We have completed another lap around the sun, and that’s often a time to think about our plans for the new year. In my previous post, I talked about New Year’s Resolutions and thinking in smaller steps rather than a goal that might take 12 months to complete. But if you only think in small steps and focus on where you want to be in a few days or weeks, then it’s often hard to know if you’re going in the right direction – there can be such a big gap between where you are and where you want to be.
If you were planning on travelling from Toronto to Montreal then you need to plan further ahead than just “which street do I take now?” You might think that was a bad example as the 401 covers the vast majority of the distance, but that assumes you’re optimising for time and that your method of travel is by road, i.e. you have already ruled out many alternatives. Take a step back and consider your goals: if minimising travel time is the primary aim, then flying is significantly faster. If you want the freedom to move around and have a meal without it impacting your travel time, then the train could be your best option.
But let’s go back to driving between the two cities, and assume we have picked the route we would like to take. We set off but before long we discover there’s a problem ahead: an accident is causing a long delay. If we had only been inspecting our progress over small steps, then we might not see the impact of the accident until we’re sitting in the traffic jam and it’s too late to do anything else. We would see a similar outcome if we set the route and followed it regardless of what we discovered along the way. One of the reasons we chose to drive is to have flexibility – we can’t easily change our route if we chose to fly or take the train.
Choosing flexibility (aka agility) may not be the cheapest, fastest or most comfortable path, but it gives us options when new information (whether that’s delays or shortcuts) is available … so we should ensure that we take advantage of that discovery, otherwise we probably shouldn’t have picked this approach!
The plans we create should provide clarity on where we want to be in the future (and why!) but we also should revise them when we see a better alternative. Sometimes it’s a detour that still gets us to our destination but in a better (faster / cheaper / safer) way, but sometimes the discovery is that our goal needs to change – maybe the reason we were heading to Montreal can also be achieved in Ottawa, saving about an hour of driving. If we don’t respond to that new information, then why didn’t we just get on the train, put our feet up, and just enjoy being passengers?
Incidentally, this is why we call some plans “roadmaps” – their purpose is to show potential alternative routes and to allow for changing course while still heading towards the destination. If our plan has only one path from A to B, then it’s not a roadmap. If the plan says “build X” rather than “solve problem Y”, then it’s not a roadmap.
I’m not saying you always have to drive (i.e. use an agile approach) – there are times when the train makes sense, for example when I travel to Montreal for a concert I know the destination isn’t going to change and I would rather get there with minimal stress. In the same way, if we know exactly what we need to build and don’t expect any changes along the way, then we could create a plan, write detailed specifications, and do all the design upfront … but, in our industry, how often can we go from A to B with no learning, no discoveries, no need to adapt?
So: start with the end in mind (understand where you want to go and why); consider what your constraints are (e.g. time) and how you expect to react to new information (do you want to accommodate discoveries or follow the plan); then choose your vehicle and route accordingly.
*Yes, I know the second habit that Stephen Covey describes in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is “Begin…” but he has a registered trademark for that phrase so I’m avoiding it, and anyway I’m not using the phrase in the way he does.
