The bulk of the skillset I need is how, as an IT consultant, I can begin to work within my own company and then help clients be open to trying new approaches. So often, new thinking is seen as risky and the answer is "Great idea, but this project is too urgent/important/big to try that right now". For all the credibility Agile has already got, it is still rarely practiced and seems terribly hard to inject as an external agent. It is doubly hard in big-bang data integration progects with long chains of (inter)dependencies.
The Insanity of the What-by-When
May 2, 2011 - 8:16pm
When you agree to take an action, do you also give others a commitment of when you’ll do it by (the so-called “what-by-when”)? As much as this practice is generally recommended in today’s business world, allow me to offer a contrary view: This practice has big downsides, and obscures a better way that comes from an altogether different paradigm.
The alleged benefit of routinely asking for or offering a “what-by-when” upon agreeing to do an action is simple and straightforward: It increases others’ confidence that we’ll actually do it, encourages us to consciously own our commitments, and builds trust over time by showing others that we can manage to these commitments. Sounds great, and sometimes it is – it’s vastly better than an environment where no one can count on anything, because everyone just works on whatever happens to catch their attention in any moment. I’m not suggesting you throw out what-by-whens and move backwards to this kind of unconscious chaos.
Yet there are times when reality simply dashes our best-laid plans to rubble anyway, despite all the conscious ownership of commitments we might otherwise hold. And even when we manage to temporarily control the wild whims of reality, there are still significant costs and risks to the what-by-when approach – and we can do better.
To illustrate my point about costs and risks, let’s say I’m in a meeting and agree to take an action. You ask me when I’ll have it done by. I think for a second and say “by Tuesday”, which satisfies you, and thus we have a makeshift social contract. Here’s the trouble with that: When I agreed to finish the action by Tuesday, I didn’t actually create any more hours in a day to do it, as nice as that would be. So that means I’ve now got to prioritize this action into a list of other possible things I could be doing with those hours, and thus de-prioritizing something else.
So when I gave you a by-when commitment, I made a prioritization decision that affected many other actions on my plate – and I did it without even looking at them, completely blind, and certainly without weighing the relative priorities of everything on my plate. My conscious commitment came with unconscious prioritization. Taking it one step further, I’ve also now introduced a new risk: That I will end up working on something to meet a commitment – often an artificial commitment – regardless of whether it’s the most important thing for me to be working on in the moment given the organization’s broader purpose.
With by-whens flying around, it’s easy to end up unconsciously chasing commitments rather than consciously selecting and working on the most important action in every moment. And just because you gave someone a by-when on an action doesn’t make it the most important thing to do; sometimes it even makes sense to drop a commitment in service of tackling a more important task that you hadn’t anticipated when you made the original commitment.
Sure, you can manage that by resetting expectations, but that’s another thing to manage and thus more cost to giving a by-when commitment – it adds rigidity and takes constant energy to hold. Yet another insidious cost is the weight of a looming by-when: it adds a psychic stressor, and tempts us to get stuck in our own “should’s”, which is really just fighting reality. Sometimes we try to magically conjure more hours in a day to deal with the stress of a by-when, often by pulling the hours from recharge time, which can be quite taxing and highly unsustainable.
All that said, I get it, I really do – the by-when approach helps us deceive ourselves that reality is more predictable and controllable than it actually is, and that’s among the most comforting deceptions we humans engage in. And it’s from this predict-and-control foundation that it builds trust – it lures others into the deception so they too can relax in a sense of certainty. And this works, at least to a point – it does build trust. Though it’s built on an awfully shaky foundation, it’s still better than unconscious chaos. Again, I’m not suggesting anyone throw out their what-by-when commitments, at least not until they have an effective replacement.
So what can replace the illusion of control we offer others with our by-when habit? First, we need a good way of organizing our lives and our work; one which allows us to reliably hold everything we could do, and always be confident that we are working on the most important thing we could be doing in every given moment, fully consciously and without losing anything. David Allen’s brilliant Getting Things Done® (GTD®) method is by far the best approach I’ve found for this at an individual level, and methods exist for doing the same at a team-level, such as the agile project management methods that developed in the software industry.
Once you’ve got systems in place that support conscious flow, you can now build trust by offering others transparency, grounded projections (not commitments), and a way to influence your priorities. Instead of offering them the illusion of predictability (while you’re barely holding it all together), you engage them in your process of ruthlessly facing reality moment-to-moment, and always working on the most important thing first.
So what about by-when commitments to clients, or other external deadlines? Sometimes you do have to make a by-when commitment and manage to it, though there’s much to be gained by making that the exception, not the rule. And even when it feels normal and needed, there are often other options. As I’d say to my clients when I ran a software development contracting company: Do you want me to promise you a date that we both know is a lie, and surprise you shortly before that date with an unexpected change which you’re then at the mercy of? Or do you want me to give you so much day-to-day transparency and control that you don’t have to trust me, because you’ll see exactly where we are and where we’re headed at every moment, and be able to influence the project’s direction throughout? Most clients chose the latter, and we had the organizational processes in place to support it.
