1. New year, new plans, new commitments
This is a time of year when many of us are in a period of looking ahead, both in our work and personal lives. On top of self-improvement resolutions to get fit, lose weight or do that thing we dreamed of doing, there are often annual planning cycles in work. As we step into the new year, we should be mindful of forces that can lead us into trouble unless we take time to think about our commitments.
Planning fallacy can be trap that can arise due to individual or systemic pressures. We can be led into subjectively report positive views of reality; hold unrealistically positive expectations, views, and memories; and to favour positive information in reasoning. This can lead us to focus optimistically on highly visible goals (whether that is a new year’s resolution or delivery of a product) whilst discounting the impact of competing time pressures. The result is overcommitment — well intentioned, but unrealistic.
In our personal lives this can have negative effects on our own self-image or our relationship with others as we can perceive ourselves as a “failure” when we miss our goals. In work the effects can be just as damaging, and lead to dangerous, long-lasting changes in culture.
Overcommitment in work can arise when there is unintentional misalignment between expectations and the real-world performance of teams, or worse, a deliberate overriding of feedback in pursuit of personal goals. The former is often the result of poor information, communication or analysis (systemic failures), whereas the latter can be due to poor practices, decisions or incentives (management failures), though there can be extensive overlap of these drivers. I will focus on the former for now and cover the management aspects in a future post.
The causes of decay in management systems
Systemic failings can grow if there is a lack of attention given to actively fighting the tendency of organisations to become increasingly complex over time (see Parkinson’s Law). The increasing complexity splits responsibilities, encourages the formation of silos and creates locally optimised versions of what had been shared resources. This can make management information increasingly difficult or even impossible to obtain on a timely basis, reducing the use of such data and therefore feedback discouraging focus on maintenance and collection of such data.
This situation can persist as resolving this is also seen as ‘somebody else’s problem’ for all concerned. By its nature, information needed for daily operations spans multiple areas of responsibility and often has lower perceived value than data on costs, revenues, headcount etc. This is compounded by the fact that by the time the reporting lines of the areas overseeing a process come together, the seniority of the management is usually so high that they are not involved in operational data issues.
The net result is separation of planning from real world data, and so a shift from data-validated to status-validated plans. This is where demand is committed to separately from the actual ability of the organisation to deliver safely, and ignoring bottlenecks in the process.
The inevitable failures that result from this kind of continual planned overcommitment destroys trust across the organisation and in turn reduces productivity due to lack of focus and context switching. All plans are unreliable in this scenario, as it is impossible to deliver all asks in the proscribed timeframe. It is especially problematic when there are dependencies between teams, as a single missed delivery can have significant ripple effects. This feeds back into the planning cycle creating an environment based on distrust and local optimisation (either for a department or project) rather than collective prioritisation and optimisation. The effect can be to increase operational risks (plans unable to adapt to emerging issues, or a lack of focus on quality and resilience) and chronic stress (another significant driver of low productivity).
So how can we escape the overcommitment trap?
The initial step has to be to clearly prioritise work — stop starting and start finishing. Even in the absence of delivery performance measures, setting a clear priority allows focus and ensures the most important work is completed. This will of course mean tough choices to stop other items — but these would not have been completed anyway. Using this approach to reduce context switching is the easiest way to increase productivity.
The second step is to measure delivery performance and use this to set a limit for accepting work into teams. Over time this will raise confidence in planning and dependency management, and increase delivery performance. If this results in work being completed early, teams can move on to the next items — but a commitment once made to others cannot be undone without loss of trust and/or wider impact.
The final step is to ensure there is a mechanism to constrain complexity in the organisation, with an aim to ease of management data availability, quality and timeliness. This needs both an initial push to build missing capabilities, and an ongoing focus to counteract organisational fragmentation and complexity growth.
