There is one thing about which we can be very certain at the beginning of every new year. Roughly 75% of New Year’s resolutions will be forgotten by March. Of those that people can even recall, most will never reach fulfillment. The same is true of business goals and the projects that they generate. Yes, a few projects may survive the inertia of existing ways of doing things. But most will vanish or simply fail. But not without leaving scars.
These two phenomena owe themselves to the same explanation. We craft goals and ambitions without regard to the tactics and time necessary to fulfill them. It is as though we were living in a vacuum during both annual planning sessions and on New Year’s Day when we gaze toward the future version of ourselves and our enterprises, hell-bent on getting there!
At their most remedial level, both are problems of arithmetic. There is a finite amount of time in any given year–and an innumerable number of tasks needed to accomplish any worthwhile goal.
But it’s also a cognitive problem. Amid aspiration and inspiration, we fall prey to many of our most common cognitive biases—and they obfuscate our judgments about what we can and should do.
So Much Opportunity!
In 1990 Maxim Dsouza founded Inovvorx, an app development company. They were in India where funding was hard to secure, but used their own savings to get started. Initially they generated revenue by developing websites. With that business thriving the founders created several other products. One was a practice management platform for dentists, while another was a business review site.
The dentist management platform, Medzee, got some VC funding, laying the groundwork for growth. In that first year over 900 dentists used Medzee.
At the same time, Doondoo, the review site, was getting as many as 200,000 views a day.
Despite these burgeoning lines of business, Inovvorx never shuttered the web development service.
Within just a few years they couldn’t make payroll. They shut down.
The founder reflects on his mistakes, saying “Our focus was all over the place. We were running a service business along with 2 different products. We did a mediocre job at all three.”
Time is Quantifiable
The year is finite and can be measured in minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months. But no matter how you describe it, it is always the same volume of time. There are roughly 5,870 waking hours in a year. And we’re already down to 5,680.
From today’s perspective, the year seems long. But wasn’t it just last month when you said, “I can’t believe it’s already Christmas!”
It goes fast. That’s because it is short. What with all eating, Slacking, meeting, peeing, ChatGPT querying and Netflix—it is ever shrinking.
Time’s finitude presents us with a problem. There is too much to do within the available time.
Unfortunately, we rarely know that until we look back and check our success and failure rate. But sadly, failure itself is a lagging indicator.
Available Time/ Initiative * Tasks * Minutes = ?
Anticipating the mismatch between time and tasks is simple—but not necessarily easy. Being wrapped up in the inspiration of our ambitions makes the analysis hard to confront—and for organizations, there are copious structural and cognitive obstacles to doing so.
In some cases, if we just do the nitty gritty work of planning how to accomplish new goals we can identify the mismatch up front.
For individuals it’s straightforward. Planning to start a workout program and learn French? Great. Look at your calendar and identify the exact days and times you will visit the gym as well as those when you will take French class and study.
Each of us has all our legacy projects and commitments in the calendar. Our own lives have only one supply of available time. You may notice that you still have book club on the calendar even though you mentally quit back in July. Perfect! French class can go in the book club slot!
But in organizations it isn’t so clear.
Not Just When But Who and Instead of What?
For example, say your organization has a goal to enter a new vertical in 2023. Moreover, the team has mapped out the specific initiatives to achieve that (which would make you part of the 1% of organizations in the planning department). Now, all that’s left is to develop those project plans and fire off the starting pistol. Right?
Not so fast.
In most organizations, annual planning focuses on new initiatives. It’s an additive process. It virtually never subtracts initiatives. Why? There are lots of reasons.
- Inertia (status quo bias).
- We won’t quit failing initiatives (see sunk cost fallacy).
- They have budgets or personnel which someone is fighting to keep.
- It’s someone senior’s “signature” project.
Time Transparency? Not.
At a shallow level: Let’s say the current team is not at capacity. Great! But, in an organization of (say) 100 people, there are 100 individual buckets of time.
Most employees only schedule meetings and deadlines. A small percentage use time-blocking to schedule actual work –but it’s a tiny percentage. Even with shared calendars there is no obvious way to determine who has sufficient time available to work on them –or expertise.
The deeper problem is cognitive.
Opportunity Gluttons
One of my former corporate clients is the worst culprit of initiative addition. In the 4 years I worked with them– through Series B, C and a subsequent $87m funding round—they never retired a single initiative.
While the team grew 40% over the last 12 months, no one knows what to focus on from one week to the next. There are tens of “priorities”. (Priority is clearly not the right word here, is it?).
Everyone except the CEO knows it’s a problem. But each leader champions at least one initiative that should be axed. They are complicit.
The cognitive load is profound. The team is confused, ambivalent and burnt-out. Plus, the lack of rigorous strategy has led to perpetual losses. To date, every single deal has lost money.
There’s more to say about this issue. But here are a few pointers as you embark on your own list of annual goals or initiatives:
- Inventory all existing projects before adding anything.
- Abide by “new in old out”. For every new initiative, kill an old one.
- Schedule a review one month after the planning. Axe overage.
- For every initiative establish a measurable trigger to revisit or retire it.
