The Business Sensei

The Less You Do…

When I started practicing jujitsu, my sensei would teach a technique and then tell us not to over-control our partners when we attempted to do it. We’d all nod and successfully fail to execute the technique. My sensei would demonstrate it again, and we’d grab our partners and attempt the throw, jerking and hauling, and adjusting position until our partners completely failed to leave the ground. Sensei would demonstrate the technique yet again, and eventually we might notice that he really didn’t do very much. There was none of this jerking and adjusting and fiddling around. Rather, he’d start the technique and then just wait while the person he was doing it to reacted. He seemed to be not exerting any control or effort at all, yet his partners just fell down.

What my sensei had learned, and the rest of us had not, was patience. We would start a technique and when we didn’t get immediate results, we would assume it wasn’t working and try to fix it. Our attempts to “fix” the technique were, in fact, the reason it wasn’t working. How rapidly a technique works depends on the specific technique and the person you are doing it to: a taller person simply takes longer to go over your shoulder than a shorter person. A lock takes longer to run through a long, flexible body than a short, tight one. By not giving those bodies time to react, we were actually negating the effects of the techniques as fast as we started them.

I find a very similar problem playing out in the work place: a manager tells his group to get something done and before they’ve really had a chance to react, he’s running around exhorting them or trying to figure out why they aren’t moving. In fact, they were moving. Now that he’s in the way, they’re not moving any more. It takes time for a group to process information and then figure out the best ways to move forward. That critical planning time is essential to the group’s success. In short, the group needs time to react.

When the leader starts running around, he is effectively negating the progress of the group just as beginning students in jujitsu negate the progress of their techniques. What is worse, though, is that the manager’s frequent interventions themselves become the focus of attention. Instead of concentrating on the work that needs to get done, everyone is paying attention to the interventions and trying to change course each time something new is said or some new instruction is given. As people become steadily more frustrated, the quality of information processing only declines.

In one company, a particular VP had some issues with the way managers in his department were working. He instructed them to make changes, even brought in coaches to help them with the changes. Each time the coaches showed up, he had a different critical problem that they had to focus on “right now!” The coaching ended up having little consistency from one day to the next. The net result was that the company spent a good deal of money and got very little to show for it.

So how do you avoid the trap of too many interventions?

Start by defining what your results should look like. In jujitsu, this is often pretty easy, usually involving a person lying on the ground. In a business environment, it may be a bit more complicated but is still eminently doable. It just takes some up front investments in time and energy.

As much as possible, define the steps you will take to get those results. What are they and how do they connect to the results? Sometimes you can’t draw a perfectly clear path, so you need to make sure you include steps to evaluate and adjust course as needed.

Then determine how you’ll know you’re making progress. What things will happen that will give you early feedback that you are on course or off course? Having some clue about both is important: if no warning signs are appearing, you don’t want to mess around. Depending on what you are doing, the first signs of success may take a while.

This brings us to our next point: how long will it take to get results? Everyone wants results Right Now, but rarely does the universe cooperate. Indeed, as we’ve already seen, the more we demand Right Now, the longer things end up taking. It’s important, therefore, to consider how long the first steps will take. Of course, if you really want to make success more likely, make sure you start with some easy steps that can be completed quickly and will build momentum. Once you start succeeding, it’s easier to keep going.

Like in jujitsu, it often really is the case that the less you do, the more you get.

Fatal Deadlines

“It ships on Monday!”

“We have a deadline to meet!”

“Why did you even set a deadline if you’re going to change it?”

Deadlines. They matter until they don’t. They are far away until suddenly they are right on top of us. Sometimes a deadline is sacrosanct, unchangeable no matter the situation or the quality of the product: one technology CEO I knew released his products on the day he promised them and nothing would change his mind. It was a point of pride for him to always release on schedule. His customers, however, were equally adamant that they wished it would be a point of pride for him to release products that worked. Yes, this particular CEO would release a non-functional product on the chosen date and then deal with fixing it in the field rather than slip the date and deal with the problems. Eventually, the customers won: they went to a competitor.

Other times, deadlines seem to be almost mystical talismans: setting a deadline will magically cause a product to be ready by that date. In one rather dramatic example from early in my career in high tech, the CEO turned to the head of engineering and asked him when the product would be ready.

“September 1^st, best case scenario,” was the curt reply.

The CEO nodded, picked up the phone, and said, “We’ll have it ready by July 15^th.”

The head of engineering did a very credible job of not exploding.

When July 15^th rolled around, the product was not ready. The CEO was shocked. His reaction was, “I set a deadline!”

Sometimes a deadline can spur people to dramatic action. Sometimes it can’t. It’s important to know which situation is which. When I was managing a team, I was once asked why I even bothered to set deadlines if I would then change them. The short answer was that it was because the only deadline that actually mattered was the one at the end, and that one we consistently managed to hit. How?

At the most basic level, deadlines are merely tools. They are powerful tools, but tools nonetheless. As will all power tools, it’s important to know how to use them properly, lest your deadline prove fatal to your success.

At the beginning of any non-routine, non-trivial project, deadlines are basically little more than wishful thinking. Early deadlines exist to give you feedback: how well is your team working? How difficult is this project turning out to be? Will we be able to marshal the resources we need at the times we need them? Are we being aggressive enough? Are we being too aggressive? That feedback provides your roadmap moving forward. Therefore, start with small deadlines: don’t rush forward in giant leaps which give you little information.

