It's coming...Follow Up Perspectives

I enjoy the writing that I do here, and in my last post, I indicated writing is a tool that helps me synthesize and articulate and develop thoughts that would otherwise remain abstract.

Fantastic for me, although perhaps selfish.  I'm flattered whenever something I write resonates with someone or triggers their thinking muscles.  But I want to offer more than just my perspective.

To kick off June (June! Next week! Already!!), I'm going to add a new feature to this blog called Follow Up Perspectives.  It will start as a new category of blog posts of follow-ups that provide links to the writing and analysis other fine people have done on the subject.

Follow Up Perspectives will be:

• Informative, so I will include references that allow you to skim, to swim and dive deep.  
• Balanced and inclusive.  It would be easy to find material that reinforces my conclusions, but that isn't really good sportsmanship.  References to other perspectives and view points.
• Open for discussion.  Your experience and insights matter!  Leave comments, send me links, continue the conversation.  

Follow ups will be published about a week after the initial post.  The first topic will be lessons in complexity.

Until then,
Andrea

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.  

Flipping the diet segment

Standing in line for lunch today I saw a row of recently launched drinks sitting on the order counter.  All of them had the word "diet" in the name.

We've come to understand the "diet" description as another word for giving something up, for going without in the name of a longer-term result.  It gets me thinking about market segmentation.

If I owned a soft drink company, I would have two broad segments of offerings, except I would go about naming them a different way.  The healthier options - those with less or no sugar, no artificial flavorings - would just be the regular deal.  I wouldn't call it "diet" drink A or "healthy choice" drink A.  It would be my default offering, the one you would get if you didn't specify any qualifying characteristic.  The other segment would be the one I would call out with a different name.  Maybe "diabetes express" drink A or "High-Carb" drink A.  Don't think that would work?  Is it unprofitable to alienate the population of consumers that haven't yet jumped on the health conscious bandwagon?

Maybe that's why I don't own a soft drink company.

-Andrea

The moment before

I catch my myself wallowing in possibility.  I really get to know it.  There's the feeling of the impatient butterflies in my stomach. There's the nervousness that gets uncomfortable.  When I have my wits about me, I go for a run, work it out of my system, and return home more focused and clear.  Other times I throw my energy into something else, a tangential task that suddenly takes on more importance than it should.  Like reorganizing the kitchen yet again.  How can I expect to concentrate on this other thing without an organized kitchen? Or an empty dirty clothes hamper? Or with those books I have left to read sitting there, waiting to tell me something that might be important?

This place is the moment before execution, the moment before the critical step that once taken means I can no longer go back.  It's the step I take that crosses the line between thinking about a good idea and having a permanent record of actually trying to act on it.  It's pregnant with anticipation and possibility and visions of success and shaded by fear of failure.  It is as if prolonging this moment preserves a vision of the future that is sure to be sullied by the messiness of the real world.  I hold uncertainty at bay, allowing myself to ignore the unexpected that threatens to extinguish the dream completely.

This place is the shore around water that looks deceptively shallow.  I walk all around it, dip a toe in here or there, develop rationalizations for why the water is colder or deeper than I expected.  I could keep going in these circles forever, spiraling in as the water eventually dries up, leaving nothing but salt from a good idea that once had potential.

I'm reminded of how hard it was for me to learn to swim as a kid.  I was sure I had to fight the water in order to survive.  I worked so hard, flailed my limbs so desperately, panicking every time my head slipped even a little from its strained position over the water.  I couldn't swim very far at all before exhaustion set in.  I would be enrolled again, thinking I needed more practice.  I was the oldest kid in swimming lessons by that point and I felt like a miserable failure.  Eventually, many years later, I learned to swim thanks to a patient friend and a different approach.  Instead of focusing on all the different activities, I simply floated, adding movement here or there until it all came together.  I was amazed at how easy it really was, how very little energy was needed to tread water.  Even better, I actually enjoyed swimming.

It doesn't matter how much more prepared I think I need to be.  The more preparations I continue to make, the more I actually have to lose in terms of sunk time and energy.  Going through all these motions won't necessarily keep me from drowning.  I can't control all of the circumstances no more than I can control the weather.   There will be adjustments.  There will be changes.  What I have to do is frame my psyche to be comfortable with the little waves, to be confident in my ability to navigate the current, to swim out to meet the cresting waves rather than recoil from them.  Most of all, I have to remember how to float, how to slow down and see what is happening when I start to slip under.

The door of my refrigerator boasts a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt that I sometimes forget about, but when I rediscover it, I smile to myself, stand a little straighter, and remember where I put my courage.

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face...Do the thing you think you cannot do."

-Andrea