Working in uncertainty

A phrase often heard in the startup world and a mantra of entrepreneurs striving to make forward progress is 'start before you’re ready'. It’s a motto that can apply to many of us.

OK not surgeons or pilots!

Yet we can spend (waste?) a lot of time waiting for the ‘right’ time, or waiting until we ‘feel right’ or for the right path to appear.

If we keep waiting for the most perfect and ideal conditions or we do all that ‘busy work’ that isn’t about launching or shipping or changing something, then we will be waiting... forever.

Things may not ever be 100% finished or ready; we'll have to start, launch, print, send, go before we feel ready ... or are ready.

Most things aren't certain when you're working in uncertainty.

 Q: Why do you think we can be fearful to start before we're ready? Leave a comment below sharing your thoughts.

Continue to cause damage - or decide you’ll make a difference

I’ve been posting this week on how being a leader who has contemporary facilitation skills is a huge advantage in today's workplace.

The time we waste in dull/boring/ineffective meetings should be enough of an incentive to make change!

Massive productivity gains are made when leaders know how to lead engaging, inspiring and productive meetings that get work done AND protect people’s self esteem so they stay engaged.

You can change culture by changing how you run meetings, workshops, consultations and conversations.

But damage is done to people in meetings when they're treated poorly, ignored, interrupted, excluded, forgotten, shut down.

It’s not on them to ‘speak up’; it’s on you to extend your leadership capability to include people, elicit information and contributions, helping to make work easier.

Facilitation is a life skill to be developed, not a simple skill to read a few articles about.

Do you commit to putting facilitation on your professional development agenda?

The difference you'll make will be immeasurable; the damage to people otherwise could be extreme. 

The waste of misdirected effort

Imagine working on a task or project and later finding that much of what you’ve done isn’t needed, that you'd kept heading down a path that wasn't necessary.

I noticed a colleague working on a project recently, spending hours and days preparing and producing some work and ... it’s not needed. It was never needed. They estimated they'd spent a week of time, at a minimum - all of it not needed.

Time could have been better directed towards more valuable activities.

We make many decisions every day about what we’re doing; I doubt we’re truly thinking about what’s the best use of our time. We get caught up in activities and tasks that we spend way too much time on - disproportionate to their value or their return to us or others.

The 'sunk cost fallacy' drags us in and we don’t want to turn around and head back out because we wrongly believe we need to stay the course and keep on down this path. But we don’t have to.

It’s never too late to call time on something that’s not right or not valuable or not worth it. No matter how far you’re along the 'wrong' path.

Be willing to call ‘stop’ or ‘time’ or say ‘hang on a moment; can we pause here?’ and then shift to the more valuable path.

Determine the minimum effective dose

What’s the least you could do, the least that’s required?

Some people think the world is going to ruin, that quality will drop if we don’t do our bestest of the very best of the best on every single thing we work on.

Oh sure, high quality and attention to detail matters, but not on everything! Keep quality for the things that really matter.

The whole minimum viable product (MVP) strategy is an example of doing just enough of the valuable stuff for a product or service to get it ready to put it out there.

So what’s the least you need to put in? Do that and then test or validate it.

Oh, and there’s the minimum effective dose strategy too. Medicos and pharmaceuticos know about identifying what’s the minimum amount of a drug or treatment that will ‘do the job’. (There’s the ‘do no harm’ mantra in there too.)

Let's play the same game. Stop doing harm to your self, your mind (and others) thinking you need a maximum dose of something (or everything) ... or that more will make it better.

Your good enough is likely good enough. Go test and validate it sooner than you think you can, to see how good enough it really is. That’s a minimum effective strategy that will bring some mega results.

Overcooking the work - Overworking the cook

It was a reality cooking show and a competitor ruined the protein for all of the meals by overcooking it. In the bin! What a waste!

This can happen in our everyday life. When we have a task to complete we can keep cooking and cooking it, trying to make it better. Then at some point it’s overdone, overcooked. What a waste!

It isn’t only the waste of effort; also the waste of energy, time, resources, power, space, people ...

Even though time is our most precious resource, we often act as if we - and others - have plenty of it. We still get distracted everyday, overcooking, overthinking and overworking, getting dragged deep deep deep into the work of our ‘cook’ - whatever the 'cook' is for you.

The kitchen's 'rare/medium/well done' scale is a useful analogy to work out how much your task needs to be cooked.

It’s best to scope out the minimum amount of work required (so you can then test or validate) before proceeding any further. You don’t need to go for well done, initially ... ever.

Where might you be overcooking something at the moment? Have you checked with others, validated your thinking or tested out your progress? Pause and give it a taste test.