So what can you do to shift your own by-when habit? First adopt a good individual organizational system like GTD® that’s built on a dynamic steering foundation – this is a prerequisite to moving beyond the what-by-when without big costs in trust and capacity to deliver. Then be more aware of the cost whenever you do give a by-when commitment – you’re making a prioritization decision in the dark, tempting yourself to work on something that isn’t the most important thing first, and forcing yourself to use a stressful predict-and-control management process to honor the commitment. Give the by-when when it really feels important and worth that cost to do so, and whenever possible replace it by offering others more transparency and influence in your work and prioritization system. And finally, look for ways to embody this at a team and organizational level with practices like Holacracy and agile project management, to wean the whole company from its predict & control addiction to ruthlessly facing reality in a sense-and-respond flow.
Comments
Submitted by Aaron B. (not verified) on June 11, 2011 - 11:29pm. #
My what-by-when thought process usually goes something like this: "if I buckled down and worked on nothing else, I could do that in a couple days, so I'll promise it in a couple weeks to be sure." But then of course I know all that, so I don't start on it until 13 days later; then when something inevitably comes up or it takes longer than I predicted, I end up overdue. So I totallly agree that what-by-when sucks.
But I'm not sure how to offer "so much day-to-day transparency and control that [they] don’t have to trust me."
Say I'm programming an e-commerce system for a small business. Once I have the basics working, I can set it up on a test box where they can see it, but that's still a what-by-when, because they'll want to know when they can see it. In the meantime, I could give them access to my code, but it wouldn't mean anything because they're not programmers -- that's why they hired me. If I decide to put their job off a few days because something more important came up (or I went fishing), I could throw some boilerplate in there and they wouldn't know the difference. Either I'm honestly putting their project first or I'm not, and I don't see any way to give them control over that that I can't get around. If there's a transparency system that allows a client to confidently oversee a project without understanding the technical details, I'd like to know about it. That'd be impressive.
Submitted by Brian Robertson on June 12, 2011 - 3:27pm. #
Hi Aaron,
It's definitely a challenge, especially in software development. The best answer I know of to your question is in the agile software development methods - they've done a really good job of getting that transparency, and I've seen some pretty transformative results from them. They take a big shift for both client and development team to get there, on many levels, though once new habits are formed they offer quite a bit of the solution you're asking about I think.
Hope that helps, and thanks for sharing!
- Brian
Submitted by Aaron B. (not verified) on June 13, 2011 - 10:26pm. #
Thanks, Brian. As you say, it's a big shift from the traditional "flowchart it and deliver a finished product by date X" model, but it looks promising, especially for web development.
Submitted by Johannes Walker on June 14, 2011 - 4:25am. #
In the end nothing replaces good old honesty. If I am really commited to a project and do my best to deliver, it won't be hard to include the client or the receicving party in the process in a transparent way and make them not only feel taken care of but also empowered to be part of the process.
If one juggels to many projects, barely makes ends met and does not want the other parties to realy know about it then the best system is not going to provide the client with feeling safe or part of the process..
I just made a step out of the 'What-by-When" paradigm by implementing a version of Bryan's peg board which he uses to prioritize and keep track of his projects at H1.
Instead of the peg board, I put all my projects on a spreadsheet, sorted in columns by the party who initiated each project. I posted and shared it on Gogle Docs so everyone can see the bigger context of all the projects I am working on, take back owner ship and participate in the prioritization of "their" projects and see the progress including next actions.
It immediately reduced pressure on my side by creating a sense of joint ownership and larger context.
Johannes
Submitted by Brian Robertson on January 10, 2012 - 10:53am. #
Hi Folks,
I recently had an e-mail exchange with one of our clients about this topic which I thought others might find valuable, so I'm sharing the relevant excerpt here. And, another tip-of-the-hat to David Allen, whose work (Getting Things Done) catalyzed much of my own understanding and distinction-making capacity around this topic. Here's the excerpt:
... To clarify, the Holacracy rule at play here is that you don’t attach “by-when’s” (i.e. make date commitments) to actions taken during the core circle meetings. Capturing information about the action that relates to dates is just fine; i.e. “Julie: Schedule regular meetings for every other Tuesday starting Jan. 31st” is just fine, as that’s just more information about what action to take, but “Doug: Schedule retreat design meeting by this Friday” is not, as there’s a by-when commitment in that one.
