As we approach the arbitrary end of the year, many organizations are beginning the planning cycle for next year. Part of that process should be identifying what projects and activities should be stopped, for several reasons – performance, alignment with strategy, and so forth. However, equally if not more important is creating a process (and supporting culture!) that encourages stopping at any time.
Darrel Rigby, Sarah Elk, and Steve Berez discussed the opportunity of stopping faster in a recent article in Harvard Business Review.
We are terrible at stopping work, even when it’s obvious that the work is a complete waste of time and money.
We’ve all been in those meetings where we discuss projects that are delayed but someone, often for purely political reasons, still sees a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Or we see wasteful activities and requirements that don’t seem aligned with strategy or creating customer value. How many reports continue to be created every month simply because they’ve always been made, how many extra reviews of a product design, how many extra quality checks? It happens everywhere.
The downside of not stopping is huge. In addition to consuming and wasting resources, fear of not being able to stop can dampen innovation itself – we become afraid of starting.
The authors describe three ways to improve the ability to stop. There are some interesting ties with lean methods, and I’ll add one more way that has been very valuable to me in the past.
Make Decisions Reversible
When we propose new projects we usually just discuss the benefits and ROI, which then leads to funding. Status meetings evaluate project performance, but always with just the end ROI in mind. There is often an analysis of project risk and sometimes ROI is discounted by this risk, but rarely are specific go/no-go milestones included – especially ones where the failure to meet a milestone is seen as a positive. The authors describe one possibility:
Recognize business plans for what they really are: business experiments. Break large, risky gambles into a series of smaller, smarter tests. Clarify the hypotheses, the best ways to test them, and the metrics that will signal whether to persist, pivot, or pause.
That will sound very familiar to those of us in the lean world – it’s a version of Toyota kata. Iterate through a series of experiments from a current state to an end state, learning and adjusting along the way.
Make Work More Visible
Physical waste and problems are often very visible – if you go to the Gemba and have learned what to look for. Knowledge work and back office business processes are a different story.
Increasing visibility is good for everyone. It helps senior executives uncover valuable initiatives, recognize the people pushing them, and accelerate their progress. It allows employees to see projects related to their own jobs, learn from them, and identify where their expertise could solve perplexing problems or save time and money. It makes it easier for everyone to identify duplicative work and triggers discussions about whether overlapping teams should collaborate or compete. It helps teams working on interdependent steps coordinate and minimize delays.
Once again, the lean concepts of visual management and obeya can play a role. What key metrics describe the performance of the activity, process, or project? What is acceptable, and what happens when the metric is not acceptable? Where are those metrics posted, when and how are they reviewed at multiple levels?
Overpower Fear
Many organizations and leaders are beginning to talk about failure in more positive light. Failure, done right, is a learning opportunity that can lead to future innovation and success. In the kata process, failure with a small experiment helps improve the effectiveness of future experiments. But we need to do more than just talk about failure in a positive manner. Culture, incentives, and leadership need to be aligned, and that can be very difficult. Are you comfortable giving more projects to someone that has failed in a visible and appropriate manner? There is additional upside to doing that:
Finally, giving people more opportunities if their current project fails reduces the likelihood that they’ll stick with a bad idea longer than they should. Successful companies build a strong and visible backlog of compelling opportunities. They make it clear that until existing projects that aren’t panning out have stopped, new initiatives can’t be launched.
This aligns with the core lean concept of respect for people. Lean leaders help people in the organization learn and develop new skills, which can come about through appropriate failure. They reinforce the potential of ongoing experimentation to create improvement.
To the three activities described by the authors, I’ll add a forth that has been very powerful for me at multiple organizations: