Has your boss asked you to eat an elephant?
Then this guide is for you.
The elephant might be that you need to deliver a product much quicker than you are currently capable of. Or that you need to complete an initiative within a certain timeframe, otherwise there will be severe consequences from the authorities.
Either way, you have to meet a demand under seemingly unrealistic conditions.
Let’s cut to the chase. The reason you have this problem in the first place is most likely because your organization lacks the ability to continuously lead, prioritize, and align on the most valuable work. You probably have multiple ongoing parallel initiatives, and multiple stakeholders pursuing different goals, and the ambition of the organization doesn’t match its capability.
I often see two responses to this problem:
- Analyzing the problem and all the possible ways forward, without deciding on anything.
- Acting in all possible directions and hoping for the best.
Neither is particularly effective at solving complex problems like these.
What you need is the organizational ability to make decisions in complex situations with limited information. It involves getting comfortable deciding without knowing all the facts, working with assumptions and probabilities, and focusing on creating feedback loops to continuously figure out what might work.
In my experience, if you find yourself in a scenario of high pressure and severely delayed initiatives, here’s what you need to do:
- Get down to basics. Create a focus for the people doing the work and increase collaboration to remove handovers. Finally, remove as many distractions, rituals, and unnecessary meetings as possible.
- Establish a decision-making framework. One that helps you work with limited information and becomes smarter as new information emerges.
- Boldly cut scope. And I don’t mean just move it out of the way, remove it. But be careful so you don’t end up with a product that nobody wants.
- Work with possible scenarios, resolve the largest bottlenecks that stand in your way, and increase your understanding of the effectiveness of the chosen strategy.
- Challenge the existing operating model. It has served you well, but to navigate the increased complexity, you might need a different approach.
In these articles I’ve dived a bit deeper into each one of these tactics:
Vadim Feldman
Founder and Management Consultant
