It’s February; we’re running out of steam on those New Year resolutions. What happened to all that willpower and motivation? Where did the light-footed exuberance and optimism of a new start, turn into a trudge through a muddy, ploughed field, with no end in sight?

It happens at work as well. All through the year. The team starts a new project full of optimism, energy. Planning is done by groupthink with a “How could anything go wrong?” mindset. Six months down the line people are looking for a scapegoat, and the exit, before they get engulfed in the crapstorm of blame and recrimination.

Where did it all go wrong?

“What do you do when the plan starts to fall apart, when willpower has gone and working long hours just doesn’t work?”

I’ve written before about the pre-mortem. It’s a thought experiment. You fast forward to the future, a future where your resolution/project failed disastrously, and list the reasons why it did. It forces you to remove the rose-coloured spectacles and face a different reality. One where willpower, guts, blood, sweat and tears are all exhausted. All those plentiful resources that you start with are depleted. Time has run out.

At the planning stage it doesn’t feel like this could ever happen. The glass is completely full, never mind half full. And it feels like it will never be empty. There’s even a superstitious feeling that imagining it being empty will help bring it about failure. We mustn’t allow negative thoughts to drag us down. Think positively.

Any plan must be capable of failing. So planning for failure must also make sense. What are you going to do when the plan starts to fall apart, when willpower has gone and working long hours just doesn’t work?

First, name some of the possible triggers. What will I do about my diet when I have to go to three business dinners in one week?s When I’m stressed out by my boss, and I’m reaching for a cigarette, how will I respond?  What will I do when I just want to pack in the new routine, because it’s too hard and I’ve run out of willpower?

Then come up with a plan for when you meet these inevitable obstacles.

But it’s more than having a theoretical plan. Rehearse the whole scene, including visuals and dialogue. You need to be ready with an automatic response that doesn’t need any willpower to put into action. “If this happens, I know that I need to do this”. “When we’re faced with situation X, we’ll recognise the trigger and  do behaviour Z”.

By the time your faced with the nightmare scenario, it’s OK. You’ve already been there in your head. You know what to do, because you planned for this, and you’ll be happy you did.

At the end of December, you can’t open a newspaper or magazine without seeing a review of the past year. What happened, who died, who won, who lost? You might be tempted yourself to have a bit of a self-audit of the year just gone, and maybe use it to cook up some New Year’s resolutions of your own.

It’s a worthy endeavour,but  I’m always reminded of a quote I first heard from Tony Robbins – [Tweet “You can’t use your rear view mirror as a navigation aid”]. In other words, you shouldn’t be using your past experiences to determine your future goals. I’m pretty sure this works for companies as well as people. A lot of what passes for corporate strategy is either re-jigging something that worked in the past or fixing a sticking-plaster over something that didn’t work, and dressing it up as innovation. No one sits down with a blank sheet of paper and just riffs on the future to create a new world of possibilities. Unless you have a coach.

A good coach will invite you to just go wild and dream, without looking over your shoulder at the Shoulda, Woulda, Couldas. The future doesn’t have to be the same as today, with the volume, contrast and brightness turned up a bit. It could be an extraordinary place. Learn from your past mistakes, by all means, but don’t rely on them to illuminate the way forward, get yourself a coach if you want to escape from the confines of your own thinking.

What are you forecasting for yourself next year? Get in touch with me if you need some help getting past your limiting beliefs and shaping a future that you want to thrive in.

Me? I’m finally going to learn the harmonica, after thirty-five years of not getting around to it.

Have a great Christmas

Lean Startup – Innovation at work.
Photo Credit Flickr Betsy Weber

Lean Startup rocks. If you’re starting a new business you should read Eric Ries’s book. If you work for an established business, and want to innovate, you should read it. I’ve just been listening to a webcast with Eric Ries, Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper. They were talking about Lean Startup, and how to roll Lean Startup out into bigger organisations.

“The Future’s going to be the same as today. Right? “

Eric said something that struck me hard. That big companies (and the people who work in them) fundamentally believe –  “The Future is going to be the same as today, right?”.

As humans we need to have some dependability and predictability in our lives. That’s why people work in a big organisation isn’t it? They get security,  structure and stability in exchange for their labour. The trouble is, in the new normal, it’s not like that any more.

“Even when they saw it coming, they couldn’t do anything to stop their own extinction”

Just five years ago, Nokia and Blackberry (then called RIM) were the kings of the mobile phone industry. Today, they’re both in their death-throes. Apple launched its first iPhone in June 2007. By 2011 they were the largest mobile handset vendor in the world (by revenue) having shipped 100 million units. Nokia has recently been bought by Microsoft. Blackberry has canned 10,000 people in the last year. They’re both toast. Even when they saw it coming, they couldn’t do anything to stop their extinction.

Successful today no longer means successful tomorrow. Start ups are disrupting and fragmenting established industries by using new technology. The barriers to entry are very low. Dropbox gauged whether people were interested in its product just by getting people to sign up on a website. They knew they had a product people wanted without writing a line of code, and they had a queue of early adopters ready to buy when they launched.

“No one knows where the next upstart startup is going to come from”

So the security and stability of a big company, is illusory. They can’t count on the future being the same as today. That’s why today’s buzzword is innovation. No one knows where the next upstart startup is going to come from, but if you don’t innovate, they’ll eat your lunch and eventually they’ll eat you.

That’s pretty scary (unless you’re the one doing the eating). So it’s no wonder those firms want new ways of working that need more agility, the ability to turn on a sixpence and to change direction if it turns out that no one wants to buy their killer new product. In a big company that’s hard to do. I’m talking to you, Microsoft.

What’s this got to do with time management and teams ? Well we believe that time management is right thinking about the past, present and future. And these are three distinctive skills, that you can learn. Innovation is understanding that the future is going to be very different to the present, and it’s not one big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey wimey stuff.

We humans are really bad at forecasts.

“Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law” 

Daniel Kahneman literally wrote the book about the Planning Fallacy. He won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, even though he’s a psychologist. He’s as smart as you can get. But he still fell into the very trap he himself identified.

“But we did not acknowledge what we knew. The new forecast still seemed unreal, because we could not imagine how it could take so long to finish a project that looked so manageable.” Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow

The problem is, thinking about the Future is hard. It’s a long way away for most of us, particularly Present Hedonists. It’s so far away, we have to construct it by airlifting the present and plonking it down in the general area. Maybe we’ll embellish it a little, but it looks a lot like today.

However, the Future is not more of the Present. It’s not today delayed by 12 months. When you finally arrive in the Future, it’s definitely not like it used to be. You find that your forecast failed to factor in an economic downturn; a change in management; contractual disputes; specification changes; mission creep; illness; holidays; bad weather. Plus it was just plain over-optimistic, because you needed a good business case to get your project authorised.

 So what can you do?

Tip #1. Phone a Friend. Once you have your forecast. Double it. Double it again. Then throw away your forecast and ask an experienced colleague who’s not connected to your project. Before you ask them, get them to bring to mind similar projects they have done in the past. That way they draw on real-life, rather than joining you in your over optimistic fantasy world.

Tip#2. Do a Pre-Mortem. I’ve written about pre-mortems before, here. They’re brilliant for eliminating group-think and the euphoria that pervades the early planning stages of any project. They force you to live in a dystopian future and explain how you got there. You wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s nice to visit, once in a while.

Have fun, and please let us know how you get on with your forecasting, in the Future.