Time To Completion

expand to completion

Parkinson’s law is:

“Work expands to as to fill the time available for its completion.”

And people misconstrue it all the time.Logic plays funny tricks on our brains sometime. People somehow believe that Parkinson’s Law warns us that work will expand (or contract) to fill the time to the deadline.  So if I give you a project that will take you two weeks to do, and give you an eight week deadline, you will not complete it for eight weeks.That might be true. But it is also true that if I give you eight weeks’ work and a two-week deadline, you will complete it in two weeks.You’ll just do a really crappy job.The eight week deadline, on the other hand, gives me the option of prioritizing other work first until I need to get to your project.So, the problem here is not the gaseous nature of work – it’s that deadlines themselves are a major element for prioritization.In other words, work is a game and a major goal of the game is to get work done on-time.Sounds good.But … what if there was a different kind of game of work? What if the game of work was to continuously improve the quality and rate of delivery of your work? The game becomes ways to discover how you can work most effectively, most innovatively. The game stops being how close to an arbitrary deadline can you complete something.Then some interesting things happen.First, work becomes more predictable. You learn the rate at which you truly complete tasks. You can schedule better, promise better. You can complete better.Second, the creation of value becomes more realistically defined. Before, we considered the elements of work to be whatever was included in the contract we were satisfying. When we focus on quality, we find that tasks like making our workspace comfortable, our tools up-to-date, and our minds rested and ready-to-think are of equal weight. We find that rushing toward deadlines decreases quality and taking a few 5 minute breaks throughout the day increases quality. We find that while we can rush work out, that work tends to come back. We start to question if meeting a deadline and having revision requests come back was ever meeting the deadline to begin with.Third, you learn the real goal of estimating is to promise completion you can deliver with quality. Sometimes that takes longer, sometimes it does not. But the goal is quality, not speed.Fourth, communication with others increases. We quickly learn that working alone is working in peril. Our projects benefit from regular communication with our partners and clients. The more constant the collaboration, the more likely there will be success.Deadlines will always be a reality. We will never escape them. The goal here is not deny the existence or advocate for the abolishment of deadlines. What we want is to remove the stress and focus on the date and transfer that to the work itself. So if something is due on the 31st of December and we get it on the 1st of November, it’s finished when it is finished (November 15th) and does not wait until the deadline.So what Parkinson’s Law is really saying is that when you give people a deadline, that’s what they focus on. The game becomes the deadline. S

The Diffusion of Responsibility

Personal Kanban and Diffusion of Responsibility

When I was an urban planning student at Michigan State University, I was part of a team involved in a large group project. We were writing a downtown redevelopment plan for Albion, a small city in southern Michigan which, like the rest of the state, had fallen onto hard times. We needed to come up with ways for the town to get back on its feet.There were about 8 of us on this team, and while we were a fairly responsible group of kids, we knew that other classes, outside jobs, and our social lives would present us with competing responsibilities and very different schedules. Fortunately for us, the project had only one deliverable - a paper that was due at the end of the term. Being urban planners, we’d all had a few psychology courses, and we knew all about Kitty Genovese, and so we wanted to avoid something called diffusion of responsibility.Diffusion of responsibility is a negative outcome in groups where responsibility isn't clearly assigned nor is leadership taken. In other words, it's a situation where roles are poorly defined. Its ugliest and most infamous example is the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. Returning to her Queens apartment late one evening, the 28 year old was brutally attacked in front of her home by a man who shoved a knife into her back - twice. In earshot of her neighbors, her cries for help brought residents from the surrounding apartments to their windows, their shouts scaring off her assailant.Temporarily. Newspapers reported that upwards of 38 neighbors heard Kitty’s screams or witnessed her attack that Spring night. While some did call the police, no one ran to Kitty’s aid. Instead, they all assumed someone else would go to help her. Sadly, no one actually did.Minutes after he fled, Kitty’s assailant returned. Following the trail of blood she left leading to her apartment’s foyer, he stabbed the young woman to death.It was no one’s explicit responsibility to help the victim, therefore no one came to her aid.This horrific scenario encompasses two forms of diffusion: social loafing and the bystander effect, elements we likewise wanted to avoid in our work group. We didn’t want parts of the project to be dropped or ignored because no one had taken responsibility for them. So we met during school hours as well as afterwards, regularly taking the group’s pulse. Most tasks were assigned to more than one person, and most were due the next time we had class. We did not assign a leader but instead, equally divided responsibility amongst group members so no one could control the group or lazily benefit from the hard work of others.Diffusion of responsibility takes other forms as well. It is part of herding mentalities like mob mentality or group think. In these situations, people end up taking part in actions that they would never sanction on their own. In the military and in business, it can also lead to people’s blind obedience, simply because they lack the positional power to object to direct orders. (Just consider the Nuremberg Trials and the events leading up to the collapse of Enron.) This is sometimes called superior orders.In teams, when we use a visual control like a kanban or a screen with well-chosen metrics, we actively thwart diffusion of responsibility. Social loafing is exposed immediately for what it is and usually dealt with not by reprimand, but simply by conscience: when it’s obvious to everyone that you are loafing, you’re compelled to stop. If you don’t, it’s pretty easy to dismiss you.The presence of visual controls make herding mentality less likely because the context of work and the opportunities for meaningful dialogue are heightened. This increase in dialogue also lessens the likelihood of falling prey to superior orders.In all these instances, diffusion of responsibility results when people have either incomplete information or lack the ability to act on the information they have. When using Personal Kanban, our goal is to give ourselves and others the maximum amount of information available that can aid in better decision making. We are less likely to loaf, follow the pack, or fall prey to blind obedience when the impacts of our actions are directly presented to us and our colleagues.Image “An Apparently Homeless Young Woman Sits Crying in a Doorway, Ignored by the World” by Arty Smokeshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/artysmokes/2963629524/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Sente and Gote in Personal Kanban

