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- Rebellious Thoughts #67 - 🤘 You Should Kill It
Rebellious Thoughts #67 - 🤘 You Should Kill It
By Gus Balbontin
Edition #67
Hey Rebels!
As always, I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game.
YEW!
Let’s get into today’s:
You often hear me say that to pull the future towards you and start playing with novelty you need to create space in your day to day life - the excuse of “I have no time to do new things” can be simply translated to “I struggle to let go of anything so my day to day is completely full”.
Businesses run into the same issue and we make BAU so full that it should be called Busy As Usual rather than Business As Usual.
One of the major culprits of busy-ness is projects… once they start and they become someone’s baby, they are hard to remove.
Even when they make no sense anymore and we should stop them and cut our losses at best we wound them and let them stay barely alive, consuming precious resources and cognitive power.
Thanks AI for helping me create this image.
Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragility makes an amazing observation worth considering:
When uncertainty impacts travel time, it has an asymmetric effect - more often than not you arrive later not earlier.
How many times have you arrived earlier on a flight? Maybe 10-20min but no more - how many times have you arrived late? Even 2-3-4…10hrs late? That’s right, uncertainty adds, it rarely subtracts.
Projects suffer from the same effect, most projects we know run over time and over budget. Projects like travelling suffer from the same asymmetry and non-linearity.
Nassim argues, well… explains in a number of his books, that we are too often fooled by randomness, the world is getting more complex and weird and in our desire to make shit happen we not only underestimate what it takes but also misunderstand the non-linear nature of our projects- shit is way more complex today and unfortunately the efficiency that software and project management claim to achieve is a fallacy - all that’s done is push us to sail too close to the wind guaranteeing that any uncertainty will simply add not subtract.
We strip so much in our attempt to be efficient that the entire project becomes as weak as its weakest link.
As it trips over and fails to deliver on its initial objective we, for political reasons in the business or KPIs we need to achieve or promises we have made or credibility we need to uphold, prop them up with more resources and try to keep them alive.
Apparently, back in the day projects like the Empire State Building were delivered on budget and on time and clearly on quality!
Things were more linear back then - there was no software, no six sigma project managers, far less complexity.
hahahaha!!!
An additional thought to consider:
What are the consequences if the outcome of this project is achieved but at a lower quality? In other words, you keep resources and time fixed but you drop quality?
Well, a good way to solve this is to ensure the key people and stakeholders in the project have skin in the game. The Romans would request the engineers to sleep under the bridges they helped build - and the English would go further and ask their families to join them.
Do you have zombie projects in your business? Projects that should die but remain barely alive for irrational reasons?
Do you start initiatives in your business and underestimate the non-linearity of execution and scramble to deliver?
How often does this happen to our own personal projects?
How much space could you create in your business and life if you simply cut your losses, killed some zombie projects and made space!
I reckon we could easily write a book called “Projects” with epic case studies of what not to do! Hahaha
Love,
Gus
CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK:
Identify “zombie projects” in your business or life and kill them (or at least consider doing it and think of all the space and opportunities that would open up!)
HEY! Lucas, who helps me with some projects like this one, has a cool newsletter. Check it out!
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