Small steps to a larger goal
Last Updated on Thursday, 20 May 2010 04:01 Written by Steve Monday, 26 October 2009 02:24
On a recent trip to the Bay Area, I had a chance to share a dinner with an amazingly productive and visionary friend who works in the social change field. In the midst of dinner she asked me a very interesting question,
“When your goal is very long-term, how do you decide what to do today? What is your process for making choices about what gets done first?”
Really, really interesting question that is at the heart of my work, and at the heart of all self-directed knowledge work. With knowledge work, we often aren’t told what to do, or even what our outcomes should be. We have to start with a long-term vision and walk back to tangible tasks to do and real systems to build.
In the course of our conversation some cool things came out.
First, I tend to prefer tasks that get others unstuck. If people can’t get some of their work done because of a bug or bad process, I want to address that as soon as I can. A key thing about knowledge work–so much of what gets done gets done by other people. We’re almost always in teams, and unsticking teammates is crucial to team success.
Another thing about getting other people unstuck is it shows you are listening. Addressing a piece of work that others have raised shows you respect the needs and input of others. That will bank good will for when you need it in the future.
Second, I like to do things that overtly show movement in the right direction. People love incremental improvement they can see. It’s much better to take many small steps toward a goal, and let people see them happen, than to take a giant leap that happens behind closed doors. Salesforce.com has done an exceptional job at this over the years. There is a faith among the customer base that all problems will be eventually resolved, because they’ve seen progress every 3 months for years now, even if there isn’t faith they will be all addressed tomorrow.
Third, do things that don’t create a big support tail for you. When you work with a community of users or customers, their requests can easily overwhelm you. Don’t jump to do work that creates an untenable support load. Analyze all work you’re considering with this lens. It’s not always clear if you’re setting yourself up for a big tail, so be careful. Doing things without a tail will allow you to move on to the next task with all you’ve got.
Fourth, think about how you would undo or improve the work you just accomplished. If you are implementing a process that thousands of people will interact with, you want to get it right the first time because changing that in the future may involve re-training all those people. But if you’re designing how a request from that system is handled behind the scenes, it might not affect many users to swap out a new way to handle that request. If you’re abstracted from the end users, with technology or personal processes, things will be easier to change. And if things are easy to change in the future, you can move more quickly now, and get more done.
Finally, don’t make any decisions today that you can‘t put off to tomorrow. This may sound like procrastination, but it’s not. You will usually have more information tomorrow than you do today, so if you can make progress without locking yourself into something, you’re better off.
I hope this helps you think about the knowledge work you’re doing every day. We all make this kind of analysis innumerable times subconsciously in our work. It was great to have my friend raise the question and get me thinking about it.
thanks again.
That was a very interesting, very helpful. Thanks
Thanks Jodie! And thanks Rajesh, I’m glad you liked it.
Great post. Thanks. V. thoughtful.
Thanks!
David Allen’s latest drilldown on this goes, from highest altitude to finest detail towards:
Perspective
purpose/principles
vision
goals
responsibilities
projects
actions
each rolls up to the higher domain, keeping bridges that span the gap between actions and goals and purpose.
Terrific piece, Steve — I esp. like points 2 and 3, and I think that question about “support tail” will be something I try to integrate into my own work.
I’m not as sure about point #1 — helping people get unstuck. On the one hand I can guarantee that everyone on my team would LOVE to see my adopt this principle, because I can be a huge bottleneck for decision-making and even on some aspects of project implementation. On the other hand, I find that a focus on unsticking other people’s workflow is probably the number one way that I get blown off of long-term goals and trapped in short-term problem-solving. And whenever I have made a great effort to step out of that troubleshooting role, in order to focus on some longer-term priorities, I see the rest of the team stretching in new ways, and developing their own capacity to support one another or to unstick themselves.
Clearly this is a place where balance is crucial: listening and providing help when needed, but perhaps not so readily that you’re distracted from your own goals, or limiting your colleagues’ self-sufficiency. My gut and limited observation suggests there may be a bit of a gender line here: I’m betting women err on the side of doing too much unsticking, to the detriment of their own focus, while men may be more prone to under-un-sticking (TM).
But I’d be very curious to hear other people’s thoughts on that balance, and whether there’s a gender dimension here. The only people I don’t want to hear from are my immediate coworkers, who are probably wondering why I am commenting on someone’s blog when I could be getting them unstuck.
Thanks Alexendra! A note about point #1. The position I’m in is a very leveraged one. I’m one person supporting software in use by over 2000 nonprofits, and multiple consulting partners. Our mission here is to help them be successful, so getting them unstuck is what this particular enterprise is all about. A few hours of work on my end can allow 10 nonprofits improve their process tomorrow, and spend cycles elsewhere.
I do think that in teams #1 is critical, and I love your perspective on not doing that all the time. Especially in management, greasing the wheels for others is only part of the job. Balance does seem to be the key here. Also structuring things to make sure that balance is possible–we need to make time for that vision piece that always gets usurped by the fire of the day.
And I also make a large distinction between getting people unstuck and doing their work for them. I like think my un-stucking style leans closer to the Socratic method than a Fixer role. Fixers are always going to be a bottleneck, but teachers expand capacity with each effort.
This hierarchy is great–I love David Allen. I see it as concentric circles with the purpose at the center. I guess it’s all those years I worked with Gideon Rosenblatt, but that’s how I envision it.
it is refreshing to hear prose from someone who spends his life in the trenches. thank you!
The original two questions are great, but I would add one more:
“When your goal is very long-term, how do you…. re-charge your batteries?”
Being the steward of long-term goals can get lonely, and turn-over in management can be disruptive. Make sure to develop rituals that affirm the goal (be it language in various strategic plans, your own performance objectives, or semi-annual brown bag lunches). These rituals will foster new relationships and identify potential champions. It is also your responsibility to build and preserve the knowledge base of documents related to the goal (the half life of documents tends otherwise to be about 60 days).
Doug, I agree that keeping the fires burning over the long-term is a challenge for so many of us. Thanks for the thoughts on dealing with that.
Great read!
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