Not when, but what can be ready

TL;DR: Instead of fixating on “when will it be ready,” focus on “what can be done”, which is more within your control, to make progress. This approach simplifies complex work, prioritizes actionable steps, and aligns with realistic timeframes. By emphasizing a demand-side perspective (what’s needed) over a supply-side one (what’s possible), you can manage scope effectively and achieve meaningful outcomes incrementally.

I am not necessarily someone who keeps a track of mottos in life, in fact I struggle to answer questions like that altogether. But I do have ideas that form the core of what I believe on, and try to enact in the world, and some of them do sound a bit like a motto. One I use a lot is this…

Focus on the things I can control.

Truth be told, it’s to some extent a kind of coping mechanism I’ve developed over the years. I have a combination of somewhat high degree of neuroticism (that’s the technical term – not to be confused with the popular version with negative connotation of someone “neurotic”) with volatility. Get anxious for things around me that may be of concern is like what I could easily call “Tuesday”.

So by keeping reminding myself that all I can practically do is to focus on the things I can control helps me to be grounded in reality. Thinking further that there might be things in my realm of influence gives me options for future. It’s a pretty solid and pragmatic way to go about life – I hope you can see it too.

Enough about me, though. Because in the end this is about what it means in a context of going about work. The little framework I alluded to in the personal story above, however, is a useful way to reason about the subject at hand – thus my recap.

Let’s get practical. when going about work, there’s a tendency to overemphasize the attempt to answer the question “when will it be ready” – and as advocated for in that previous post, there practical ways for us to increase our chances to answer that more predictability.

Ultimately, a lot of my focus here on talking about flow and improving the overall system of doing work is to deal with the inherent uncertainties of knowledge type of work precisely with that purpose – to be able to more confidently answer questions like those (“when will it be ready”).

But there is another way of looking at that, which comes full circle back to focusing on the things we can control. And if we are truly honest, the “when” is not sufficiently at our direct control, albeit largely in our realm of influence. Nonetheless, there is a more direct lever we can make use of, and that is…

What can be done?

I realize I’m being somewhat vague in stating like this – perhaps deliberately. By consistently addressing “what can be done” (in a broader sense) we can influence “when it will be ready” and increase our chances to get it right.

I do also mean it though in a much crisper way – what tends to be much more on our control is to focus on “what can be done”, in terms of what is the focus and the scope we want to accomplish by a not far off future (for many good reasons, we should stick to that not-too-far-off future principle, by the way, but that’s somewhat a different topic…).

Another useful way to look at that is to think that we are swapping the questions to simplify in a context that tends to have some degree of complexity. It’s easier to answer the question of “what can be done” and that informs the “when it will be ready” (more confidently). Or better yet, we can take the frame of “when it should be ready” to act as an useful constraint (another great way to deal with complexity, by the way), which then informs the “what can be done” – in terms of what is realistic given the set timeframe. That is to say – what’s the ‘x time’ version of doing something about the problem we want to deal with, and make progress on now.

Yet another useful way to look at it, as yet another useful frame, is the idea of a language and process which is oriented towards a “supply-side” (what we are capable) vs “demand-side” (what is needed). I’ve refered to it and written in some level of details about that here, framed as the difference between planning as refinement (supply-side) and planning as investment (demand-side).

While this might sound just a nuance on the surface, I am convinced it has fundamental implications on how we reason about things. It’s the difference of risking to overblow scope, since what we (think we) are capable tends to be quite a lot, whereas not everything is truly needed in one go. Given some sensible constraint in time (so to also learn faster), all the risk we need to manage is how big (or rather small) that scope should be and what can be meaningfully done in that timeframe – so to make progress.

I once was talking to someone on my team and we happen to touch upon that and what he told me was truly inspiring, He basically realized the essence of that implication and gave a simple of example of how that couple play out in his context. He was working with the team to figure out the necessary scope to be tested given the implications of a major program impacting their products.

The original supply-side oriented approach was defined as systematically checking every layer of the data products they own, one by one. It turned out that was a massive scope and he was not willing to invest all of that effort in accomplishing their goal (which was to make sure the changes created by the major program wouldn’t have downstream implications for their products and consumers).

Then it hit him – by focusing first on the last layer that is published for consumption, they would be able to safeguard what matters most, and they could still decide to check earlier layers if they weren’t confident enough with what they checked first. That gave them a path to approach the goal more incrementally and also pulling from demand and where value is upfront.

The power of little stories and reframing things like this, I don’t believe can be overstated.

So, there you go! Focus on the things you can control – more of “what can be ready” (by a sensible, not-too-far-off when…), than the other way around.

By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect, I'm happy to engage and interact. I’m passionate about leading to achieve better outcomes with better ways of working. How can I help you?