Someone then asked for more about how these two examples were really different; i.e. don't both commit to a by-when? I responded:
The distinction Holacracy aims for is about shifting how action-taking is held/interpreted/understood, rather than preventing any particular words or phasing necessarily. So, I was reading “Schedule regular meetings for every other Tuesday starting Jan. 31st” as just including information about the desired recurring schedule for the meetings, which is fine, rather than something that implied a commitment to necessarily take the action by that date, which is misaligned with what assigning an action means in Holacracy. Likewise, to get even more fuzzy, an action like “Send the client the proposal by Tuesday” is wording I would avoid, but “Send the client the proposal (which was promised to them by Tuesday)” is probably okay – it’s capturing information about reality that might help in consciously prioritizing the action, but is not implying a date-commitment on the part of the action-taker (at least as I read it).
The rules of Holacracy are not about any particular wording to use or avoid, but about how we collectively understand the commitments underneath what “taking an action” means. With Holacracy at play, taking an action in a circle meeting is by-definition (per the Constitution) making the commitment to (1) consciously track the action, (2) consciously prioritize it against other possible actions you could take as you continually decide where to direct your attention and energies, and to (3) consciously choose to do it as soon as it becomes the most important thing you could do among your possible actions, all things considered. That commitment may actually be at-odds with a commitment to “do it by Tuesday”, which requires much less consciousness to deliver upon, as you may end up doing it later than Tuesday – not because you’ve unconsciously dropped it, but because you have very consciously (and continually) selected a more valuable usage of your attention and energy which is more aligned with the organization’s purpose given current reality.
So, whatever wording is used in capturing actions, the key is to hold them differently and shift the cultural understanding to one where action-taking implies a deeper obligation of consciousness than the by-when paradigm embodies and evokes. There’s also another piece of this about moving past just trusting someone else’s “by when” in a way that gives over our power to them, and bypasses a more conscious holding of our own needs – i.e. if my role cares about it, it’s up to me to own it and follow-up with the person, without giving in to the illusion of control a nice predictable “by-when” commitment offers me (an alluring drug to be sure, though not as effective for manifesting a purpose as consciously holding whatever needs holding, maintaining my own stance of power and following-up as-needed, and then consciously facing reality head-on without that illusion, come what may).
Hope some of you find this useful or clarifying!
All the best,
- Brian
Submitted by Norman (not verified) on January 13, 2012 - 2:25pm. #
Brian,
I really appreciate what you are trying to get at here as the by-when commitment, when done without the full understanding of the impact on one''s total commitments is in reality a false promise. And as such has tremendous negative consequences for the individual at their relationships.
Yet I instinctively feel you are addressing a Context level issue with an Activity level solution. I can certainly comfortably give someone a by-when commitment if I am very clear about the full range of impacts of my commitment. AS you say a system like David's GTD(R) is a good tool to help with that.
THe issue isn't the Activity of giving someone a by-when commitment, it is the COntext of how I am being with that commitment.
Norman
Submitted by Brian Robertson on January 13, 2012 - 2:38pm. #
Thanks for the comment Norman!
A thought in follow-up: You added that you can in fact "comfortably give someone a by-when commitment if I am very clear about the full range of impacts of my commitment." While that rings true for me in theory, I doubt we often have that level of certainty, even when we think we do - reality is just too full of uncertainty for that to be a common case (and even when it looks like it is, counting on that certainty opens us up for unpleasant surprises).
Aside from that, if I'm working reasonably closely with someone, I'd also prefer to both give and receive a commitment to more consciously hold the action than is required by the by-when approach (see my comment above just before yours about this). Otherwise, we still have all the potential downsides of allowing the by-when to lull us into the unconsciousness prioritization I mention in the post.
All that said, I'm effectively giving someone a by-when action commitment every time I tell them I'll meet them at noon for lunch, or be at that meeting at 4pm. So, there's clearly room for them at times, though I try like mad to avoid giving them whenever practical due to their downsides, and because I want a higher standard of consciousness at play...
- Brian
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About the Author
Brian Robertson
Brian is an experienced entrepreneur, CEO, and organizational pioneer. His work with Holacracy has found international support within both the conventional business world and cutting-edge movements and thought-leaders.
Brian is an experienced entrepreneur, CEO, and organizational pioneer. His work with Holacracy has found international support within both the conventional business world and cutting-edge movements and thought-leaders.
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Submitted by Neelesh (not verified) on May 2, 2011 - 9:47pm. #
In complexity theory, life is viewed as a 'dancing landscape' in which there is diversity, connectedness, inter-dependence and adaptation amongst all sentient participants.
The objective pay-off function needs to dance between 'explore' and 'exploit' continuously, which is what Holacracy One calls 'Dynamic Steering'. This is done through a process called 'Simulated Annealing' which is a metaphor drawn from mathematics and engineering.
Once we understand this, asking for 'time commitments' such as 'by next Tuesday' will look like a foolish, antiquated caveman's request. The best one can say is: 'I will try to do my best and keep you psoted. If that is not good enough for you, we must have a discussion on Holacracy, or Complexity Theory'!