Cats, mice and sloths: getting a shared understanding of proportionate timescales
Is this a cash job, a one off? Are you a potential long term customer? Am I in charge of making food for a wedding meal for 100 or a hungover meal for 1 the day after? Do I have ten hours to make this or ten minutes?
A recent situation left me reaching around, in vain, for workable analogies to try and describe getting a proportionate time ‘fit’ to the task at hand.
It was prompted by what seemed to me to be premature optimising for something that should just be knocked into shape in a few days, shipped in a ‘this-is-good-enough’ way, then followed by similarly energy filled refinement + improvement period once a bit of data is coming back (probably in the form of watching users use it). Rinse and repeat.
Instead we had a prolonged chin stroking period for something that doesn’t have a ton of research to be informed by anyway and people getting (in my view) distracted about obsessing about the wrong things. Worrying about the leather on the dashboard when the car has no engine, a £300 Garmin and no running shoes, that sort of thing.
The result felt an unsatisfactory hybrid of (not-so)quick and dirty and fairly thinly researched and qualified set of user needs we were working to. Not great.
There’s a place for quick n dirty (I think it’s the best approach for lots of- but not all - things) and following it up with bashing it into shape via refining. And there’s a place for the considered, the well planned through, and the comprehensive.
I think we got to the bottom of the issue and worked out a good resolution, but it made me conscious of how important it is to talk through time-effort-expense expectations and checkin they are shared. There’s also a hell of a lot of lost in translation with the default mode of remote work, I’m finding.
Suffice to say that expected cadences, a shared understanding of speed required, are best when they are well shared and understood by all involved. Are we going to be hungry mice, fast and eager for our next meal? Or are we slow sloths, keen to minimise risk and to not move fast + conserve our energy?
Both work, and both are well adapted to their environments, but if some people think the team are staffed by sloths, when they are in fact mice, or worse you have a mixed crew and no one knows - you risk frustration + unmet expectations along the way. Maybe cats are good to copy, fast and focussed when they need to, otherwise: chill.
An adjacent puzzle is how you can usefully employ urgency in big bureaucracies. I know urgency is also best treated with care https://www.fearlessculture.design/blog-posts/the-problem-with-an-always-urgent-workplace-culture, but there’s something for speed to improve the morale of everyone working on a thing, and the lack of it to quietly throttle off the oxygen of satisfaction to a job. How do you encourage an upside to speed for permanent employees? It’s easy if you’re selling deliverables.
There’s also something about different personalities suiting the different ‘default cadences’ of their host organisations or teams. And these may change over time. In the past I’ve found the pace and managing of uncertainty involved in startups (in the widest sense of the word to mean emergent projects dealing with ambiguity) exhilarating but, in retrospect, not great for my long-term health.
I also have a pet theory that there’ only so much ambiguity individuals can hold, and if there’s a lot of it outside work (money,kids,caring,health,etc) there’s a limit to how much they can comfortably hold at work without it being hella stressful. But that’s another story.