens usually leads to less-than-optimal results for an organization, team, and individual, as it can drain everyone’s emotional energy. Individuals and organizations tend to get off track in growth cycles longer than 90 days. But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

You can use the 90-Day Growth Method to bring your team together every quarter to review and celebrate your progress over the past 90 days, refocus on goals and actions, and renew your commitment to achieving them. Soon, you and your team will feel re-energized and ready to move forward with courage and confidence for the next 90 days.

You may not realize it yet, but you are following the exponential growth journey. You ACT for growth by ascending to the Apex of Awareness, then committing to crossing the 7 Cs, and finally arriving at—and transcending—the Territory of Transformation. 

Here’s how it works: 

1. Learn: Learning provides clarity and reduces fear in a rapidly changing world. The more you learn, the more you understand future opportunities, enabling growth.
2. Think: Apply insights by defining goals, identifying roadblocks, and planning the next steps. Thinking through your 90-day plan builds the courage to move forward.
3. Do: Execute your plan confidently, focusing on new goals and actions. Stay mindful of distractions and challenges to ensure continuous progress.
4. Review: Reflect on your achievements, celebrate success, and prepare for the next 90-day cycle—document lessons learned to improve future efforts.

These phases follow the patterns of nature. Spring is a season of new life, where you expand and prepare for future growth through learning. Then, those insights you gained through your springtime learning are further enlightened, so to speak, by the summer sun. In the fall, you prepare to harvest the fruits of your labor by applying your thinking to do even better than the previous season. 

Finally, you hit winter, a season where time slows down and provides you with the opportunity for review and reflection. Winter can feel the most painful as it’s also a season for dying, but it is typically needed to make room for future growth and expansion.Each of the four seasons plays a vital role in your continuous growth and the growth of your team and organization. 

You will cycle through each season every 90 days to move beyond knowledge and awareness. Growing is only achieved through action and reviewing what you've done. Bridging the gap between knowing and growing simply requires commitment.So, when you combine your awareness (A) with your commitment (C), you continue to transform (T) as you maximize your future growth potential and go from good to great.  

What's Next?

How we perceive time, specifically how we think about change in the present moment, directly impacts our exponential growth potential. This is truer than ever in the Age of AI when the rate of change is increasing exponentially.You can confidently ACT for growth by ascending to your Apex of Awareness, committing to cross the 7 Cs, and transcending your Territory of Transformation as you learn, think, do, and review—all by following the 90-Day Growth Method. 

I encourage you to invite others to learn this methodology alongside you. It could be your team or a cohort of like-minded people from other organizations committed to creating a bigger, better, and brighter future. 

Here's why this is important: when you try to bring about a transformation on your own, either personally or professionally, there’s a strong possibility the people around you (say, your family or coworkers) will not like it. Why not? Well, as you transform your thinking—with new beliefs guiding your behaviors and new actions leading to new habits on your exponential growth journey—you create a gap between where you used to be and where you are now. 

Because of that gap and all the future gaps you create every 90 days, the people around you who choose to stay trapped in their Caves of Complacency will want to criticize you. Be prepared for them to try to tear you down because they feel lost and alone and because misery loves company.But remember, you are now a Digital Stoic with control over the most critical technology in the Age of AI—your mind—and you can respond by not reacting.

Instead, you’ll just continue to commit, with courage and confidence, to moving forward by learning the practical tools, methodologies, and strategies that each of the Four Seasons of Exponential Growth has to offer.