If you haven’t seen the famous TED talk about how kindergarten kids outperform business school graduates in a team challenge, it’s worth 5 minutes of your time. (Spoiler: collaboration that leads to iteration and learning is far superior to up-front planning.)
In many teams, however, heavy up-front planning is expected and incentivized. Even if a company lists “bias for action” in their culture deck, those same companies don’t always clarify what exactly counts as “action”. That lack of clarity can lead to lots of low value activity, rather than high value action.
Consider a software team that has just decided to build a new app. Let’s imagine two ways for the team to start:
| Biasing for activity | Biasing for action |
| The team sets up daily status meetings. Designers conduct user research. Software engineers map out architecture and estimations. QA engineers create testing plans. Program managers draw up Gantt charts. Product managers refine roadmaps. Engineering managers prepare reports. | The team takes a couple of days to build a prototype, then gets feedback on it from users. |
One team gets busy researching, meeting, analyzing, and planning. These are all mildly defensible tasks, but their value pales in comparison to what the other team does. The other team starts the process of learning at the earliest possible moment.
In the example above, the team biasing for activity believes they can reduce the risk of releasing a dud product by doing as much up-front planning as possible. Unfortunately, they are delaying true learning until after detailed product plans are created, which will make those plans difficult to change due to status quo bias.
The action-oriented team however, has de-risked the future product much more by learning as early as possible with a prototype. They can now begin to do an appropriate amount of planning to get them to the next phase of learning, perhaps by releasing an alpha version to early adopters.
How to recognize low-value activity
Sometimes known as “busywork”, activity is:
- Work that delays learning
- Work that attempts to de-risk an easily reversible decision
- Work that spawns more work (without increasing learning)
- Work that has a high opportunity cost
High-value action, on the other hand, is:
- Work that helps the team learn and informs future decisions
- Work that quickly implements existing decisions
- Atomic, in that it generates value on its own without needing other work completed first
- Work that will yield the highest value for the team
Remember the difference between them as you begin new initiatives.
…but don’t be a Shackleton
In any project, there is a time for learning and a time for planning.
Planning – the act of mapping out future work – is best done when the future is certain enough that the work has a high chance of being valuable, relevant, and won’t need radical changes later.
Planning before that point of confidence is reached is wasteful, and not planning enough means you might end up with an outcome like Ernest Shackleton did when he navigated the Northwest Passage.
Instead, be more like Roald Amundsen: learn early, plan appropriately using your experience, avoid wasteful activity, and create excellent outcomes.
Cover photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash.