The cost of a wrong turn
The cost of a wrong turn
Back when I was living in Australia, I once set out on a skiing holiday with friends. The long drive was uneventful until...
Over a decade ago when I was living in Australia I was setting out on a skiing holiday with my future wife and a friend of hers. We were on our way from Melbourne, Victoria to visit Thredbo, a ski destination across the border in southern New South Wales. On the way there I took a very costly wrong turn… one that led me to a realisation about software development.
We set out in the late afternoon on a journey that on a good run would take over six hours. Driving in Victoria is picturesque and the roads are fit for a driving nation so whilst a minor endurance effort such a journey would not be an uncommon holiday activity for Australians.
The route is largely a long straight northbound jaunt followed by a right turn along the border between Victoria and New South Wales (much of which is defined by the Murray River) making the shape of an upside-down ‘L’ which terminates after a border crossing and a relatively short journey to Thredbo after that.
Being a later start on the journey, as it became later in the day and the daylight dwindled the passengers snoozed leaving me to drive and navigate what on the map looked like a straightforward trip.
As it turns out finding an appropriate turn-off when driving out in the sticks with reflectors and headlights for visibility is not so straightforward but nonetheless, I thought I had made the appropriate turns as we came to the border.
Signs were few and far between being a less populated bush area but after a while, I started to doubt my choices and direction. I looked for anything which could affirm or invalidate that I was on the right track.
Eventually, in a mild panic, I stopped the car and woke up my passengers for their input. We concluded my worry was correct and found evidence that we had not ended up travelling east along the border but were actually travelling west in the opposite direction and had been for about an hour.
The reception to this revelation was not a warm one as it was already very late and shortly after our accommodation was calling to see if we were still coming. I quickly calculated that we had an hour to backtrack and then another hour to travel in the right direction to our destination which would bring us there well after midnight.
As I made that remaining part of the drive, now a journey well over nine hours I had time to reflect on my mistake. It occurred to me that I had wasted three hours. One travelling in the wrong direction, one backtracking and one which could have been spent travelling in the correct direction!
Never one to waste a good mistake I used the penitentiary silence to further contemplate how this might relate to a work context.
It occurred to me that it was analogous to working on the wrong thing. There’s the time you spend heading in the wrong direction, the time you spend backtracking (cleaning up, removing dependencies etc.) And the opportunity cost — the time you could have been spending doing the right thing.
It was clear to me that focus on feedback loops such as having more opportunities to spot when you were off track sooner, consideration of priorities such as identifying the right path were critical and the impacts were possibly much larger than may be obvious.
Sometimes such an epiphany takes such an experience like that long drive to really resonate but hopefully in your case reading this provides enough for you without the white line fever.
Follow this publication for ways to make the map clearer and more adaptive to your current situation. You might still make mistakes but you will detect them much faster and avoid the costly repercussions. Do you have an example in your own life you would like to share? Please share your experience in the comments.