gote

Sometimes your relationship to work is initiative based, other times it is reactive.  This is simply the nature of work. It is normal, and nothing - not Personal Kanban, not GTD - is going to change that.In the game “Go” (“Weiqi” in Chinese) there are balanced strategic concepts for the natural ebbs and flows of taking the initiative or reacting to a change in a situation.  “Sente” is the term for the initiative, “Gote” is the term for being reactive.In English, we’d be tempted to equate these to Offense and Defense.  However, there’s a subtle difference here. The word “defense” has a few connotations we’d like to avoid when working. One is that you are on the defensive when you’ve lost control of something. The other is that the goal of your defensive strategy is to quickly regain an offensive strategy.This comes from the animal brain inside us all. Reaction is the gazelle taking flight when the cheetah springs forth. Reaction, for human beings, naturally caries a fight or flight response.In Go, Sente and Gote positions are perfectly acceptable at all times. There are Go Masters who can win a game and play almost entirely from a Gote position. The Sensei knows that reaction is itself an action.Why is this important?Life comes at you fast. The nature of personal work is that some days are quiet, comfortable, and predictable. They are yard work or cleaning the house. Systematic and reassuring. Other days your water heater explodes and covers your basement in water, steam, and destruction.Some days you are at work, methodically finishing up your report and other days you are surprised to get a report back with particularly nasty comments and an unrealistic deadline to fix it.On days like this we realize that life doesn’t always respect our personal goals. Mopping up water and pulling down saturated wall board isn’t helping us achieve our goal of learning Spanish. This makes us feel like we are on the English term defensive, and that upsets us.  We wanted to learn Spanish by Tuesday and now we have to wait.Well, this is why most businesses fail. It’s why bosses are cranky.  It’s why people don’t feel they get what they want from consultants.  It’s why that damn plumber is STILL HERE installing the dishwasher.Life is by its very nature chaotic. We’re lucky that it is predictably so, but it still does not adhere to our plans. Whether you are doing Sente or Gote work, the work needs to be done. The best way to assure rapid and effective completion is to look past the emotions of “defensive” and accept Gote into the attainment of your goals.What Personal Kanban seeks to do is visualize how your work is actually done. It actually accounts for exploding water heaters and other unexpected events because, over time, your throughput will reflect these.So, say you have 20 projects at home and they have an average cycle time of 4 weeks from conception to completion.  The mean time to completion though, might only be 2 weeks.  There were a few outliers in there that took 6 or 8 due to unforseen events.What you know from this is that you have a maximum of 8 weeks to complete a household project, it’ll usually be done around 2 and that 6 is a very safe number to promise completion by, with 8 being virtually guaranteed.  As you notice this, you can start to examine why those 8s are happening.I’d be willing to bet those 8s are projects that developed a defensive posture and were delayed due to emotional reasons. In short, they were shelved because they became too hard to finish. Well, those unfinished projects mount up and procrastination has a price. You now have a 2 to 8 week variance in the time it takes you to finish something around the house.So we can examine those projects. Are the 8 week ones just more complex? Do they involving cleaning? Yard work? Being outside when the chatty neighbor might want to chew your ear off? Are they perhaps even unimportant?When you find the commonalities in the outliers, you can then develop Gote strategies.  As I said, Go Masters are unfazed by adopting a Gote posture because there are deep and tested strategies for achieving victory from Gote maneuvers. Part of this is tactical series of moves that undo an offensive maneuver by your opponent, but the other part is mental. Reaction to events whether on the Go board or in life in general is natural.  Acceptance of this natural relationship calms the fight / flight response in our animal brains and allows us to quickly and effectively deal with the unexpected work. This reduces the time to completion, shrinks our cycle time, and eliminates outliers.Be calm, deal with the issues, reduce variance.