Flexibility and Hyper-Reactivity, The Chinese Way

I placed an order online for a new bag for the excessive luggage not long before my departure from Taiwan. The bag was supposed to be collected at the 7-Eleven not far away from my hotel. I trusted it would arrive on time, as previous orders did.

Early in the morning, I saw the shipment was indeed delivered to the store midnight, but have not received the message for collection.

Hoping to grab it early and start repacking, I went to the outlet to try my luck, with no idea if the store staff would allow this.

Upon entering that small 7-Eleven I immediately saw the parcel box with my name on it. I politely asked the staff if it's possible for me to collect the bag now. Upon checking the system he suggested that the parcel had not gone through final scan yet, and I come back around noon time.

So I returned to my hotel. Just as I re-entered the room, a message popped up on my phone: "Your parcel is ready for collection".

The extra trip didn't bother me. I understood that collecting the bag earlier was a favor to ask. The staff had all the legit reasons to decline my request. But I can't help thinking the what-if: what if this was in Beijing or Hangzhou?

I had multiple experiences ordering urgent items online (not because I preferred racing against time, but I simply did not know where to buy offline). If I was really in a hurry—for example, if the flight is departing soon, I would "intercept" the couriers based on their real-time location within the App. Almost always they would stop, quickly find my parcel in the parcel mountain and hand it over. "I will confirm the delivery in the system later. You go ahead", I was often told. I trusted them, and I never had any problem.

A whole different level of flexibility.

***

As an entrepreneur working on complex hardware products and cross-border supply chains with a manufacturing base in China, this flexibility is what keeps me and my team alive. We could make any last-minute change on almost anything, and our suppliers, partners, logistic agents and customers would adapt almost immediately, and for most time, willingly. This flexibility is so expected that a request granted without pushback feels almost magical. This agility allowed us to efficiently prototype, test, iterate and upgrade our products and services. It also provided us with the critical room for error—if something had been wrong due to whatever reasons, it can almost certainly be rectified with no significant impact on timeline or budget.

On the flip side, this agility has a cost. For one, we had to adapt too—to the rather constant change initiated by our stakeholders, for instance, a wrong item was shipped, or an incorrect parameter was set. We, as the "downstream of change request", had to respond to various such last-minute requests, and more importantly, to prepare, materially and mentally, to deal with such uncertainty. Another challenge is to draw a line between requests caused by human error, and those caused by the real need to adapt. Often lame mistakes got wrapped in, or blended with, iterative change. Those who should be held responsible for the error could somehow escape freely under the cover of "experiments." Once a critical step fails, it takes magnitudes of effort to fix.

***

What I am more interested in is how to culturally make sense of this relentless agility, and what it means for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship?

The standard startup jargon—MVP, Pivot, Agile—labels a phenomenon that has existed in the Chinese social fabric for centuries. As the pioneering Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong observed in From the Soil, Western society resembles a "bundle of firewood," where individuals are bound together by clear, rigid classifications and explicit contracts. Chinese society, however, operates on a "differential mode of association", like ripples spreading from a stone thrown into a lake.

In a ripple-based world, boundaries are inherently elastic. Rules are not absolute monuments but rather contextual agreements. When the courier hands over a parcel before it is scanned, he is not being "unprofessional," but is prioritizing a temporary, human-to-human relationship over a protocol. He trusts that "we will figure it out later, together."

In the Chinese entrepreneurial ecosystem, this cultural elasticity manifests as "institutional bricolage"—the art of making do with what is at hand, adapting existing rules, and thriving in the "grey zones" where formal regulations have not yet caught up. While a non-Chinese entrepreneur might wait for a certified SOP, the Chinese entrepreneur operates on a philosophy of "trial under hierarchy"—testing the waters first, establishing the norm later.

This cultural default of high flexibility gives Chinese hardware startups a biological speed of evolution. In places like Shenzhen and Hangzhou, the supply chain behaves like a living, breathing neural network. A WeChat message to a supplier at midnight can trigger a tooling modification by dawn. It is an builder's paradise, but as anyone who has run a production line knows, this "organic flow" also has a darker, more exhausting shadow.

When everything is negotiable, nothing is stable. The very same "flexibility" that allows you to make a last-minute engineering change also permits your supplier to unilaterally substitute a component because "it was faster to source and basically the same."

In this environment, human error is easily disguised as "rapid iteration." The line between genuine, adaptive agility and sheer sloppiness becomes dangerously blurred. When a critical failure occurs, the "move fast and break things" ethos is often weaponized as a convenient shield to escape accountability. The entrepreneur is forced to develop a state of perpetual vigilance—what I call "hyper-reactivity," constantly firefighting, translating chaotic, informal inputs into some semblance of quality control.

***

I think about the courier again. "I will confirm the delivery in the system later. You go ahead." He was breaking a rule (parcels need to be scanned before handover) to achieve a goal (deliver the parcel to the consignee), placing an informal human connection ahead of the protocol. And I think about the 7-Eleven clerk, who did the opposite: he guarded the gate of the system (SOP says parcels need to be scanned first), choosing the quiet safety of predictability.

Neither is wrong. One builds the kind of foundation you can run a major system on; the other fuels the chaotic, breathtaking speed of a hardware supply chain that brings prototypes to life overnight. As entrepreneurs, we're often told the goal of growth is to eliminate friction—to build a perfectly automated, SOP-driven machine. But my journey through these different landscapes has made me wonder: if we digitize every gray zone and formalize every ripple, what happens to the human agency that saves us when the system inevitably crashes?

The magic of flexibility isn't that it's flawless. It's that it's a constant, live translation between the ripple and the rule. In the end, we don't build businesses to "worship" a perfect barcode scan. We build them to serve the people on both sides of the counter. And sometimes the most entrepreneurial thing we can do is leave enough room in the system for a favor, or a bit of trust extended before it's earned.