Less Mass = More Agility
“Adding power makes you faster on the straights, subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere.”
— Colin Chapman, founder of the sports car company Lotus
Colin Chapman obsessed over weight. He knew lightness meant speed. The Lotus founder’s obsession worked brilliantly; under his direction Lotus won seven Formula One Constructors' titles, six Drivers' Championships, and the Indianapolis 500. Many of his innovations are still used today in Formula One such as the faster, lighter, stiffer, safer monocoque chassis.
Many businesses profess that they want to be “more agile.” They usually don’t mean "Agile" in the narrow software development sense; they want to respond to changes in strategy, market dynamics, and customer feedback as quickly as possible. Yet organizations often forget that as they mature and scale, they add “weight,” or more accurately, “mass”—and the more massive an object, the more energy required to change its direction.
They need to get lighter to go faster.
Embrace Constraints
Massive organizations can take years to pivot. If you reduce organizational mass, you can adapt business models, products, features, and marketing messages much faster. Shedding “weight” in the right places allows you to speed up, change direction with minimal friction, and seize market opportunities.
When I hear “we don’t have enough time/money/people,” I see an opportunity. Constraints are advantages in disguise. There’s no room for waste, which compels creativity and keeps organizational mass low.
What Defines Organizational “Mass”?
In business, mass can accumulate from a variety of sources:
- Long-term contracts that lock you into rigid commitments
- Long-term roadmaps, strategies, and plans that lack adaptability
- Excessive meetings that focus on discussion rather than action
- Oversized staff that create work for work’s sake
- “One-way door” decisions that are nearly impossible to reverse
- Complex and numerous processes that slow down execution
- Silos within the organization that impede collaboration
- Hardware, software, or technology lock-ins that limit flexibility
- Office politics and political deadlocks that breed inaction
- Excess oversight (compliance, audit, regulation) that slows decision-making
For deeper dive see The Inertia of Enterprise Despair. If a business really wants to become more agile they must shed mass.
“Simplify, then add lightness”
— Colin Chapman, founder of the sports car company Lotus
Case Study: X (Formerly Twitter)
Elon Musk’s actions with Twitter (rebranded as X) are a high-profile example of organizational “mass reduction”. Shortly after the acquisition, X laid off nearly half of its 7,500 employees.
The cuts impacted all departments, including engineering, content moderation, and communications. This also included the elimination of entire teams, including a team focused on human rights and global conflicts, another checking X’s algorithms for bias in how tweets get amplified, and an engineering team devoted to making the social platform more accessible for people with disabilities.
In addition to workforce reductions, Musk revamped the leadership structure. Many top executives were either fired or resigned, and some middle management layers disappeared. Removing layers of hierarchy can speed decision-making by reducing bottlenecks—just as shedding weight in a race car improves acceleration.
The result? A company that could shift priorities and implement changes faster than before. The smaller workforce and flatter org chart allowed X to pivot more rapidly to new product features—such as revamped subscription services, updated verification, and new monetization experiments.
Balancing Mass and Reliability
In racing, there’s a delicate balance between reducing weight for speed and maintaining reliability. Heavier parts are stronger and more reliable; lighter parts can fail when pushed to extremes. Racing engineers often design weight reductions to the point of occasional failures, then add mass back strategically to reinforce where necessary. In doing so, they explore the true limits of performance.
“Any car which holds together for a whole race is too heavy.”
— Colin Chapman, founder of the sports car company Lotus
The X experiment has many parallels. If you strip away too much process, staff, or oversight too quickly, you risk compromising the reliability of your operations. In some areas the cuts were too deep. For example, X cut engineering and then proceeded to re-hire engineers and staff where necessary.
The changes made at X raised concerns about long-term sustainability. Critics argued that losing institutional knowledge could hurt the company’s ability to handle complex challenges, such as hate speech moderation or compliance with international regulations. Others, including Musk, contended that many of those roles and processes had become bloated and were slowing innovation.
Judging the Results
X remains a fascinating case study: a bold, real-time experiment in how drastically you can reduce mass before you compromise stability. Elon's goal was to discover the lowest feasible “mass” that keeps the organization functioning reliably (and handles unforeseen stresses). Whether it succeeds long-term is still an open question—but the most interesting aspect of the whole thing is that X was able to shed nearly half its mass and still function.
Summary
The quest to become a more agile organization is often about removing unnecessary weight. By shedding layers of bureaucracy, revisiting long-term plans, trimming/simplifying processes, and embracing constraints, businesses can gain nimbleness to seize opportunities and outmaneuver competitors (if care is taken not to sacrifice the essentials).
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