Never waste a good crisis — part 5— A crisis can be leveraged by leaders to rally support
Never waste a good crisis — part 5— A crisis can be leveraged by leaders to rally support
A crisis can help catalyse attention to critical business areas that need improvement by the way it demonstrates the importance of the area for smooth running and the degree of focus.
What can this teach us when thinking about Product development? I will walk through the concepts and takeaways that this live example of COVID-19, which touches every business and every consumer, can teach us.
Start part 1 here of my 6-part series here:
A crisis can be leveraged by leaders to rally support
One property of a crisis or failure or any change that leads to a negative consequence is the observation of a problem. Framing planning in terms of a problem is a big improvement over plans centred around solutions.
Its true project management frameworks will prescribe writing problem statements but these are tangential, and I’d argue incidental, to practices centred around the planning of activities. Problem statements in this context often, themselves, become a check-boxed activity.
A recent tweet I saw communicated this misallocation of effort succinctly :
Across most organisations, estimating costs associated with activities is the dominant practice compared to understanding what customers value. I am sure in your own experience have spent significant time estimating costs or effort and planning schedules of activity. How does this compare to the time your organisation invested in understanding and validating the value of the options under consideration?
We can suspect that understanding value may be a better use of our time than understanding effort but still may not do it. This can be for various reasons:
It can be harder - it takes some effort to engage with your customers compared to sitting in a room and making guesses of how long things will take.
Certainty bias - the pay-off is further into the future and estimating effort seems to provide a lower effort way to prioritise (it just won’t be the most valuable things that get prioritised).
The seeming urgency of near-term activities crowds out time for other things.
Rush to solve bias - the need to act overrides doing things which would be healthier for us over the long term:
The lesson here: We should prioritise time investment into fulfilling our purpose and addressing what we have determined to be valuable.
Bonus lesson which I cover elsewhere in this publication. The only meaningful measures of progress are through indicators that are evidence of realising the value we seek.
Whilst it’s satisfying to tick off tasks on task lists and to complete all the activities associated with an initiative, completion of these does not translate to success.
In product development where whether we have addressed customer needs well is not a known recipe but discoverable through trying and then a combination of engaging our customers and objective assessment of the evidence of progress towards better serving your customers.
In part 6, I will wrap up our findings and also share some things you can do in your next crisis to ensure it isn’t wasted:
This post is part of a series of posts focused on examining crises and what we can learn:
