Lessons in assumptions and complexity

A perfect knock out in the first round would have been less painful, but that is not the way complexity fights.  Round after round, the matches drag on, exhausting opponents, leaving them battered.  When they've been beat down, a new fresh-faced boxer is thrown into the ring and it all begins again.

On Monday I was working through the second Fire Starter Session.*  Part of the process was reflection and analysis on my three all-time screw-ups, and then letting go of past mistakes to focus on the good stuff.  I paused before letting go because I had an "Aha!" moment I knew I had to capture.  My thoughts and experience had coalesced into a lesson I wanted to make sure I learned.  Now is maybe a good time to admit I write here to fully articulate my thoughts, to sharpen the blurry points that my brain would fill in using the temporary lookup table of recent experience. (Note: I'm going to come back to this idea of a temporary lookup table in a future post.  Get excited.  It will be good. And geeky.)  So, I'm going to write about the insights I had in the hopes of fully developing these lessons for myself so I won't forget them.  I already learned them the hard way once.

My ill-fated match with complexity lasted almost two years and dealt with the relocation of a product line from one manufacturing facility to another.  I could tell you all the reasons why it was complicated, but they don't matter.  I could tell you about the loose ends that morphed into writhing snakes, but they don't matter either.  What matters are the lessons I learned from the experience, which are:

1. Be upfront and open about assumptions.  Write them down because they will need to checked and rechecked.  Share them with everyone who has a stake in the project - the people involved in making it happen, the people committing resources, the people who make project leaders accountable.  Ask other people for their assumptions and compare.  Assumptions should be public knowledge.  Why?  They could be wrong.  They may overlook something.  They may be based on outdated information.  They might overestimate the capability of people, of systems, of the resources to be consumed.  Guess what? It's ok if assumptions turn out to be wrong.  They're assumptions, not facts.  
2. Doing hard things simply is the be all and end all of an elegant solution. If success depends on an exquisitely detailed but rigid plan that rivals the setup for an Ok Go video, it's a good idea to call a time-out and review.  Don't automatically opt for complexity and assume killer project management will make it all work (see Lesson #1).  Bewildering plans contingent on very fine points are prime opportunities for unpleasant surprises.  If this is what Plan A looks like, Plan B is probably better.  Why?  Complexity consumes resources exponentially.  The attention and oversight has to come from somewhere.  Did the hours required for administration get factored into the project cost?  Energy that could be spent on "doing" other important things gets spent on "controlling" when complexity is in the ring. What about that opportunity cost?  The ROI has to be worth all of the hidden costs, too.

Moving on,
Andrea

*The Fire Starter Sessions is the brainchild of the lovely Danielle LaPorte.  If you don't know who she is yet, go ahead and take care of that.  She's inspiring and seriously, you have to experience how this gal talks.  Your day would go a whole lot better if you had a miniature Danielle sitting on your shoulder whispering kick-ass mantras in your ear.  That's not entirely possible, but the experiencing the Fire Starter Sessions is.  The experience happens over 10 sessions on how to burn your brightest, all delivered in a e-book.  You're going to have to self-reflect.  You're going to have to be honest with yourself.  And when it's all said and done, you'll be whispering your own kick-ass mantras.