A Bias For Action
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
Among the many business ventures of Thomas Edison, one was a short-lived venture into rock-crushing machines. It was a short-lived venture that never quite became profitable for him, despite eventually being related to some of the coolest pour-in-place concrete houses you’ve ever seen. Like most things Edison had his hands on, it created some cool stories, one of which involves him intentionally breaking one of his rock crushing machines.
The story says that Edison was walking by one of the machines in operation, and asked if could be turned up to a higher speed. The foreman said it could, but that this was already all the machine was rated for; any more would potentially damage the machine. Edison had him turn it up anyway. The machine kept running. Edison had him turn it up again; it kept running. The pattern repeated until the machine had one speed increase to many and catastrophically failed, turning it into a very expensive pile of scrap metal.
The story says the foreman asked Edison why he had done that, why he had ruined an expensive machine for no apparent reason. Edison replied that now they could build another rock crusher just as good as the other, but get much more production out of it buy running it at a higher speed; they now knew it was good for anything up to that last disastrous increase.
We tell this story because it illustrates something - a predisposition to take action (or more intense action) as opposed to letting things coast. Most people faced with the same opportunity might have spent months analyzing and engineering, making sure everything would be OK before. Edison also could have, but then he wouldn’t have been Edison; that predisposition to move instead of sitting still is what made it possible for him to spend his entire life inventing and innovating.
Clipboard Health looks for people with the same kind of bias for action when we hire. We want people who seize opportunities as soon as they can, rather than getting bogged down in over-planning and over-analyzing. This bias for action superficially resembles recklessness but there’s a lot of reasons it works and works especially well for small organizations where speed is an all-important, or for growing companies trying to maintain that speed as their organization becomes more complex.
Reality is always different than you imagine
The most common piece of advice for new writers is to just start writing. It seems simplistic, but the more time you spend around writers or writing yourself the more profound you realize it is. There’s a lot of reasons people who want to write end up never starting and finishing projects, but the problem you see most often is planning paralysis; people have a tendency to want to know exactly what they will write before they actually write it. The fear that they will get to some point in the project and find their well has run dry keeps them from moving forward; the worry that if they don’t know the exact direction they are going they won’t go to the “right” place keeps them from writing a single word.
The reality once the any writing project starts is that the problems you were anticipating running into in the story often aren’t problems at all, and some things you never expected become challenges. That’s because things look different from the inside of a project; problems you imagine would be hard sometimes have very easy fixes and problems you never would have expected make themselves known. That means that it’s easy to get bogged down in a kind of planning that’s entirely a waste, addressing imagined problems and ignoring real yet-unknown issues. It’s almost always better to just start writing and deal with the problems as they come.
Outside of writing, the same principle holds. At Clipboard, we are big fans of SMART goals, a model of planning that demands goals be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timebound. Of those qualities, specific, achievable and relevant look to making sure a project is feasible. The other two are designed with re-iteration in mind - they establish milestones at which to reassess progress and an expectation of keeping eyes on the measurable parts of progress to make sure things are going as they should. In a world where everything is solvable by planning, those two wouldn’t exist; sufficient planning and effort would prevent issues.
But SAR goals aren’t enough, and the reasons they aren’t enough are never evident at the beginning of a project. At some point you have to get your hands dirty and take a risk. We’ve found that the earlier you do this, the better. We’ve mentioned before when we talked about courage as a value that, in a lot of scenarios, we actively discourage people from asking for permission to start addressing a problem. We’d much rather they come to the table with the results of a test they’ve run, or with a report of what they’ve learned digging into the problem through conversations with users. We want that to start immediately whenever possible; the sooner we get the kind of perspective you can only get once you’ve taken action, the faster we can move towards delivering excellence.
There’s always a good-sounding excuse
Fixing the problems related to the paralysis of inaction is a difficult task partially because of an imbalance of effort - it’s usually much harder to actually solve a problem then to come up with a reason why you couldn’t do it. It’s not that there’s no such thing as a valid excuse, but invalid excuses often are indistinguishable from “real” reasons why someone couldn’t move forward.
One way this manifests is a person who is always waiting on someone else. You will see people who could have moved forward if they just had X, some resource or assistance they say they absolutely need to get something done. Or someone who is waiting on other people to finish their work and points to another person’s failure to deliver some aspect of the project as a reason they haven’t been able to start their portion.
Sometimes this is a person who is too busy with other things; something landed on their plate that didn’t get addressed, but how could it? They have other job responsibilities that got in the way. Sometimes it’s a person who can’t move forward because they don’t have the expertise to do the job. Sometimes it’s someone who couldn’t take a risk without approval. Sometimes it’s someone who did some preliminary planning and decided the project wasn’t feasible.
Sometimes these excuses are valid. But what we’ve found is for every person out there who lives and dies by reasons they couldn’t get moving, there’s someone out there who bashes through roadblocks. Even in a company that doesn’t encourage a bias for action, there’s usually at least one person who acts as a “fixer”, a person for whom none of those excuses is a reason to stop. Where they don’t have the expertise, they start working on figuring it out. Where other people haven’t delivered, they find out why and get things moving. Where they are busy, they effectively prioritize. When a plan turns out to be unworkable, they improvise and re-iterate.
People who are in the habit of moving forward tend to find ways to get over, around or through obstacles. Finding those people is tough; it involves a kind of assessment that goes beyond a list of skills. It means asking interview questions about times where they didn’t have the support they needed and moved forward anyway, or looking for projects they started (and finished!) that were driven by their own initiative.
Building an action-oriented culture also means assessing performance through a lens that focuses on patterns, looking to see whether an excuse was a one-off or another entry in a history of preferring the safe and stationary to acceleration towards goals. Allowing for judgement is important; sometimes the best course of action really is to stop. But acknowledging that this isn’t most people’s default and actively building a culture that expects to see action is vital; the alternative is being bogged down in a sea of reasons why a thing couldn’t be done.
Allowing for action on the organizational level
We’ve been talking about a bias for action on the individual level, but a culture of action doesn’t work unless it’s just that - a culture, not just the efforts of the individual. Some people will, as we mentioned, always move forward; it’s how they are built, and immediate action is how they naturally operate. For others it’s a learned, difficult thing, especially at first. If a person from the second group for which action is harder finds that they are completing work right away only to have the work they produced sit in queue for days or weeks unacknowledged, it’s exponentially harder for them to build a habit of action. Where immediate action isn’t natural for them, a perception of futility is potentially a deal-breaker for their improvement.
A real bias for action is visible on every rung of the ladder. This means that the work of individual contributors is immediately utilized as appropriate, that wherever possible it moves from something they handed in to something they can see in action immediately. It also scales; where individual contributors do quick work, the same sense of urgency applies to the projects they are supporting. The quickly completed projects should in turn be supporting company goals that are actively looking for customer needs to fulfill and customer problems to solve and moving on them in a timely way that maximizes the return on any given opportunity.
Working at Clipboard Health, we can tell you that where a bias for action is pervasive throughout an entire company, things feel snappy. The people working in a company like that see goals be set that are quickly met, and notice. They are motivated to notice opportunities and issues themselves, because they know they will be addressed in a real way. People working for a company like this talk about it - eventually you have an organization people want to join because it accomplishes real things, because they’ve heard from people already working for you who feel accomplished and utilized. That’s a culture with tremendous upsides and very few downsides, and it’s one you can have - so long as you are willing to start today and move.