Whether you make those initial deadlines or miss them, the key is to be strategic: why did you make them? Why did you miss them? What are you learning about your team and your project? Early stage deadlines can be easily shifted and adjusted as needed, provided you don’t lose sight of the feedback they are generating. Done right, the more flexible your early deadlines, the easier it is to hit your later ones. When you do miss a deadline, recalibrate! Don’t just pile the extra work onto the next deadline; that only triggers a series of failed deadlines, which reduces productivity. Success is not how fast you can move, it’s how smoothly you can accelerate.

As the project continues, you’ll find that your ability to set useful, doable, aggressive deadlines will increase. You want your deadlines aggressive enough to excite and challenge your team, not so aggressive that people look and tell themselves that there’s no point in trying. The secret to maintaining that excitement is simple: strive for deadlines that can be beaten with serious, but not unsustainable, effort. Beating deadlines increases excitement and builds a sense of success. Failing to meet deadlines has just the opposite effect. Quite simply, when people are ahead of schedule, they work harder, are more creative and innovative, and are better at problem solving.

Many a race ends with a final sprint across the finish line. How well you’ve managed the deadlines to that point will determine how hard the sprint is, and how much fuel your team has in its tank when you get there. If the team is exhausted and burned out, your deadline will likely prove fatal to your plans. On the other hand, if the team is excited and energized, they’ll blast through that final deadline.

For the Deadline Was a Boojum, You See

“There was one who was famed for the number of things
He forgot when he entered the ship:
His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,
And the clothes he had bought for the trip.”

— Lewis Carroll, Hunting of the Snark

Lewis Carroll billed the Hunting of the Snark as an “agony in eight fits.” While it’s not entirely clear what Carroll meant by this, the sentiment well describes the process of scheduling and hitting deadlines in many organizations. Certainly it’s clear that the Bellman didn’t have a schedule, or he wouldn’t have left his crew’s belongings on the beach.

Some years ago, I worked for a software company where the CEO decided that missing a deadline was a personal failing on his part. No matter what, the software would ship on the day he had announced. Even if the product had bugs, even if it did not work, it shipped on the day the CEO had promised. “Not a single day of delay,” said he.

He preferred to ship a product that did not work and then release a bug-fix rather than delay the software even a day. He never understood why customers grew increasingly irate and would call the company to complain. He was keeping his promise to ship by a certain date, and certainly adherence to the schedule was important.

There are several problems with this belief. The most obvious, of course, is the stubborn belief that the software must go out on a specific date no matter what. Shipping any product that doesn’t work is going to upset your clients. Doing it repeatedly just makes the company look incompetent or indifferent to its customers. It is not meeting their needs to give them something that they cannot use.

Stepping back, though, from that minor problem, we have to ask what the point of the schedule was. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to why the CEO picked the dates that he did. When pushed, his reaction was that scheduling was important, otherwise things didn’t get done. True, but not necessarily relevant. Fundamentally, a schedule is a tool; like all tools, it must be used properly or there is risk of serious injury. In this case, financial injury.

A schedule is not an arbitrary set of dates put down on paper to make sure that everyone works hard and doesn’t goof off. The goal of a schedule is also not to precisely calculate how long each task will take and account for every minute. It is not a holy writ to be held to beyond the bounds of common sense or product quality, nor is it put in place in order to have something to ignore. Sadly, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen schedules designed with exactly those somewhat dubious objectives in mind. However, a well-designed schedule needs to satisfy some fairly significant constraints:

1. A schedule helps make sure you don’t forget anything. It is both a to-do list and calendar. It helps people know what to work on when so that they don’t have to waste time constantly figuring that out.
2. A schedule is a tool for marshalling resources. Building a product requires different resources, be those resources time, people, or equipment. The schedule helps make sure that the right resources are available at the right times so that the project can move steadily forward.
3. A schedule is a tool for managing dependencies. In any large project, different pieces will depend on other pieces or on obtaining external resources. Some dependencies are obvious from the beginning, others do not emerge until the project is under way. The schedule helps organize tasks and manage dependencies so that they don’t derail the project.
4. The schedule helps you determine what you can do in the time available with the resources you have; alternately, it helps you understand how long it will take to accomplish your goals with the resources you have available.
5. The schedule enables you to define reasonable checkpoints, or milestones, that will let you know if you are moving successfully toward your planned target date or if problems are emerging. Missing a milestone is feedback that something is not working as expected!
6. A schedule needs to have enough slush in it to handle unexpected problems. You can’t always determine all possible dependencies at the start; some parts of the project may turn out to be significantly more difficult than expected; you may discover that a piece that appeared to make perfect sense just won’t work and needs to be redone. When I speak about this to technology companies, someone always claims that they’ve done a few simple calculations and developed the perfect project schedule. Based on the reactions from the rest of that person’s department, I have my doubts.
7. The schedule also needs enough slush to handle external delays. If your schedule is so tight that a severe winter storm closing the roads or having someone come down with the flu or having a vendor be late on a delivery will cause real problems, then you need to rethink the schedule. As that great sage Murphy so wisely said, “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.” Plan for it.

You’ll also notice that if you design a schedule this way, you’ll tend to be running ahead of schedule, not behind. Falling behind schedule is demoralizing, particularly when the schedule feels arbitrary. Running ahead of schedule energizes the team to work harder. A team that falls behind tends to stay behind, while a team that runs ahead tends to get further ahead. In other words, nothing succeeds like success.

When you view a schedule in this way, it has the potential to be a powerful, flexible tool for getting things done as opposed to causing quality, effort, and enthusiasm to softly and silently vanish away. Isn’t that the whole point?