Learning Tight Loose Tight (TLT) is not primarily about setting goals (first tight) or following them up (last tight). Above all, it’s about learning to let go. Unfortunately, in most organizations, letting go is difficult because it's scary for both teams and leaders.
Intuitively, most people increase the level of control and management when they encounter challenges. In many organizations, it's considered good leadership to have tight reins on both goals and direction, execution, and follow-up. A leader practicing this style provides the team with a clear vision and goals, insists on approving delivery plans, dictates roles within the team, manages the work process, and follows up on results.
I call this "Tight Tight Tight leadership."
Tight Tight Tight leaders implement these management mechanisms with the hope and belief that they will help the team become more productive. They assume that all the mechanisms reinforce each other. However, my experience shows the opposite.
When the Roadmap Collides with Reality
Here’s an example to illustrate my point: A team had a clear target audience and a clear roadmap. The leaders were most focused on the roadmap and didn’t want it to change because it had been “anchored in top management.” The team had a budget for the next two years.
When the team started working in their usual agile manner, they quickly realized that the roadmap had significant weaknesses and wanted to change it. However, this was impossible, and they faced the following dilemma: Should they follow the roadmap or the target audience?
The leader instructed the team to focus on the roadmap, arguing that “we depend on you finishing this before you start working with the users.” The team didn’t understand this logic. What was the result for the team? Their energy and engagement plummeted.
The team’s product owner shared his frustrations with me after attending a course: “Rune, I wish you hadn’t made us focus on the users. It led to a lot of learning! Now we’ve discovered many things we’re doing wrong. Great! But we’re not allowed to change anything. It’s frustrating to carry on as before!”
Is It Effective? Keep Going. No Effect? Stop and Reflect.
The product owner and the team had explored the Tight Loose Tight method. One principle of Tight Loose Tight is to continuously look for the effects of what you’re doing. To uncover these effects, you need to know your users and their needs. This team had realized this and adapted their daily work accordingly: They dug deep into what truly made life easier for their customers. The team learned from their efforts, adjusted routines, and improved the product. Now, they worked to create customer value rather than please the director. It provided energy, a shared direction, mutual understanding, and a sense of purpose in their daily work!
However, they felt that the director lacked customer understanding. But, of course, they couldn’t tell him that. Moreover, the team was surrounded by an organization that did not yet share this relatively new realization that working for impact and customer value can make a significant difference. This bothered them.
The product owner’s leader noticed the decline in team motivation. He thought he could help by conducting a workshop to "establish clearer roles and a better work process." This was also supposed to contribute to better collaboration. The result, however, was the opposite: The team now had another management tool thrust upon them. The participants lost focus on planning, and the product owner saw that the team members were increasingly waiting for each other instead of experimenting as they had before.
Levels of Alignment: A Great Tool to Clean Up the "Control Bonanza"
I believe most leaders would benefit from choosing a level of governance and being cautious about combining too many levels, as this puts the team in a dilemma, as mentioned earlier. From my experience, we can summarize various governance and control tools into five levels, all of which require active leadership participation. If you’re supervising your children to clean their room, you might need to operate at level 1. However, if you’re leading a larger research program, perhaps level 5 is the right approach.
Levels of Alignment
Let's briefly go through the different levels, starting from the bottom, level 1:
Personal Follow-up: Most people working in a company naturally have personal goals and perhaps a hidden agenda. Many leaders want to manage employees more directly, setting up 1-on-1 meetings and frequent employee reviews where personal goals and tasks are adjusted. This provides the lowest form of autonomy. We can call this “level 1.”
Role and Process: Most employees are hired for a specific role, which is often carried out in conjunction with others through a work process. Many companies focus on clear roles and smooth handovers between these roles for friction-free collaboration. Others prefer that roles work more dynamically together in a cross-functional team. Regardless, roles and processes are an important governance tool for many leaders. This offers slightly more autonomy since individuals often manage level 1 on their own.
Roadmap: During the 80s and 90s, many organizations found that personal follow-up, clear roles, and work processes weren’t enough, and they struggled to develop good solutions that delivered functioning results. This led to the establishment of projects and programs, and teams were followed up on their deliverables. A classic example of level 3, and where things can go wrong, is the belief in the "roadmap" as a guiding tool. It could look good at first glance, but upon reflection, something was often missing: the check-in with users, customers, or the target audience. There wasn’t necessarily anyone who had asked them. This brings us to level 4:
Target Audience: Over time, many have realized that teams dominant at level 3 may not be able to understand their target audience and create user-friendly solutions. From 2001, the agile movement encouraged businesses to focus more on target audience, customer, or user needs for both leaders and teams. A level 4 team gains more autonomy than teams and employees operating at levels 1, 2, or 3.
Society: Increasingly, especially in product areas, teams must relate to their company’s societal mission and concretize ideas and initiatives to succeed. Autonomy at level 5 provides the most freedom of action and is naturally the most challenging level for both leaders and teams. Therefore, I see few teams where societal mission is the only guiding level.
Tight Loose Tight leaders will delegate responsibility for levels 1, 2, and 3 to the team and its members (Loose) and will primarily guide the team through user or customer understanding and learning. This doesn’t mean that the team lacks plans or roles. However, it does mean that the team decides on its own plans and roles and can adjust them when they see that the target audience’s expectations change.
Tight Loose Tight Leaders’ Preferred Level of Governance
The lowest level of governance you use becomes the most dominant level, meaning the levels above are rendered ineffective. If you’re tempted to establish and manage by level 2—roles and processes—a conflict will lead the team to follow their roles instead of the feedback from the roadmap or the target audience. This also means that as a leader, you must take responsibility for ensuring that the roles and processes align with the roadmap, that the roadmap aligns with the target audience’s expectations, and that these expectations are prioritized in line with the vision and mission. A demanding task that few of us master.
How to Let Go?
Letting go is difficult for many. It’s understandable. You are asked to stop doing something you know well and start doing something with which you have little experience. Therefore, I recommend not taking this on with a “big leap.” Instead, start with part of the business to learn and experience the effects. I believe it could be beneficial to have someone who has been through this before and can help uncover hidden behaviors and build new, inspiring governance processes based on levels 4 and 5. With Loose, you will see that employees adapt more quickly, and loyalty conflicts will be fewer.
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