Stop your team from thinking small

“Build it in a month? You’re crazy!”

My client looked confused. She hired me to help her plan and execute a high-stakes internal IT project. But after what I said, I could see on her face that she was regretting that idea.

“Listen…” she said.

“Didn’t you recently Tweet that half a project manager’s job is explaining to stakeholders you can’t make a baby in one month with 9 mothers?”

Yup. That was me. Guilty as charged.

“Then why would you suggest that we build this in a month, while my best engineers say it’ll take 10?”

“Here’s the thing” I explained

“I know that a month is a stretch. But you just explained that 10 months is too long and feels like an arbitrary number.”

She nodded.

“But with the current ideas from your team, we won’t get close to the 6 months you need to make your total planning work.”

As no one was protesting, I continued.

“They’ll shave off a day here or there. But we need to stop thinking linearly, and I’m trying to get your team to think differently.”

Let me explain…

If you try to improve something by 10%, you can almost always solve the problem with brute force and caffeine.

Do a little more. Work a few weekends. Throw two extra people at it, or leave out that extra test (please don’t).

It’s all incremental thinking.

If instead of 10% you try to improve 10x, you completely change the conversation.

Doing more won’t cut it. You can’t go 10x with optimization. You need to radically re-think how you get from A to B.

Only when you make a goal impossible, you’re forced to stop working based on your current assumptions and knowledge.

Instead, you force yourself to open up to new ideas and consider angles you’ve never considered.

It’s pretty simple…

First, you make a goal impossible. Then you add the secret word.

“Building it in a month is impossible, unless…?”

What would need to be true for that to work? Go brainstorm with your team. Nothing is off limits, as long as it has a reasonable shot at getting you to your goal.

And while some ideas will be a little too extreme, others that sound crazy at first are pretty reasonable once you see them in the bigger picture.

Because overspending on one part of the project to get something off the critical path or eliminate a big dependency might not make sense in isolation.

But in the overall project, it might just be the smartest thing to do.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing here.

Zoom out and raise the stakes.

Because seemingly impossible goals act as a filter for high-impact ideas.

The purpose is not to get it down to exactly 1 month. The purpose is to force different thinking and cut all the small stuff that’ll shave off a day here or there.

Because that won’t solve your problem.

You get the idea, right?

If you shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land amongst the stars.

One final warning…

This is a very effective approach, but it can backfire.

If you suggest doing it in 1 month instead of 10, that needs to be remotely possible. If it’s not, and you have no way to show your team that it is, you risk losing your credibility.

So how do you know if you’re not overplaying your hand?

Experience.

If you’ve seen a dozen of similar projects before, you’ll know exactly how far you can push it.

And what if you don’t have that? You can take a chance, or bring in some experience, like in this case.

If you could use some experience in your project, consider doing a Project Sprint with me. We’ll do a structured workshop to get your project underway, and I’ll be there to guide the implementation.

You can learn more about a Project Sprint here.

Talk soon,
Jasper