Shipulski On Design

With companies, there are always competing demands and too few resources.  Always.  Don’t feel special. And there is always noise in the signals.  Always.  And it always comes down to a single question:

What do we do next?

Don’t believe me? Think about your meetings last week.  During the meetings, there was discussion about the current situation followed by discussion on what to do next.  And at the end of the meetings, there were lists of things to do next.  Those things may not get done, but there were lists of things to do next.

The competing demands create the set of possible problems to address.  And the problems are inputs to the critical decision: What do we do next?  The demands are not fully defined, which adds noise to the decision process, and there is no agreement on the underlying problem, if the problem is formulated at all.  This adds noise to the signal.  There are more demands/problems than resources, and they compete with each other for the small pool of unallocated resources and the sea of double-booked resources.  This creates emotional stress and also adds noise to the signal.

Situation Normal for all companies: Partially formed (competing) demands, disagreement on the relative priority of the ill-formed demands, incomplete (or missing) problem formulation, limited understanding of the required resources other than everyone knows there are more demands/problems than resources, and immense pressure to violate resource constraints.

I cannot give you a recipe to answer the all-important question (What do we do next?), but I can suggest ways to reduce the noise and better assess the options.

Spend some time formally fleshing out the demands before the meeting.  Dig in.  Bring data.  What is the output required? Who is asking for it? What are the inputs? What happens if we do it?  What happens if we don’t?  Come to the meeting with your analysis, but call it “a draft”.  Let others ask questions and challenge your assumptions.  Don’t be defensive.  They are not attacking you; they are trying to improve understanding to make a better decision.

The cost of making a bad decision is immense, so it makes sense to spend a lot of time preparing a good description/assessment.  The cost of over-preparing is low, so over-prepare.  Here’s a rule:

For big decisions, preparation time should be at least ten times longer than your first estimate.

Another type of assessment is often overlooked.  It’s the assessment of how well the opportunity fits with what you do well, with how you do things, and with the dispositional state of the larger system.  In short, you’re trying to answer: Is it easy?

Here are some things to consider to answer the “Is it easy?” question.  If the opportunity requires new knowledge, skills, and abilities, it will not be easy. If it requires you to work in different ways with new partners, it will not be easy.  If it cuts against an industry trend, it won’t be easy.  This is not an exhaustive list, and you should come up with your own assessment themes.  To be clear, though, these lines of assessment are different than “How many people do we need?”

Here’s a rule:

You can’t run a marathon wearing running shoes that are three sizes too small.

There is nothing wrong with having too many good opportunities and too many competing demands.  In fact, I think that’s a good sign.  I think it says you are in high demand.  And there is nothing wrong with having too few resources because, again, it means you’re in high demand.  I’ve never met a profitable company that had too few opportunities and too many resources.

Image credit — Mitchell Hirsch