By Alex Shootman |
CEO at Workfront
Note: This post pulls
from Done Right,
a leadership book from Workfront CEO Alex Shootman.
“Just three guys on Valentine's Day that had
nothing to do.”
That’s how Steven Chen described the decision he took with his friends, Chad
Hurley and Jawed Karim, to launch a video dating website on February 14,
2005.
They started with high hopes of earning their
fortune from brokering happy matches online. But the first week passed
without a single video being uploaded. Hastily, they decided to change course.
Confident in their underlying technology, they dropped the video dating idea
and decided to allow anyone to upload videos about anything. Karim kicked
it off with an awkward
18-second video about a trip to San Diego Zoo.
Romance may have died, but YouTube was born.
Hindsight is one of the world’s most abundant
commodities; foresight is far rarer. So, what would you have done in Chen,
Hurley and Karim’s shoes? Would you have made the same quick pivot?
Sure, the risks and costs of getting the
decision wrong are smaller one week into the life of a start-up than at
more established moment. But the story of YouTube captures a
classic dilemma that every leader will face at some point: how do you know when
it’s right to change course? How do you know what direction to take? How do you
decide your best next action — the best option to get things done right?
Go/No-Go Decision Making
The Prussian military commander Helmuth van
Moltke once said, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
That truism hasn’t deterred military commanders ever since from trying to plan
how they would overcome every conceivable obstacle to victory on the field of
battle. Typically, they’ve figured out decision-making rules — rules that
business leaders can learn from.
Just ask US Navy Seal
Mark McGinnis how his teams decide whether to continue or
abort a mission, and he’ll explain the concept of go/no-go
decision making.
Commander McGinnis has served his country with
distinction from the early 1990s on operations around the world. He explains
that in the cool of the planning room, the team identifies the criteria to
complete their mission: the bare minimum of tools, expertise, timing, and
support. In the theater of operation, if one of those elements is
compromised, lost, or proves insufficient, anyone in a leadership role on the
mission can then make a call to continue, change course, or abort.
“We bake go/no-go criteria into everything we
do,” says Mark.
So, leaders need to ask: Can you still reach
your hoped-for business goal with the team, tools, and resources in the time
you had planned and in the context of the market terrain you face? By asking
this question, a complex problem is stripped back to a clear binary
choice: yes, or no.
The Compass-Point Question
Let’s imagine that you’ve reached a go/no-go
decision point. You know you can’t reach your goal by following the original
path. So how do you know which direction to take?
One essential item in your leadership toolkit
should be a compass-point question: “If we do this, will it take us closer
towards our goal?” That could play out in different ways depending on your
strategic goal:
- Will
we be more innovative?
- Is this what customers want to
hear from us?
- Will the business earn more?
- Will we gain market share?
At Workfront our compass-point
question is, “Will it allow us to create and keep customers?” I’ve
always found that a compass-point question can be a quick way to focus
attention on the strategic end-goal that we’re all trying to achieve. It gives
the team a way to debate options and recommend a course of action that isn’t
based on personalities or pay grades — just the right way to reach the
goal.
Best Next Action
There’s a final element to our decision-making
framework: finding your best next action. Go/no-go criteria and
compass-point questions are about big stop-change issues.
Day-to-day, there’s a couple of questions that can help ensure that the right
tactical decisions are made — the smaller, regular decisions about task
priority, for example.
- “What
are we going to do next?”
- “What are we going to do
within the next two weeks to take us closer to our goal?”
Asking these two simple questions will help
guide your team’s tactical decisions as they push towards the end goal.
Never Hesitate to Change Course
The idea of a business changing course was
often taken as a badge of strategic failure before the concept of the
“pivot” (coined by the entrepreneur and blogger Eric Ries in 2011) became
part of Silicon Valley start-up culture. Truth is, I’ve seldom seen
successful projects hit their objective by dashing full tilt in a straight
line. There’s always been a zig-zag on the journey. But to zig-zag, you and
your team must be watchful for signs that you need to take an alternative path.
The decision-making frameworks discussed in this post — go/no-go criteria,
compass-point questions, and best next actions — will help you make the
right decisions at the right time.
Great leaders embrace change and are vigilant
for it. So, hold the old Turkish Proverb close: “No matter how far you
have gone on the wrong road, turn back.”
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